Sunday, March 07, 2010

Kona manta ray night dive action is picking up, just in time for spring break!!!

I saw on the manta report yesterday that 20 or so mantas showed up on Monday night. That's a bundle of action. I've got a manta ray night dive charter tomorrow and another one or two scheduled for next week. Hopefully it'll keep up with lots of mantas for those outings.

We're crazy busy next week. I've got 8 charters currently scheduled, and 6 of them are full. It'll be interesting to see how spring break diving pans out for all of the dive companies in Kona. The last two years it hasn't been as busy as it had been in years earlier. I'm thinking people are starting to travel a bit more than they have lately once again. I've got bookings into June and inquiries into August so far. I used to have a good portion of my bookings 3-6 months out, the last two years it's been more like 2-6 weeks ahead of time with a lot of last minute calls. I'll be referring a bunch of the last minute people elsewhere next week most likely. If other operaters are experiencing the same thing it might be tough to catch a dive for the last minute bookers this spring break. After next week I open up again for now.

Yesterday we had some strange winds in Kona. It was blowing in heavily from the north at the harbor in the morning, so we headed a bit south to Casa Caves and it calmed down for a very nice dive. We don't seem to visit this site often enough, it's got the cave and a very nice reef out front, the topography's a bit different than our other sites and the finger coral reef is a great example of that type of reef for Kona. By the end of the dive the wind had done a 180 and switched to fairly strong from the south and things were getting pretty choppy, so we headed north and found the conditions to be quite good in that area... go where the wind ain't I guess, it worked this day anyway.

Here's a photo of a Goldlace Nudibranch. We see them from time to time. I took this underwater photo a couple days back. Yesterday Cathy and a couple of others popped into the cave at the end of the first dive and spotted 6 of them in a grouping. I've never seen that before, wonder if it's some sea slug sex thing?

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