OK, the earthquake was a 3.8 down near South Point...

Not as strong or close as the 4 pointer up the mountain from us on Sunday. Pat felt it, I was on the boat at the time.

Small earthquakes are common here. I haven't felt one in ages though. Here's a link: Hawaii earthquakes

Later,

Steve

Ah, felt that earthquake a minute ago...

Thought I was losing my touch, there'd been reports of relatively local quakes the last week I hadn't felt at all. This on felt like someone jumped up and down real hard behind me. Over in a fraction of a second. I'll post later what strenght and where it was located.

Wow! One of our divers spotted a Tuberculosis Nudibranch on the manta ray night dive the other night....

This is what I was so excited about on the night dive with 20 manta rays the other night. Customer Peter found this after we'd peeled off for a short night dive at the end of the manta show. It's a Tuberculosis Nudibranch (Dendrodoris tuberculosa) or a very close relative not in my book. I've heard of them being seen up in the shallows at the manta dive site in the past, but I've never seen one. This one was actually in more like 25-30 feet of water out towards the edge of the reef. I'm glad I had the camera in hand, although it took a while to get the settings right and I missed the good angles on it. They're a good sized nudibranch, this one was probably almost 6 inches long.

It's partly sunny today, but kind of hard to tell because the vog is very thick right now in the Captain Cook area. It's thicker than usual the last couple of days. Up in Kailua it's rarely this thick, in Captain Cook we're right at the spot where the winds sort of eddy around the island and the vog ends up. My eyes are itchy, but then again I was out under the house yesterday hauling off some old building materials the previous owners had left... could just be dust, not the vog, causing the irritation.

Yesterday we had a nice little earthquake. I missed it... bummer (after that one a couple Octobers back, any little shake gives you a nice adrenaline shot)... I was in the garage and didn't feel it being at ground level, Pat upstairs in the house felt it quite noticeably. It was a 5.0 centered off the volcano on the other side of the island, pretty shallow so it wasn't as noticeable here as some of that magnitude.

I thought I felt a minor earthquake at 1:55....

And it showed up on this link about 15 minutes later. There was a 3.7 off of Kiholo. They probably felt it pretty good up north by the Four Seasons and even in Kailua. It just felt like a car drove past the house here.. . not much to it, the dog used to shake the house more every morning getting ready to take a walk.

Small earthquakes are quite common here, while most of the activity is on the other side of the island we do notice a mild bump here every now and then.

Here's a nice shot of a Fuchsia Flatworm (Pseudoceros ferrugineus) I took the other day. I'm pretty sure I had the new closeup lens on for this one.

Later,

Steve

Had some flash floods in Kona yesterday. One came through our yard....

I wanted to post this yesterday, but our cable/internet was down for over a day.

After yesterday's charter the weather started looking bad. I called my evening clients to give them a heads up that they could cancel if they wanted but they said they'd prefer to meet me at the regular time and we'd look at conditions before making a decision. 20 minutes later the thunderstorms began and I got a call saying they'd take a raincheck... good idea.

Pat was in town so I met up with her and we went to lunch at the Harbor House (which is a great place for lunch and a beer at Honokohau Harbor) and we're stopping off at Macy's on the way home when we got a call from my parents (who arrived for a visit the night before). They said a veritible river, full of boulders, was coming out of our driveway and blocking Napo'opo'o road. I'm telling them "oh, that happens all the time" thinking it's the typical 4-6 inches deep of water streams with rocks tumbling through that we often see in very heavy rains. Turns out the Captain Cook area had several inches of water in about a half hour to an hour and a culvert on the highway almost a mile above us failed and rerouted water from the usual flood zone. It really was a river for a short time. The upper highway was shut down in two locations, and our main road was shut down at our driveway so there was no going south of Captain Cook for a couple of hours. Traffic was at a standstill so by the time I got home it was getting dark so I didn't really get to see everything.

Anyway... I guess this is a continuation of my "living in paradise is cool" thread, but a bit more extreme than mice, rats and bugs. So far this week the biggest oddity we'd had was ants nesting in an unused showerhead...I can live with that more readily than what happened yesterday. We'll be cleaning up the yard for a long long time.....

Here's a little video of the damage, keep in mind most of the rocky stuff you see in this used to be lawn. The kayak is normally stored next to the house, and we just found our garbage can in the pineapples, it's also normally kept up at the house. The segment at the end is actually of what was jungle above our property just above the neighbor's driveway, now it looks like a road as the water took out everything it it's path. This video is long and boring, but my relatives who've been here might find it interesting

Later,

Steve

PS: By the way, we had a little earthquake tonight too. I'm still waiting on a wrecker to lift the car off it's boulder, luckily it didin't move or fall into the trench.

