Great scuba diving in Kona Hawaii today....

Here's a Harlequin Shrimp (Hymenocera picta) feeding on a Blood Star. These little shrimp feed on the tube feet and legs of starfish. They are occasionally found deep in antler corals. When we find them we consider ourselves lucky, they often stay in the same coral head for long periods of time so we've got a shot at finding them repeatedly.

We're at the start of a long stretch of days of dive charters. Today we were at High Rock for the first dive. I captained and the divers came up quite happy... great viz - 150' plus, along with lots of critters. Cathy said if the pinnacle wasn't in the way they could've probably seen the boat from the north arch (we're probably talking 200-250 feet or so)... man, that's clear. Between dives we moved down to Golden Arches and I hopped in for a Captain's dive, the surge had come up by then and the water was a bit milky, but probably still in the 125' plus visibility range. I didn't bother putting on my wetsuit... it's running 80 degrees for water temperature right now. It was a good day.


Later,

Steve

Here's Lookin' at ya....

I don't think I've posted this squid shot from last year before.

We were seeing squid again on the manta dive a couple of times the last few months... they're always fun. We did the manta night last night, no squid but it was a great time for all. The manta dive has been hopping still, maybe a bit more up and down the last few weeks, I'm only aware of one or two no-show nights since late February.

I've got tomorrow off, then comes another two week minimum stretch without days off. I'm trying to set my manta outings to strictly Monday or Wednesday or Friday from here on out, and then likely go out on whichever two of those days gets booked first. I get people asking why I don't run it every night... well, I work 7 day charters a week when it's busy, and with two night dives thrown in on top of it that means for an awful lot of shifts for the three of us to cover. Most of the dive operators doing it more than 2-3 times a week are the bigger companies with multiple boats and/or employees.... I'm not there just yet.

We've had quite the south swell for a while, but it appears it's going down for at least a while. With the swells came warmer waters... YAY!!! Bob had water temperature readings of 81 degrees on both of his dives last night... I can't belive the water's actually warmed up about 7-8 degrees since April, that's a big jump.

Aloha,

Steve

A few days off...

We've been quite busy for a while and I've got a few days off right now, with the schedule getting hectic again in a couple of days. We've had back to back south swells the last couple of weeks, so the dive charters have been spending lots of time at spots outside the harbor and up near the airport, with a few dives in the north pine trees area, but the southwest facing sites have been pretty much off limits for a while. We've been able to find flat water by avoiding the sites facing southwest. Yesterday I was kind of glad to have the day off as the surf was probably as big as it's been.

On Monday evening I ordered an enlargement just to see how it'd turn out... it had arrived by Friday afternoon. It's BIG. I'm not sure if I want a BIG picture of an eel hanging prominently around the house... likely to be office material. It turned out great though, I wasn't sure if the detail would show up in the white, but it's fine. Here's a shot of the pic with me next to it just to give you an idea of how JumboGiant.com does with their enlargements.

Aloha,

Steve

Sloppy, choppy water today between a big south swell and the wind... but the diving was great!

Today we had a couple of intro divers on board. Neither of our intros had ever scuba dived before so we went in search of calm water with good viz. We had to go up to the airport, north of Keahole point to find very good water for intros. Several spots between town and there were pretty OK, it's just that with intros we have to do skills on the mooring line and it's tricky to do them with new divers while they're holding on a line tied to a bouncy boat. The intro divers had a great time. Highlights of the day were mating octopus and a nice juvenile frogfish and lots more.

I haven't been taking a lot of photos lately, busy with students or larger numbers of customers, also was out for a while with a back/rib problem that has resolved itself. This photo above was one of an eel on a late afternoon dive spring of last year. Tonight I decided "what the heck" and ordered a copy of this photo from www.jumbogiant.com. This is a company I heard about several years ago, they do enlargements at a very reasonable price. The copy on this post is about 56K in size, the one I uploaded to them (took several minutes) was about 5.5 megabites in size. I ordered a 24"X36" photo luster print using "best crop". I figured I'd challenge them a bit with this photo, see where they crop it, as well as the fact that there's a bunch of white to deal with, to see how they do. The guys in town that do prints would charge pretty good money to do a giclee print of that size... Jumbo Giant charges $19.95 plus about $9 in shipping, about a quarter of what the photo enlargement shop I visited last week charges locally... so I thought it would be worth a shot. I'll let you know how it turns out, and how fast it gets here (just ordered it 20 minutes or so ago).

Been real busy lately.. I had 6-7 days off in early May but the month filled up after that, I have another 6-7 day stretch next week with nothing, but the phone's been ringing again and I've got 1-2 charters a day 'til July 3rd except for that little stretch. It'll probably fill in too though,if it does that'd mean only 1 day off this month.

