Another reason why I like Hawaii Scuba Diving...

Went scuba diving... dolphins swam by from Steve on Vimeo.

Whoohoo!!! Hawaiian Spinner Dolphins!!! When you are scuba diving in Hawaii it's a real treat to see these guys underwater. It doesn't happen all that often, but we get lucky often enough to say it's not that unusual. We do see them on the surface on a quite regular basis, often several times a week, when we're out diving in Kona.

This was a particularly good day for us, I happened to have the camera along at the time. You can clearly hear the dolphins in the video and if you listen, you'll hear the whales singing in the background. It was February when I took this, that's just coming into the height of the whale season off Kona. We hear humpback whales quite often on our dives that time of year.

Later,

Steve

Here's the 5:45am NOAA tsunami warning supplement for the state of Hawaii...

1:30 The harbor's been reopened apparently. Boats are returning. Other than the evacuation and business closures, the tsunami was pretty much a non-event here in Kona.

Aloha,

Steve

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12:03 Finally, found a live stream... www.kgmb.com you have to click on the live streaming link.

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Update11:41am. The radio station I'm listening to is reporting the water is receding in Hilo Bay around Coconut Island.

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Update 11:05am HST Nothing so far according to the radio station overlooking Hilo Bay. The county water supply has turned off the water in the evacuated areas to prepare in case anything happens.

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Update 10am HST: I'm down at the dive shop across from Honokohau Harbor. Met up with a lot of fellow boaters getting their trailered boats to higher groud. Looking out at the ocean it's full of boats sitting a half mile out or so ready to ride out any surge if it occurs, looks like a big regatta. The shoreline drops off deep rapidly around the Big Island so if you get out a half mile you can be sitting in 2000 feet of water, most tsunamis are not more than a big long bump in the water in those depths but become very dangerous when they hit shallow water.

The tsunami sirens have been going off hourly all day. We talked to some friends down in Napo'opo'o, which is on the water, that said their sirens weren't working... not good if this occurs in remote communities.

It appears there was a pretty orderly evacuation of downtown Kailua. I came in to town at 8:30 to get the boat and traffic leaving the area was minimal. By the time I was leaving the harbor with the boat they had the area blocked off and were only letting people in to move their boats.


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They do state to expect wrap around on all islands. I'm glad I don't live on Hilo side at this point, gonna be hectic over there this morning.

http://www.prh.noaa.gov/hnl/tsunami_msgs/HEBTSUHWX.201002271749

6am and the tsunami sirens went offf.... so'd the neighborhood dogs...

Well, I've always wondered how long the sirens went off in case of an actual tsunami threat. 5-6 minutes worth. They test the siren system at 11:45am the first weekday of each month for about a minute or so... I've heard them once or twice when they've gone off accidentally at oddball hours, that usually causes a stir.

Latest news is they're expecting some wrap around on this side of the island, sounds like a cancel for our charter. It's not worth taking a chance of something unexpected occurring.

Big earthquake in Chile. Tsunami currently expected to hit Hawaii about 11am to noon...

Something woke me tonight and I'm up a couple hours early and saw the tsunami warning. Supposedly they're seeing 4 foot deep ocean waves in the Pacific, which means a tsunami is expected once the wave hits shores. All the arrival time listings are 2119z - whatever that means - I finally found a report that gave a 11:19 Hawaii time estimate.

The report said our civil defense sirens to go off at 6am and again 3 hours prior to arrival.

I've got a charter today... not so sure I'm going...

Turtle Pinnacle - Turtle cleaning station in Kona Hawaii....

Turtle Cleaning Station Kona Hawaii from Steve on Vimeo.
Today's diving was good. Cathy did the first dive, at Golden Arches, and reported viz approaching 200 feet, mentioned it was warmer too. I did the second dive at Turtle Pinnacle. As we approached the dive site we were in very deep water (I didn't have the sonar set up, but we were off the reef and in deep water, probably 150-200 feet) and could still see the bottom. We pulled up to Turtle Pinnacle and probably had 135 feet or so of viz on the reef. This site is not one that's known for it's viz, so conditions were excellent today.

Turtle Pinnacle is a turtle cleaning station. Turtles will swim to there and solicit a cleaning from tangs (surgeonfish). In it's heyday, you could generally count on seeing several turtles there. The last few years it's been more hit and miss. We had two turtles at the site today. One was there for a cleaning, the other looked like it was just looking for a ledge to tuck under for a sleep at the time.

