And yesterday afternoon we could color it kinda green. During the first dive yesterday (Golden Arches)the viz wasn't so great, but not all that bad. It was a three tank dive day so we went quite a bit north for our second dive, and it wasn't too bad for viz. On the third dive we came back in to the Pine Trees area to do Aquarium and Suck 'Em Up... now that dive had poor viz. It was down to maybe 20 feet or so by then. We had some kind of unusual algae bloom or coral spawn or something. I've seen really heavy algae blooms diving twice since I moved here in '99, it usually lasts for a couple of days.
It was a fun day of diving though. The sky north of Kailua was clear, with little vog and beautiful "puffy" clouds in the distance.... I should have taken a picture, it was gorgeous. We could see Maui from the water. The water temperature has bumped up nicely, I saw 79 degrees my entire dive. The seas were very flat and we were doing a three tanker with a couple of very good divers from Oahu so we took them to a special spot we don't make it to often due to water conditions, distance and such. I got to dive the second dive so it was a blast for me, Cathy dove the other two dives. I'm betting the divers were tired... first dive 77 minutes, second dive 100 minutes and the third was 60 something (the divers were getting cold at that point, despite the extra shorties we threw on them... nearly 4 hours underwater dims your furnace).
Speaking of color, the photo at the top of the post is a closeup of a Fried Egg Nudibranch, one of our most common sea slugs here. Here's the full photo, it wasn't one of my best efforts, but in good focus for the cropped version.
I thought I'd post another interesting blog... I earlier posted a blog from Saipan, this one's from an obviously enthusiastic California Diver and has a bunch of local shots, both above and below. Some people knock cold water diving, but there's a lot of color if you can get past the freezing. I'm looking forward (well sort of anyway) to one day doing some cold water diving again now that I have more of an eye for little stuff than I had back in the day when I was diving in Oregon.
Aloha,
Steve
2 comments:
Wow, that nudibranch closeup is cool! I didn't even guess what it was until you put it in context at the end of the post.
That's great to hear you had such clear, beautiful skies. I've been wondering about that. We were there for two months this February/March and it was so voggy, it looked overcast every day and we couldn't even see the top of Mauna Kea. (We actually didn't mind much--the vog made it nice and un-glary out!) We've been trying to follow what Kilauea's been up to since then (there is some absolutely gorgeous footage of the new lava fountain on CNN video!) but it's hard from Connecticut. That's really interesting that it's getting more and more active, but it's less voggy in Kona now. It guess it all has to do with winds and stuff...
The vog is a day to day, and spot to spot thing. It's usually pretty good north of Kailua, at least compared to Captain Cook. If we get some west winds the vog tends to stay on the east side of the island.
Aloha,
Steve
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