Wow, that was fast. They just broke in and announced the Pacific tsunami warning center has issued an all clear.

Good news, and it only took about 15 minutes.

Hot off the press... Tsunami advisory for Hawaii 8/15/07...

Apparently they just had a 7.5 earthquake in Peru. There's a possibility the state may see a tsunami around 2or 3 in the morning tonight. Apparently the tsunami sensor off Peru did note water movement and a possible tsunami, there's another sensor halfway between here and Peru that they'll be watching. The 1960 Hilo tsunami was caused by an earthquake off South America, so these things are taken quite seriously.

Update on Hurricane Flossie and 8/13 earthquake...

So the earthquake did end up being the first mention on the 10 o'clock news, short story though as there wasn't much information whether there was any damage. It was felt on the Kona side, but not strongly.

Flossie's in the news bigtime. Assuming this works,here's a cool site from the University, it shows the animated hurricane track, it takes a while to load so be patient. Just in the last few hours the eye has broken up and the storm is spreading out (essentially weakening on the fringes). Tonight's news said they expect a downgrade to a category two in the morning.

Coming into a potential hurricane is interesting. Traffic was nuts today around 4-5pm, everyone seemed to be on the road. Costco was jammed with people buying water and canned goods, the corner with Walmart and Safeway was very busy, by the time I made it home around 6pm I went to Choicemart in Captain Cook and you'd think it was the day before Thanksgiving or Easter (surprisingly that is pretty much the busiest grocery day of the year the years I worked in grocery way back when) by all the crowds. Nearly every cart had water.

Assuming we are relatively protected in Kona, water probably won't be our biggest single issue. Odds are if there are winds elsewhere on the island, there'll be power outages as a downed line on the other side can cause problems here. The news said to expect winds in the 40mph range and up to 10 inches of rain in the affected areas on the southeast side... glad I don't live in Wood Valley or Pahala.

The pictures on this and the last post are of a Dragon Wrasse (Novaculichthys taeniourus). This was a good sized juvenile. The juveniles have the elongated front dorsal spines, a lot of divers who don't know the hawaiian fish will come up and say they saw a lionfish 'til we get a description and show them the picture in the book we carry on board.

Goodnight... I'll try to update tomorrow morning unless I'm running around like mad trying to batten down the hatches.

Aloha,

Steve

Hey, earthquakes, hurricanes... Hawaii's got it all...

So I'm frying up some italian sausage and the window starts rattling, for about 10 seconds. There's nothing else unusual going on anywhere else in the house, so I figure I'll check the time in case there was a small earthquake. 7:28. During "Fat Walk" on ABC a bit over a half hour later there's a hurricane update.... oh, and by the way, there was a 5.3 quake about 20 miles south of Hilo on the Big Island at 7:28pm.... any other day and that'd been one of the first mentions on the 10 o'clock news, as a 5.3 is a once every year or two or three event if I recall correctly. Here's the LINK to the USGS Hawaii earthquake map

Anyway, the current thinking is the hurricane won't hit the island directly, but might generate surf and 40-50 mph winds on the southeast side as well as surf on most of the east side. No talk about the Kona side yet. More updates later, if I'm still up (I'm getting to where I actually go to bed around night news time -10pm here), I'll update any new news I hear.

Later,

Steve

Bump!!

We just had an earthquake about 5 minutes ago... and it lasted about as long as the title of this post, one nice little pop, maybe a fraction of a second but strong enough to know it wasn't our dog falling over (she's getting up there in age and sometimes trips up). It's the first one I've felt in a few months. Here's the link - http://tux.wr.usgs.gov - The red square (if you read this today or tomorrow) just south of Ho'okena is the one.

Gotta hit the hay, I have to be up about 6 tomorrow to get to an early charter.

Good night.

Steve

Hawaii's otters have been migrating apparently....

Over the weekend there were roughly 200 small earthquakes down at the volcano park and they closed Chain of Craters road and other roads around the park. The lava flow has been real active the last couple of months and they suspect magma is migrating beneath the volcano.... however they could be incorrect according to this video published by Dr. Tiki.... (warning - may contain alcohol, off color language and immature subject matter)...