The turtles will often lay down and spread out for a good cleaning. The video above shows classic swimming cleaning behavior. This can get fun if there's several turtles wanting to be cleaned. It's almost as if they get jealous... turtles will swim over to a swimming turtle being cleaned and cut in tight trying to steal their fish!

Later,

Steve

Testing...facebook video embedding... plus whale song sounds on underwater video...

OK, now that seemed to work.

Today was a great day out on the water. We had an 8-10 foot northwest swell so we decided to head south and go around the corner of Kaiwi point and dive sharkfin rock and Pawai Bay for the day, it was nice and relatively calm in there. The divers came up from the first dive very excited about all the whale singing, so when we moved over to the second dive site I took a "captain's dive" while they had lunch on their surface interval with Cathy.

Boy were the whales loud!!! I half way expected them to show up out of the blue at any time. Turn up the volume and listen between my breaths on this video and you can hear them. The sound of the whales through the camera housing doesn't do them justice, it was quite loud underwater.

While the divers were on their second dive I was up top on the boat and had a couple of whales swam to within 30 feet or so of the boat... very cool. They went right towards where Cathy had taken the group but probably cut outside when they hit the corner our group was around so the divers missed them.

This video clip is of a Lined Butterfly (Chaetodon lineolatus). These are Hawaii's largest butterflyfish species, reaching up to a foot or so in length. We typically see them in pairs, this one's partner was just a few feet out of the shot.

Aloha,

Steve

Let's discuss working as a Divemaster or Instructor for a bit.... pay, getting a job and such....

Aloha,
Quite some time ago I solicited some questions and reader Mel asked these.... "What do you typically look for when hiring a divemaster? (Qualities, skills, type of experience, etc.)" and "Is it possible for a DM to make a living wage in the Kona area?". I haven't answered these yet so I thought I'd try now.

Part of what got me thinking about this was a phone call I got back in October or so. I had a Course Director (essentially Instructors that teach how to become Instructors... not a whole lot of them working in Kona right now) from Colorado call me asking about work, if I recall correctly he was looking at moving out this way in the following month. Course Director is a desirable qualification, but not one that is needed at my business at this point. Anyway, I filled him in the best I could giving him the names of a couple of shops that might possibly be large enough to hold an occasional Instructor Development Course. As we were ending our conversation he wished me good luck on my "upcoming season"... I couldn't bring myself to tell him Kona's busy winter dive season is typically December 20th through January 3rd or thereabouts... the holidays were hopping this year, but boy did the number of boats on the water drop as of Sunday. There's a lot of people who think "snowbirds" will keep the diving community busy all winter, but the reality is that not all that large of a percentage of that group are divers, and while places like the Florida Keys are just a few hour air flight from over half the population of the US and see a lot of people taking a long weekend to dive, we're a bit harder to get to so the busy dive times tend to surround typical vacation breaks. I wonder if he had any luck getting on anywhere. Personally, if I were to come here out of the blue looking for a scuba job, I'd do it the first week of June and keep my fingers crossed that things pick up by the end of the month, as summers are the longest "busy" season we have here. If he found his way to Maui, which arguably doesn't have quite the diving Kona does, but has lots more tourists and hotels, he might have been able to hook up with some steady work.

On to what I look for when looking for a DM... Personally, I've been lucky in that I've known, and in most cases worked with elsewhere, every person I've hired for quite a while. That really helps because I've known their ability, local knowledge and disposition already. I'm lucky enough to have employees who've been leading dives in Kona and Hawaii for one to three decades each rather than having to rely on people who just became Instructors or just moved here. Odds are if I do need someone else in the next couple of years it just might be someone who's already working here, but you never know. To me the local knowledge is important, but really loving diving and really liking meeting new people are probably more important. Enthusiasm and sociability skills are darned important on a 6 pack boat, and probably at a premium on any boat. If I were a dive operator with a shop, retail skills would be real important. An Instructor's certification and a Captain's license are a big plus, especially for my particular business. I'd guess the larger portion of the "DMs" here in Kona are actually Instructors, but there are some DMs who either came up through classes in the local shops or walked in the right place at the right time and have found work.

Occasionally I get some bright, enthusiastic people approaching me for a job, but they have no scuba leadership certifications or Captain's license. I'd love to be in the position to give them some work, but unfortunately that doesn't work on the boat, there's really no such position as a "deck hand" on the dive boats, at least the smaller ones... people who fall into this category need to look at a boat with a shop (and then get the leadership certification to get work on the boat) or look at getting on a boat that primarily services tourists other than divers.

