Why is this frogfish sooooo happy?? Airfares are finally dropping!! Come visit Kona Hawaii....

Ok, this is a pretty commercial topic. I've been checking on airfares on a trip we picked up tickets for back in the spring, we picked up ours just in time. I kept an eye on it and the price increases were downright surprising over the course of the spring and summer... nearly doubled... just recently they took a nosedive and are approaching what we originally purchased them for. Tonight I checked travelocity.com for some flights from the mainland to here just to see if the prices have dropped coming this direction... nice to know you can get here from Seattle for 350, Portland for 480 and Los Angeles for 550 or so again now... I'd had people tell me of much higher rates a couple months back.

While I'm at it... I might as well mention our vacation rental still has a bunch of openings in November and December, kind of slow for this time of year, but it's loading up the first quarter of next year quite nicely. I suspect a lot of the hotels and vacation rentals have availability if you're thinking of coming over.

Weather wise and as far as diving condions lately... it's been wonderful! We've done some great diving the last few days, primarily intros and students getting their open water certifications. Our intros the other day got to see a white tip reef shark on thier very first dive!!! The students got to see a lot of great stuff too, I wasn't able to produce a shark, but today we saw a great big (well, great big for here, nothing like the Pacific Giants back in the northwest) octopus at Kaloko - maybe 20 feet from where we saw a similarly sized one just over a week ago, if it is the same one I'm hoping maybe that's it's favorite hangout for a while - who gave us a great show posing/shape changing/color changing for a couple of minutes. We were able to approach it from slightly below it so it didn't seem to take us a much of a threat.... no pictures though as I don't take cameras on teaching dives.

Anyway, I thought a heads up on the airfares might have been in order just in case people've been looking earlier and seeing them go nowhere but up.

Aloha,

Steve