More Kona Hawaii scuba diving fun...

I've had a couple days off, one more tomorrow and then back to work. On Sunday we had a couple of nice dives.

We did the first dive at Turtle Pinnacle. I'd been telling Bob that I had a "turtle theory" involving conditions that would lead to a busy cleaning station. All conditions were go, according to my stupid theory anyway, so we decided to give the spot a try... well, as luck would have it, there were plenty of turtles to be seen at the site - both the customers and Bob (who led the dive) were pleased... gotta chalk it up to luck though as I like to make up theories just for conversational purposes sometimes. We'll make a point to keep track in the future just in case I've stumbled on something.

After that we headed to an interesting site our customers hadn't dove yet. The couple on board had dove with us earlier in the year and returned to Hawaii for the holiday weekend to dive. I wanted to show them somehting a bit different from what they'd seen so far. We picked a site which has some neat structure, a nice dropoff, decent reef in the shallows and a good shot at Tinker's butterfly fish. I led the dive. We popped down to a hundred feet and the Tinker's seen in this earlier post cooperated, they came up from the deep and got right in our faces. These are cool fish in that they are extremely curious and will approach divers. That unfortunatley makes them very easily collectible, and since they are generally described as only being found in Hawaii (they recently found them on another island - Johnston atoll, Majuro, or something along those lines, I can't recall which) they are considered quite rare and desirable as a high end aquarium fish.

Here's one of my favorite shots I've ever taken. It's of a Banded Coral Shrimp (Stenopus hispidus, also called a Boxer Shrimp in some places). This guy came out great, and you can see a Golden Goby in the background. They are one of the cleaner shrimps, although they don't appear to be as active a cleaner as the cleaner shrimp I posted numerous posts back. Oftentimes these guys will set themselves up in a hole somewhere and you will be able to find them there, along with an eel visiting for a cleaning, nearly every time you visit.

I'm running very, very low on pictures that I really like without doing repeats.... You may start recognizing things or seeing some pics with a blue cast.... I gotta get out more and take some new underwater photos.

That's it for now.

Aloha,

Steve