Wages... not really a subject we talk about that much. When I came over in '99 the prevailing wage worked out to between $65 and $75 bucks a charter. There are some DMs/Instructors getting a higher wage, and apparently some getting lower still these days. Some are paid a decent hourly wage, but aren't necessarily guaranteed full time work, so in the end you're likely still talking Taco Bell earning levels for a lot of divers in the business. Many divers here have second jobs to make ends meet, have additional incomes, or are semi-retired and don't necessarily need full time work (that's a huge bonus to their employers). I gotta be vague because the wages run the gamut here, I know of dive guides making anywhere from Zip (working for free) to 15/17 bucks an hour but not necessarily full time.

Working in this trade is more about lifestyle than earning power for the vast majority of people here by my guess. I've seen lots of faces come and go, but several that have made it work for a number of years. I'm not sure that it's any different here than anywhere else. It's a wonderful time when you can make it work.

Here's a rather blurry shot of a small group of Bicolor Anthias (Pseudanthias bicolor). They're a real colorful smaller fish, often found in deeper waters (this is in about 90') in coral heads in or next to sand patches here. If you are out poking around in a deep sand patch it's not uncommon to see a lone coral head with a group of fish surrounding it, as you approach closer they'll pull into the coral head for protection. They're commonly found in heads that have a cleaner shrimp, pictured here in the lower right.

Later,

Steve

Happy New Year!!!

Just an early happy new year wish for all as I'm going to be too busy to post for a few days. We've been busy the last couple of days and it'll stay that way through the holiday and then some. I may have some time to post after the 2nd or 3rd of the year.

Kona water conditions, at least for diving, have been superb the last few days, horrible for surfing as it's been glassy flat in the mornings with only some small chop in the afternoons. Hopefully it'll stay at least close to flat the next few days. We've been seeing lots of cool stuff on the dives lately, but we're still waiting for the big prize.... Whalesharks. This time of year seems to be the time that people are seeing them. My wife's boss saw them while he was fishing down south on the weekend and we've heard of other reports in the area. I'll be keeping my eyes open for a collection of boats on the water the next several days - when one boat finds one, then soon there are several as the whalesharks often stay put and check out the boats for some time.

Here's a shot of a frogfish I took back in May that I apparently haven't posted. We're seeing mostly larger ones right now, although the divers found a bright yellow medium sized one earlier today that we've not seen before.

Hopefully everyone has a great holiday.

Aloha,

Steve

It's two days before Christmas, and you couldn't pick a better day for diving conditions in Kona...

I hope this keeps up for a bit.


Untitled from Steve on Vimeo.

We had dolphins just outside the harbor, whales on the water on the way to the first dive, whales about a third of a mile outside the divesite on the second dive (they weren't singing, so the divers were unaware of them but I got a good look), and the divers saw a lot of good stuff on their dives.

Aloha,

Steve

Winter snow season has arrived in Hawaii...

I took the liberty of stealing this picture off the Keck observatory webcam on this webcam page that has live webcam shots of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. I'm not sure if this is one of the first snows of the year or not up there, but it was a pretty good snowfall by the looks of it.

We had a heck of a squall come through yesterday. My boat was already out and the surf was coming in crazy tight sets from the south so Cathy and Bob stayed right outside the harbor where it's protected from the south. I had a medical appointment yesterday so I was off the boat. The rain hit hard about noon time yesterday. The Big Island was soaking, but the most rain fell on the other islands... parts of Oahu got over 14 inches of rain yesterday!

Today the flood warnings are up 'til 4pm, but it's not raining right now. I looked at the Magic Seaweed Hawaii surf page last night and they were predicting 7 foot surf from due west for today, and called the divers and we decided to take a breather from today. We rarely see surf from straight west, usually it's north or south and easy to get out of. I haven't been out yet to see if the surf materialized, but if it does it won't be a pleasant day for diving anywhere on the Kona side.

Brrrrrr, it's cold.

Steve

Time to fly rules.... what about driving to altitude on the Big Island of Hawaii after scuba diving in Kona?

Here's a shot Pat took of one of the white tip reef sharks that occasionally hangs out in the mouth of "suck 'em up", a lava tube we have here in Kona.

I thought I'd write a post about something that comes up for divers on the Big Island from time to time.... Driving to altitude after diving. Many visiting divers, and some that live here, don't give it a second thought, they seem to forget that not only is the Island of Hawaii BIG... it's TALL too.

