Day off... Tinker's Butterfly fish... Blabber...

I've got the day off today, which is a good thing at this point. I've tentatively only got 3 days off between now and the 3rd of April, and I'll probably fill those if I can... you gotta work while you can get it. I went to the airport to pick up Pat last night - man is that place dead. I worked out there as a greeter for a shuttle company a couple of years ago during my slow season and the 7PM United SFO flight usually arrived full, last night it was only half full at best and we're hitting spring break.

The picture above is of Tinker's Butterflyfish (Chaetodon tinkeri). They were considered to be "endemic" to Hawaii but they've found them (or something extremely similar) elsewhere in the last few years. They're a deep water fish, at least a 100' for the most part, and that might explain why they're just now finding them elsewhere, not a whole lot of divers doing the deeper reefs in some locations.

An interesting thing happened to the camera at this dive site, and it's happened here before so now I'm thinking it's depth related. The camera (Canon G9) freezes up and shows a line of rotating blocks with numbers on it, looks much like some of the countdown clocks you see on some websites. I'm not sure what it's all about, but it quits when I get shallower. Yesterday it was at about 100', so I could only manage 4-5 shots and couldn't really get underneath the Tinkers without it locking up again. I'm guessing the housing compresses enough at that depth to press a couple of specific buttons at once and causes the screen to default to what it's showing. Guess I'll have to download the CD for the camera to find out what that screen means.... I pretty much read just the quick start manual.

It's been cool and cloudy, wet in the evenings, the last several days. We've missed the flooding that some of the other areas of the state have had, and the only effect on the diving was a swell that came in the last two days limited the sites. Today we've actually got some sun... yahoo! It's actually been foggy up mauka around Honalo to Captain Cook in the afternoons, felt like being back in Oregon... only I'd probably freeze myself numb going back to foggy and 40 degrees for days on end, foggy and 66 is almost too cold anymore.

Whales have been out in force the last few days. We could hear them on all the dives, and two days ago I was diving at "High Rock" and had gone out to the spot called "Lionfish Arch" and another name or two, and a trio of whales swam between our group and the boat - unfortunately we were keeping our eyes out towards deep water. The northwest swell was just coming up that day so viz was lowering, probably in the 60-70 foot range, the whales were probably 60-100 feet the opposite direction of where we were looking.... Man, I WANT TO SEE WHALES UNDERWATER, preferably soon. So close.

Later,

Steve