A day off.

After being in the water 14 of the last 17 days I didn't have anything booked (my slow season's turning into a busy time) and took a day off. I thought about DIVING for fun today, but I'll give my ears a rest. Maybe tomorrow.

The big news around today is the roughly 40 acres of land that fell off into the sea over on the lava flow a couple of days back. Sorry I don't have a link, if I find one in the next day or so I'll link it. --- Here's a link with some pics of the new island edge, it may be updated to something different for those looking at the site after 12/2/05 --- http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/kilauea/update/#images --- We have an active volcano that is continuously building new property on the Big Island. The photo above is of my family (wife, parents, sisters and in-laws and families) out on the lava flow back in late '99. The glowing orange stuff in the background is real red-hot flowing lava. You can still walk to the flow but they do warn of bench falls. As the lava flows to the sea it forms a bench which could potentially fall, this is what happened to the parcel which fell into the sea the other day. It's a very popular thing, walking out to the flow, hopefully nobody was on the parcel that sank. It apparently happened in smaller portions over several hours, haven't heard of any problems with hikers as of yet.

Here's a photo of some Pyramid and Thompson's butterfly fish soliciting a parasite cleaning from a cleaner wrasse.

later,

Steve