For the non-divers reading this, when you go through scuba certification classes one of the things taught is the use of dive tables to track your nitrogen loading, or computer use that will do the tables for you on the dive, and the time to fly rules. I'll give a brief over-simplified version of what it's all about... Nitrogen comprises the bulk of the air we breathe, and normally it's inert and our bodies do not absorb it, but when we breathe compressed air at depth our bodies absorb nitrogen. Sudden loss of pressure, such as flying in an airplane or driving to altitude, can cause that nitrogen to fizz out of solution and cause all sorts of problems with your body. In essence what happens is similar to opening a pop bottle, the dissolved gas fizzes out of solution, but when the dissolved gas is in your blood and it fizzes out of solution into your joints and such, you're in trouble. Anyway, the easy to use guidelines you are taught in your Open Water course are to avoid this.

Most visiting divers do think about the time to fly rules... no flights within 18-24 hours of diving is common... but some think inter-island flights don't qualify as "flying" for some reason and I get the question asked of me several times a year. It's all airplanes, they fly well above the altitudes they're pressured to (generally airplanes are pressurized to an equivalent of 7000-8000 feet altitudes), so yes, inter-island flying has the same recommendations. Lots of people though tend to forget that you can drive to altitude here on the island, often times to altitudes well higher than what you'd find an airplane pressurized to. It's important to be aware of elevation changes while driving too.

Currently, I'm thinking DAN and PADI are typically suggesting you should be safely able to drive to somewhere between 1000 and 2000 foot elevations after diving without worry... don't quote me on that as I'd have to look it up to be certain. Above that elevation they're very vague. I've heard recommendations for driving to altitudes over that which are all over the board.

You can NOT drive between the Kona side of the island and the Hilo side of the island without going well above 2000 feet in elevation. The southern route will put you well over 4000 feet in the volcano area. The northern route runs through Waimea, which is at 2500 feet, and you're heading uphill when leaving Waimea, so you need to consider it to be at least 3000 feet - I don't know what the altitude peaks at on that highway. Over the top via Saddle Road, you might as well consider it to be a flight, as it approaches 7000 feet at the summit of the road. The observatories should be considered extreme altitudes, and I personally wouldn't visit them for at least a couple days after diving.

So, what do you do? The only guide I've seen on this is by NOAA. Here are the NOAA dive tables. Dive tables are only a guide, and even their no-decompression tables carry this warning: "WARNING: EVEN STRICT COMPLIANCE WITH THESE CHARTS
WILL NOT GUARANTEE AVOIDANCE OF DECOMPRESSION
SICKNESS. CONSERVATIVE USAGE IS STRONGLY
RECOMMENDED."

Anyways, to give you an idea of the time you need before heading to the other side of the island you can use their no-decompression tables and then follow up with their driving to altitude table. I'll run a relatively common, and non-aggressive dive profile run on their tables just to give you an idea.... 1st dive - 50 feet for 50 minutes, an hour and a quarter surface interval, 2nd dive - 40 feet for 50 minutes. Running that you you'll end up with a K group letter. Going to their altitude after diving chart, as a K diver you are recommended to spend at least 6 hours and 25 minutes out of the water before driving to 3000 feet, say Waimea. If the dives were any deeper or any longer, and those dives I just ran were very conservative, we often do dive days that would put you in a much higher group letter, the time you'd need to spend at sea level would be even greater.

Now in real life, there are people diving here and driving back to the other side on occasion without problems. I did hear a rumor that someone took a DCS hit driving to Waimea in the last year or two, but I can't substantiate it though. So what happens if you take a DCS hit? You're looking at a private helicopter flight over to Oahu and then a few days in the chamber is my best guess. Last numbers I heard bantied around for the cost of this (not sure if they were accurate numbers though) were fairly similar to the numbers I heard for a week's stay at the Presidential Suite at the Four Seasons... Not cheap! For me it's not worth trying to go to the other side of the island after diving. I personally won't go to Hilo after I dive 'til the next day, and if I was diving Hilo side, I'd probably rent a hotel room for the night before coming back.

Just some food for thought... before you dive and drive, you might want to pay attention to the elevation here. For most of Kona you're in pretty good shape to drive after diving if you stay below the upper highway. Above that you maybe should think about elevations and maybe spending some extra time at sea level.

later,

Steve

Sunday Green Market in Captain Cook Kona Hawaii....