I stumbled on Tikibartv.com a couple weeks back and it's sort of a kick. It's a story of a group of thirty-somethings who hang out at a tiki bar and solve their troubles through alcoholic tiki beverages. It apparently started as a single episode joke by a scriptwriter who was poking fun at the fact he had a tiki bar in the corner of his living room. I saw an article yesterday which said it's become one of the most popular podcasts out there and it's now almost a full time job and has created interest in his other works he previously couldn't sell, along with other project offers.

By the way... diving's been excellent. We had two mantas at the manta dive last night.

Aloha,

Steve

PS: One other thing, just in case someone is taking the video or my post title serously.... Sorry, no otters here in Hawaii.

Big Island earthquake, October 15, Kona Hawaii

This is my last post about the earthquake unless something real interesting on a personal note comes up. I thought I'd pass along some links to the local paper and one of the Oahu TV stations... Take a look at West Hawaii Today and The Hawaii Channel for more thorough information.

The earthquake made for an interesting morning here in South Kona, but was far more of an event up Kohala and Hamakua direction. One of Pat's co-workers who lives up north apparently had major home damage, as in the roof fell in and windows blew out. I'm sure we'll be hearing lots more stories of more serious damage tomorrow. Hopefully the first reports that nobody was seriously hurt hold up.

Take care all.

Steve

Kona Hawaii... the land of natural disasters...

Just kidding. We rarely have any earthquakes of any real damage, in fact I can't think of any actual damage from a quake here since I've moved here.

Here's the only real evidence near my property. We've always had some rock overhanging near the road just down from our property line. It fell, didn't go very far. There are lots of smaller rocks, primarily from the older rock walls, along side the roads in many parts of Kona also.

Pat called to tell me to not be surprised if our next renter calls wondering if things are OK. I'm gradually hearing from friends and family on the mainland also wondering. Not too much looks out of the ordinary at the home though. Apparently the upper floor of the hospital took a pretty good hit, also apparently North Hawaii Hospital also was damaged.

Here's a bonus natural phenomenon photo... We saw three funnel clouds the other day, I remembered I actually had the camera in the car. Tornados are not a problem here in general, but we do see waterspouts every few years.

Later,

Steve

Here's an internet radio link to a broadcast covering the earthquake...

It's pretty much the only radio station on Oahu going. The link requires you to allow popups to hear the broadcast.

I could only get one local privately owned radio staion, literally a guy with an antenna on a cherry picker up the hill, when I was driving earlier. As the power comes back in all areas I'm sure there will be more info available.


Interesting... I looked at the stats and I'm getting huge numbers of people hitting this site looking for Kona earthquake information... I hope some of them are divers and will remember me.

Later,

Steve

More Info on the Kona Hawaii earthquake...

Here's the link to recent earthquake activity... USGS map .

Bob just called, he's back from the Galapagos. He said he did not see a single whaleshark on one of his whaleshark dives... 22 sightings on the other 7 dives though. Between that and a couple hundred hammerheads, and sea lions galore, he thought the Galapagos was quite a place. Anyway, Bob was headed to Safeway when the quake hit. He said his car was bouncing all over the place. When he got to Safeway they'd had ceiling tiles all over the place and food off the shelves.

Pat called from the Hospital to say she had no clue when she'd be coming home. Apparently they've lost a lot of ceiling tiles and had lots of broken water pipes. The hospital has been evacuated and they are finding spots for all the patients.

The Pali (cliffs) down at Kealakekua Bay had several landslides. Apparently there was a huge dustcloud. I wish I noticed it when it happened, we live right above the bay but have trees in the way of the view. I checked out the bay a while later and there was still tons of dust/dirt on the surface of the water in the bay.

I'm sure I'll have more to report later...

Steve

Heck of an earthquake hit Kona about 3 hours ago.

Wow, biggest earthquake I've felt.... The power and internet just came back on. Apparently Oahu is out of power and parts of Kauai, the earthquake was apparently felt as far away as Kauai.

Lots of shaking at home, but no real damage at our house. I've got friends with lots of broken glass and pictures knocked off the walls and such.

We cancelled todays charter after everyone called and said this wasn't a good day to go out. I've got one group who was up at the Mauna Kea, apparently they evacuated the hotel as there was some damage along the lines of a wall or two collapsing.

Pat was called into the hospital, as the county/state activated the emergency plan. The radio station is reporting that there may be structural damage to the hospital and there is an evacuation in place, new patients are apparently being taken outside.

More later,

Steve