the Big Island of Hawaii and live coral reef... lots of it here...

I was cruising the web and ran across this page I've linked before on NOAA's study of Hawaiian coral reefs. It reminded me of a story from this last fall.

We went to DEMA, the big dive industry show, in Orlando in November and my wife and I went to Miller's Alehouse, a bar/restaurant near where we were staying that impressed us favorably. While sitting at the counter waiting on food, Pat noticed a couple across the way and said "they're divers". I'm wondering how she figured that and she mentioned she could see the necklace the gal was wearing was one we sell out of the office, and the guy had a dive computer on his wrist... maybe Pat should be a cop, I apparently don't notice these things. We started up a conversation with them and by and by Pat says to the guy that he's familiar, we must have met before. I'm doubting it because they're from the east coast, then suddenly she says she thinks we talked to him on the monorail in Vegas on the way back from DEMA the year before. He said "that's quite possible".

Towards the end of the meal he mentioned he had 30 some odd dives in Hawaii, then said too bad Hawaii doesn't have any coral. Well, that's a hot button topic with me because it's simply not true. We've got no soft corals or sponges, but we've got loads of hard corals in Kona. He didn't believe me, but he'd never been to Kona yet, his diving was mostly Maui and some Oahu. Now I've been to both, and Maui has some decent corals in spots, but not like in Kona from my experience as well. Anyway, I disagreed with him and later realized he was definitely the guy from the monorail the year earlier because the exact same topic came up. I've now had two big Vegas monorail coincidences over the years (first one was spoken of on one of my very first posts in this blog, check the history if you're into a lot of reading) and I find it amazing that it can be such a small world at times.

So... if you think Hawaii doesn't have coral, or you think you've seen it all on trips to the other islands, you might want to come to Kona for a visit and check out what healthy Hawaiian hard coral reefs can look like. We've got several types of dive sites here, and most of the dive operators try to vary the dives, so over the course of a couple of days you should run across some of our nicer spots for coral structure. Hurricane Iniki did pull a number on much of the coastline a couple decades back, but there's still plenty of old growth coral to be had. Reef areas that were really trashed from the hurricane nearly 20 years back are starting to come back quite nicely - I wish I'd taken photos of the north side of Honaunau bay when I moved here, it looked like a boulder avalanche, now it's tough to see the boulders and there's an 8-10 inch coating of finger corals over the whole thing, and plate corals are starting to take up residence on that side of the bay as well... that was the one weak part of that bay as a dive spot, now everything's pretty much a tremendous dive.

Later,

Steve

Back to the fishes....

I kind of drifted away from posting about the diving. I'll get back to it now.

So far, with the exception of last night (ended up being a lot of rain and a lot of wind), the diving's been very good this month. We've had 78 degree water and it's been mostly flat, some days lake flat. We've had several days with sightings of dolphins underwater, the whales are starting to show up (although we're not hearing them yet), the mantas have still been around (although we had to go south last week one night to gind them) and we're keeping busy diving.

Here's a shot of a nice antler coral. We're always taking a peek into these as we pass, they attract a lot of critters and you never know what you'll find.

Aloha,

Steve

Great scuba diving this summer in Kona Hawaii...

We've been real busy diving the last little bit. I've been Captaining for the last 3+ weeks, picked up a cold that went straight to my chest... I'm getting itchy to get back in the water.

Current water temperature in Kona is still sitting at 78/79, we're waiting for the next little bump in temperatures we usually see in late summer through fall.

The manta ray night dive has been hopping up off the Kona airport for about a couple months now. Last night we had 4 (mantas, and passengers) on our dive. We've been going out on the manta dive pretty much twice a week most of the summer, and the day dives have been 6-7 days a week for the most part. This week is looking as it'll be a bit slower so far, that could change. August is shaping up to be quite busy with bookings.

Here's a photo of a diver I took a few months back that is giving a good sized antler coral a once over. These corals occasionally house some interesting rare critters... leaf scorpionfish, harlequin shrimp, reticulated frogfish and such... we always take a moment to check them out when we see them.

Later,

Steve

Orange Cup Coral from Kona Hawaii....