I had the day off today and thought I'd go out for a hike, but it turned to rain so that plan was ditched. I've been wanting to hike the trail to the Captain Cook monument, to see if I can still do it after all these years (maybe a stupid thing if I make it down but have troubles on the way up). It's been very gray yesterday and today and I figured it might be a good day without sun to do the hike. Not a good idea in the rain though as it's got a 1300-1400 foot elevation change and parts of the trail would not be good when wet.

....So I checked out the Green Market that is held on Sundays in Captain Cook across from the Manago Hotel. It's a bit bigger than the picture above shows, and has a mix of locally grown produce and locally produced craft and art items. They started this Sunday market a few months back, I'm hoping it's a success and keeps up. There was a reasonable sized crowd when I went through.

later,

Steve

Night dive tonight...

We've got manta night dives scheduled for both tonight and tomorrow night. They're always fun. I was looking at a list of top 100 dives in the world this morning, and the Manta night dive here in Kona was #7.... not bad, it's truly a world class dive. Apparently the list was voted on by readers of some scuba diving magazine.

We've been pretty busy since returning from our vacation, which is good. November is usually a slow time for the dive industry here, and considering the water conditions are typically quite good in November that's kind of surprising, and this year's probably slower for a lot of folks doing business here because of the economic downturn and lower travel numbers (a report in the Honolulu paper said visitor arrivals for the Big Island was down 31% for September as compared to last year, it's down all over the state).

We just finished off a set of Open Water referral students and I've got one or two more groups of students scheduled up in next couple of weeks, along with our certified divers we take out on tours, so it looks like we'll stay reasonably busy for a November. We managed to see a lot of stuff on the training dives... several frogfish, indigo darts, several sets of flame angels, loads of butterflyfish and tangs, an octopus or two, morays and all.... Kona's a great place to do the open water diving end of a course because you get to see all that stuff in nice warm water - beats the heck out of doing your open water dives in a muddy quarry or lake for the most part.

Here's a decent sized Yellow Margin Moray from last month before our trip.

Aloha,

Steve

You talkin' to me?

We saw this turtle at "Turtle Pinnacle", which is historically a very popular and well known dive site in Kona. It (the dive site) was featured in a recent IMAX 3D movie last year. Turtle Pinnacle is a large rock structure with a turtle cleaning station below it... turtles come in and present themselves to juvenile surgeonfish/tangs, which eat the algae off their shells. In the last year or two, the sightings of the turtles seems to be down, at least in our opinion. The other week Cathy and I were looking for a site for dive #2 and decided to hit this site as it's got a lot going on critter wise... we told our customers we were thinking about calling it "Turtle Cynical" because we hadn't really seen turtles there in quite a while... but there was a turtle anyways... Bonus!! It's a pretty nice site without turtles, but we've seen them a couple of times recently. I saw this one on a trip this week, thought it looked a little defiant.. hence the post title.

Kailua's really quiet right now...

Ironman is over and the town emptied out quite quickly. Pat and I were running errands today and drove through town and it was about as empty as you'll see in on a late afternoon.

We had a pretty good swell come in during yesterday's dives. Today it was coming in real good from the north, it's supposed to be coming down tomorrow. We'll just dive some south facing dive sites and stay clear of the north facing ones for an extra day.

I've been trying to get a decent shot of a Flame Angel (Centropyge loriculus) for quite some time. They're really tough to get a photo of because they are very shy and flighty and will dart into the finger corals if you approach them or swim above them. They used to be pretty rarely seen a few years back, but they're seen quite a bit more often these days.

I saw 5 of them on my dive yesterday. I saw this one towards the end of the dive and decided to try something... in underwater photography, the general rule is get as close as possible, get as little water between you and your subject as possible. As this is really really difficult to do with Flame Angels I decided to take a different tack. The Canon G9 camera has a pretty darned powerful flash, and you usually use the diffuser to help it light up your subject as the flash is very directional and won't get good coverage when shooting close. I decided to not use the diffuser and see if the flash was strong enough to light up the Flame Angel at a longer distance with the camera really zoomed in. The first of these pics was taken at the usual distance before removing the diffuser, I was just lucky to see it for a moment and get a shot off. The second one was taken at a distance of about 5 feet without the diffuser on the flash. This is about a 2 and a half inch fish so the camera was really zoomed in for that shot, but it worked OK. I'm thinking Pat actually has some better pictures of one, but these give you a great idea of how colorful this little fish is.

Later,

Steve

Short, poorly shot octopus video...

