It's gorgeous in Kona, both topside and in the water, right now...

I'm in the dive shop for the day right now. We went out for the manta dive last night and got skunked for one of the few times this year. There was a manta around when snorkelers were first put in, but it took off, so none, or very few, of the divers got to see it as far as I know. It turned into a night dive for everone.

Business has been pretty steady throughout the summer, although right now I've got a 7 day mystery stretch of no charters for some reason. Starting the 19th, which is about when I suspected it to slow down, I've got charters lined up through the next 3 weeks or so, with plenty of other charters through the rest of September at this point.

So diving has been really nice the last little bit. We did see about a degree temperature bump in the last week, so the water's seemingly warming up. We've had some minimal swell, not enough to really affect anything. We're into the start of my favorite time of year to dive Kona. Late summer and fall are really great times to dive here... warmest and calmest water conditions usually, and once school's start up it typically isn't quite as busy for the resorts.

We were diving the other day out at Kaloko, and one of our customers was taking the Advanced Open Water course and used my camera for the photography dive, he managed to get several decent shots. Here's a shot of a pretty good sized ulua (aka trevally) he shot a picture of that was following our divers through the canyons for a while. The picture really doesn't do justice for the size of this fish, everyone diving said it was in the 36 inch long range.

Later,

Steve