Went for a little dive today...

I did manage to get a reasonable shot of a female Whitley's Boxfish (Ostracion whitleyi). These fish tend to hug the cracks between rocks so they are tough to track and get a clear shot of with a camera... you end up with lots of butt shots or partially blocked shots usually.

The males of this species are few and far between, and they are spectacular. They can have anywhere from a deep navy blue, to an electric powder blue, along with white coloration. We rearely see them. We've got one dive site where I've seen a male 4 times in the last 7 years and that's about it. I did see what appeared to be a juvenile or female turning into male coloration last fall. Down at Honaunau the juveniles and females are fairly plentiful, so there's got to be some males around there somewhere, but I've never seen one there. The males are rare enough that early versions (maybe even the more recent ones) of Hoover's book didn't have a picture, and about 4 years ago I tried to find a picture of one on the internet and could only find pictures of aquarium specimens.
Here's a link to a page with most of the boxfish on it.

We'd gone about a month and a half or two without rain, but it's started raining some the last couple of weeks. Things are starting to green up a bit again. New year's day, possibly the next day, I got a call at 6 am by someone worried about seeing rain forcast on the internet... Don't worry about rain (try not to call me at 6 am either if possible, remember that there's a time difference if you don't live here - worst call I ever got was a 3:10 am wanting to know how to spell that state fish). Rain rarely affects the diving here, can't say never because we had a hundred year rain event on top of a golf course that was being constructed which washed a lot of mud and affected a stretch of reef down south of town for several days one year (that was the big beginning of this whole Hokulia mess I've commented on a couple of times), the lawsuits have been flowing since. Other than that, since we have no rivers or streams and very little sand on our rocky shores, rain is a non-event as far as affecting visability. Our viz is generally only affected by swells which usually are generated from storms hundreds to thousands of miles away from here.

Later,

Steve