Kona Water Temperature News: I've been whining about how cold the water was this year... well, about the first week of May things started warming up and haven't stopped... we're up about 7 degrees the last 5 weeks. The water is now sitting at a pleasant 79 degrees, touching 80/81 on our computers at times. YAHOO!!!!

Do you twitter? I've been playing around with it the last month or so. I picked up a new phone that takes OK pictures and has internet, so I can send them to twitter from the boat. In theory I could answer mail from the boat, but that involves figuring out how to set up my e-mail accounts on the phone... too much thinking for me right now. Anyway, I manage to update conditions several days a week via the phone on twitter, if you are interested, you can find me at http://twitter.com/wannadivesteve

Aloha for now,

Steve

When should you reserve your scuba diving charters... How soon is too soon???

I get people asking me if it's OK to book ahead from time to time... the answer to that is that I'd prefer it, I suspect that's the same for most if not all dive operators. I've had people book ahead as far as 14-15 months or so, but those are rare. Right now I've got numerous charters partially booked through September, September itself is starting to look fairly busy, but most people seem to be booking a little closer to actual dates than in years past. It's usually fairly easy to slide into an open spot on relatively short notice if there are only one or two of you in most cases, but with larger groups it can get dicey if you wait too long.

All in all it's somewhat of a guessing game. I usually recommend to people that they try to book when they feel comfortable that they know they definitely are planning on diving... during busier seasons it sometimes takes several phone calls to find space with someone if you wait too late.

I thought I'd mention this because I had a surprisingly busy May and had to turn down last minute bookings (by last minute, I mean last few days or longer) several times due to a full or mostly full boat. I'm not discouraging last minute calls, definitely give me a call (808-937-1175) if you're looking at diving last minute, but I'm definitely encouraging a little lead time if you plan on diving for sure.

Here's another shot of a turtle getting cleaned by surgeonfish/tangs at a cleaning station.

Later,

Steve

Wow. You couldn't ask for better weather or skies in Kona the last several days...

The tradewinds died out and were replaced by north and northwest winds the last few days, it blew all the vog out and the skies have been clear and bright. Today was partly cloudy but still absolutely beautiful.

I had the day off today, start another stretch of diving tomorrow. It looks as though June will be quite busy at this point.. lots of charters started, now I just need to add additional passengers on the dives to fill things in.

Here's a frogfish from one of our recent dives.

Aloha,

Steve

Old dogs can learn new tricks????

We've been real busy this last week, dives every day with a couple of night dives thrown in on top... I'm due for a nap.

Among the passengers this week was a fun couple that were relatively new to diving (less than 50 dives) who passed along something they'd heard about to Bob and I (I'm in the 2K dive range and Bob, who's logged every dive he's done, is at 4900 and then some) that we'd never heard before - not that we can remember anyways, we're both over 50 - You can talk to your buddy underwater by... now this is cool... sticking your regulator on top of his/her forehead and talking through it. Well, it looks stupid, and you better clue your buddy in ahead of time that you might try it, but it does work to some extent. You've got to use few words, and avoid words that are tough to say with a reg in your mouth (I tried the word "big" and it didn't come across, but "huge" was something the customer I tried it with clearly understood). Apparently someone they dove with said it was a Navy Seal trick.

Now I really doubt I'll be using this often, but in rare cases that we have to communicate it's an option.

Here's a photo of something I find interesting... We had a mild junk line off of Eel Cove the other week (currents sometimes make a line of things caught in them) and we found this visor floating off the dive site. Take a look closely... it's got it's own eco-system going. Any time you find something floating in the ocean, there's no telling what else may have been attracted to it and is living around it. In this case it's a bunch of little fish that have taken up residence on the hat. I've seen the same or similar fishes around Oceanic White-tip Sharks and some big jellyfish we see on very rare occasions. I don't know what they are called, but I've even had them show up next to my divers when I've led blue water dives. Most anything floating out in the open will eventually have other life surrounding it apparently.

Later,

Steve

Whoohoo!!! Summer seems to be coming....

Wow, what a difference a few weeks makes... the water temp has risen to a point where it's quite comfortable for those of us who dive here nearly every day, and the water's flattened out most of the time lately (not that it was all that big of surf earlier). Water temp today was a very comfortable 75/77.

Earlier in the week we were able to go south to the Red Hill/Kealakekua region, and yesterday we were able to go way up north to a spot that we pretty much only go with "regulars" - don't feel slighted if we don't get there with you, it's just that it's different and once you've been to 30-40 dive sites we here want to start showing our "regulars" something new. It's fun for us to dive something we don't see all the time so on occasion we try to cover some distance when the boat has people we've done a lot of diving with.

Today we had a light load, went up to the Golden arches area and just slowly scanned the area for a couple of 78-80 minute dives... were rewarded with a good sized frogfish (here it is, check out the full belly, must've eaten recently), Leaf Scorpion, Peacock Flounder, Harlequin Shrimp, and loads of other cool stuff.

Aloha,

Steve