Some much needed rain in Kona today.

We had our first real rain in a month or two last night, at least at our altitude. Not sure if it rained down on the shore or over in Kailua. Winter is Kona's "dry" season typically. When the ocean warms up (it's 75 right now, on the cool side) we tend to see convection rains in the afternoon and evening. During this part of year it takes actual storms to give us much rain, with tradewinds generally blowing weather in from the east, the other side of the island gets the brunt of the wet stuff.

Last night we had another manta charter for a family of 5. It was probably the calmest the water's been in a while.... glassy smooth practically on the way up. We saw 5 humpback whales on the way up to the dive site.

I did the first dive. We were hopefull of hearing whale songs during the dives but I could barely hear a little in the backgound at one point in the dive and that was it. Highlights were garden eels and Heller's barracuda as well as some good sized eels. The first dive we usually do up at the site, which is a very nice reef area, and is done in the late afternoon prior to sunset. There's lots of activity on the reef at this time as some of the nighttime fish are starting to come out of their holes and lots of others are grouping up and doing whatever it is they do (fish behavior changes about this time of day, the reef is just different) before the sun goes down.

We had 4 mantas on the night dive. I captained the boat for this one. The wind direction had us blowing directly adjacent to the dive site so I got to hear just about everything the snorkelers (our group was diving, several of the other boats had snorkelers) were saying... they were having a great time.

Here's an older pic, you'll be able to tell my older stuff because I used to write information on the pictures for my business website. This one mentions the poison spines, we're talking more than a little owee here, more like a bad spider bite where the wound goes bad, erodes away and you've got a quarter sized painful wound for months and might be picking at it for a couple of years... you don't generally want to touch these guys.

Aloha,

Steve