I did a dive last week at Pawai Bay out on the Kaiwi Point end. There's a bunch of cup coral on a large formation near the point and the current was screaming when we were down so the polyps were out bigtime.

We had a huge southwest swell during the last half of June. I'd heard people mention it was one of the largest in decades but I hadn't thought much of it 'til this dive. Everything on the west end of the dive was as normal, but in one area of the site there was noticeable damage.... large lobe coral formations were sheared off and tossed out of place, often upside down. Wow. The area between Carousel and the Body Glove mooring had quite a bit of breakage. I'm wanting to check out the reef more inshore and to the south to see if it was damaged also. All of our sites that weren't directly in the path of the swell are fine. Quite interesting, it's amazing how much power a little surf has.

later,

Steve

Here's an Oval Mushroom, or Razor, Coral....

We see these corals from time to time while on dives. They're not overly common and many divers don't notice them. The species name is Fungia scutaria. They're interesting in that they are not sessile, they are unattached and can move around a bit to where they get the conditions they want. Divers occasionally notice them when their tentacles are retracted and invariably think they're dead, I really discourage touching them as unless it's bone white, it's alive. Another reason not to touch the corals, dead or alive, is that Hawaii has a law making possession of many corals illegal, so it's not a good idea even if it's passed on the the great reef in the sky.

This is the first photo I've got of them with their tentacles out quite nicely. Back in my aquarium days we used to keep these in our reef tanks, they'd really come out nicely under the proper lighting. I'm not sure where the source was, I suspect the Philippines and other areas south of here, but some of them had remarkable coloration.

Maybe I've been wrong all along....

Yesterday I was doing the navigation portion of an Advanced Open Water certification. Part of what we have to do for that is run a 100' course while counting kick cycles and timing it. We have a 150' line on the boat for this so I took it down for the students to follow. I'd guessed at the viz to be 70-80 as it was a mediocre day... well, 100' of the line out and I could still see my divers, barely. I guess I'll have to call it 70-80 feet of "good" viz, but viz was more in the 100' range. Now I'm tempted to take the line down on a good day just to see what the viz really is. I've always called some of our better days as 100'+, but I'm now betting it's actually much better than that.

So you're probably looking at the picture above and wondering what's interesting about it... it's a wire coral in front of my hand (I had to give the camera something to focus on)... but that's not the interesting part. The interesting part is what's on it. It practically takes a magnifying glass, but if you saw this particular wire coral while underwater you might notice there are not one, but two, Barred Wire Coral Shrimp living on it. Here's the slightly closer view with the shrimp circled. These little guys are tough to spot. I'd noticed one on this particular coral several months back, then decided to check on it a few weeks ago and noticed a shrimp of a different size than I remembered. Last week I decided to pop a quick picture of it, I thought there were two shrimp on it at the time (they tend to crawl to the opposite side of the coral when you get close enough to investigate) and the pic confirms it.

Now I'm wanting to break out my closeup lenses and external strobe and see if I can get a picture of one. They're much larger than the Siphopteron Quadrispinosum I took a picture of the last summer (I'm thinking I posted pics last June or July) with the closeup setup, so there's potential for a good picture if I'm lucky.

later,

Steve

NOAA survey says Big Island has most live coral...

Here's a link to an online version of a news article I saw last week.... on their recent coral survey of the Hawaiian Islands. It basically says the Big Island has live coral covering 57% of it's shallow coastline. The print article I saw also mentioned the bulk of that was on the west side (Kona,Kohala) and the other islands average somewhere in the mid 20s percentage-wise in coverage.

If any of you are interested in some of the specifics of the survey, you can click on this link to get to an interactive map of the islands and check out maps of coral structure around the islands.

The picture above is of a day octopus I took at Pawai Bay the other week. I couldn't quite get the focus on him I wanted, he wasn't interested in sticking around and posing. A little personal health update- Saw the doctor yesterday and he's thinking tears at the top of the hamstring and down behind the knee, but nothing that won't heal over the next little while - that's good news as surgery is required for complete tears. I'm now walking gingerly, yay! Jogging by next week... not hardly, but hopefully walking normally, it might be a few weeks before I don't have to pay attention to what I'm doing as to not reinjure the hammy.

Later,

Steve