Octopus... eating another octopus! from Steve on Vimeo.
I mentioned in my last post that we saw a large octopus at Kaloko. A week or so earlier we saw one. It was heading to a large rock and I started to switch the camera into video mode. It slid behind the rock and suddenly a small octopus popped out and the bigger octopus came out behind it... I'm thinking "I'm gonna get some octopus sex video", then suddenly it engulfed the smaller octopus and there was a huge ink cloud. By then I've got the camera in video mode, but I didn't have the time to change the camera to underwater white balance from what it was already set at... so the white balance is pretty funky... the focus is off too. Anyway, it appears the bigger octopus ate the smaller one. You can sort of tell there's something within it's mantle. It booked off shortly after I started the video so this is very short.

To bad I didn't have a camera for the octopus 2 days back, as it was cooperatively posing.

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

More squid..... Less blabber....

The last post was too long...

Aloha,

Steve

What dive sites do we dive???

One of my almost pet peeve questions that I hear fairly frequently when people sign up for a dive is "do you know where you're going?". I'm getting to dislike that question, but I guess I just need to get over it. There are some places that feature one or two better dives and practically everyone goes to the same spot, practically every day... thank goodness Kona isn't one of those places. We've got lots of very good dive sites up and down the coast that we can do. Actual choice of where we are diving on any given day depends on what customers want to see, what they've already dove, and the water conditions of the day, and in some cases if there's a mooring available when a lot of boats are on the water. We rarely pick dive sites 'til we're outside the harbor on the water and can check conditions.

Kona has a fairly extensive day use mooring system, primarily between the Kona airport and just north of Kealakekua Bay. The mooring balls are roughly 15 feet down and chained to the bottom, dive operators will send a crew member down with a rope to tie off to it. The first day I hopped on a boat with the first operator I worked for, I'd never really jumped a mooring before. Being the new guy, that was pretty much my only job - the instructions from the boat captain were "I'm going to head the boat towards the ball, and when you think you can reach it, jump." OK, easy enough... so I go for my mask and fins and am immediately informed that those are "only for sissies". Anyway, it's pretty easy to make it down to the balls unless you have a stiff current, there's a couple that are sitting at around 22' that are tougher to get to if you aren't expecting to have to dive that deep.

The story behind the moorings is kind of interesting. Kona didn't always have a mooring system, the dive operators used to drop anchor everywhere. From what I understand (I wasn't here yet in those days), a rather well known individual (start guessing who now) inquired as to why we didn't have a mooring system like some of the places in the Caribbean. I think the response was money, so he decided to help out. Anyway, he had the means to generate the money to get the mooring system started and the dive ops contributed the labor to put them in. Nowadays there's a local non-profit that raises funds for maintaining and adding moorings to the system. Oh, the individual's name was Jerry Garcia, of the Grateful Dead, and he was an avid diver. Apparently they held a concert to raise the initial funding... a very nice thing to do.

Anyway, the mooring system has been great for the reef as anchors are only dropped infrequently by dive operators anymore. We do have some anchor sites, and most boats take care to make sure they're hitting sand when they drop anchor. This spring I decided to start keying in our positions on our boat's GPS, and we're up over 50 spots already (still haven't keyed them all in, I try to add them as we dive them), so we've got a lot of variety to choose from as long as the swell cooperates.

Here's a shot of a diver taking a picture of a yellow frogfish in a rubble area. Cathy found this frogfish back in February or March. It was about the size of a nickle/quarter back then, we've been watching it grow since and it's getting to be pretty good sized... I hadn't realized they grow that fast.

later,

Steve

Another Hawaiian bigfin squid pic from last month....

I wish these critters were around all of the time, they aren't, so when we do see them it's a real treat.

Last week we had a customer who wanted to do a reef night dive. We were able to get another who wanted to do one and weren't working the next morning... so why not? I sat on board while Bob led the divers for a 70-80 minute or so long night dive. We've done a reef night dive a few different spots and Cathy did the last one at this spot. Cathy came up very excited from her dive here in June, and when Bob came up he could barely get his regulator out before saying "Wow Steve, this is a fantastic night dive". He said it was probably the best reef night dive he'd ever done in Hawaii. He said the reef was nothing but little red eyeballs looking back at you and he was going to have to look at his invertebrate book to figure out what all the different types of shrimp he saw were. My turn next! I want to see if this place is better than what I've done so far. We don't get a lot of call for reef night dives, although I wish we could get more, the trick is trying to get enough divers to make it worthwhile for us. We're slower now so it's something we can do with fewer people IF the schedule works.

Later,

Steve