Don't tease the animals!!!

Fun with lazers. from Steve on Vimeo.

OK, I shouldn't have done this, but my wife has a lazer pointer and I couldn't help myself.

It's a banana buffet....

It's a bright sunny day today in Kona an the day geckos are out in force looking for fruit. We've had a bunch of bananas ripening and there were geckos crawling all over them.

Later,

Steve

Enjoyed the view from the Coffee Shack Deli in South Kona today... Gorgeous day!

Today was a gorgeous day. Pat and I went out for a walk and decided to go to the Coffee Shack Deli up the hill in Captain Cook for a breakfast (no charter today and Pat had the day off too). The Coffee Shack provides what is arguably the best view from a restaurant on the west side of the island. It's a mostly open air restaurant on the side of Mauna Loa overlooking the South Kona coastline right on the side of the highway. They serve breakfast, lunch and desserts. Prices tend to run right in the 10-13 buck range for most everything on the menu. I had one of the specials of the day.... 3 egg omlette with bacon, mushroom, avocado, red onion, peppercini, calmata olives, tomato, cheese and topped with pesto... yum yum!
We don't get here very often, even though it's close by for us, but it's a pretty nice place.

As an extra bonus.... this place is one of those places where not only can you have a meal with a view, you can also share a meal with a wild animal!!! I decided to see if one of the resident geckos was interested in some pineapple...

Geckos gotta eat too! from Steve on Vimeo.

Aloha,

Steve

Busy, busy, busy...

Bob, Cathy and I have been keeping busy with charters.

The day of the manta ray charter that I took the recent squid photos I just blogged we also did a morning trip. It was a rather spectacular morning of charters according to our passengers... schooling barracuda, a manta ray, 5 or 6 eagle rays, and 30-40 dolphins swam with them for several minutes.... all on the first dive. The second dive was at one of our favorite divesites, often called pyramid pinnacle or harlequin or pinetrees pinnacle or any other number of names, and it was almost a letdown in comparison - and it's a great divesite.

Kona conditions report - Water temps have been fluctuating in the 77-80 degree range the last couple of weeks, kind of odd to see that much fluctuation in any direction but up this time of year. The vog has generally been pretty low the last couple of weeks and we've had some gorgeous weather.

Here's one of our resident geckos. This one likes the coffee maker, and we can find it laying on top of it much of the day and evening.

Later,

Steve

Honey, someone's stuffing tic-tacs in the electronics...

So I'm turning on the light in the bathroom and I hear a rattling noise from the switch... hmmmm, what could that be. Well 20 seconds with a screwdriver reveals this...

Gecko eggs, lots of 'em. We've had an explosion of Gold Dust Day Geckos the last year or two in the house, and we've probably got these in lots of our sockets. Looks like time for a cleanout. Still don't quite know what the rattling was from.

Later,

Steve

Quick, lock up the booze cabinet!!!!

This gecko's after margarita residue, no way we're letting him help himself.

Fred is dead.

My wife had pretty much tamed the male day gecko (it would eat from her hand) that hung out with it's conterpart, Wilma, on the espresso maker in the kitchen. We hadn't seen Fred in a couple of days and cleaned out the fridge and found him in the back of it. There's been another male hanging out trying to horn in on Fred's action, so I guess this is his chance, he'd been run off with major head bobbing, body leaning and tongue sticking out threats 'til now. Here's a link to a pic of Fred before the permafrost incident.

So barring any further missing pieces.... I finally have a pretty good idea of when I get the boat back. Whoohoo!!! The paint job is basically done, I'll be enameling the cabin interior after all the wiring is done. The engines have been mounted in place for weeks, but now the throttle and shifting and steering cables are in place, the new ladder's up, the GPS is in, they were hooking up the running lights and stereo when I was by earlier. After that it's just the fuel and power, a couple more things I need (courtesy lights, red/white/red restricted maneuverability lights, macerator pump for the fish hold and a couple other items) and it's ready to go to sea trial. I suspect I'll get it Thursday and then I can take it out for a couple days to break in the engines and do some other stuff I need to get it ready for charter. Finally... I didn't believe them when they said "three weeks" but I never figured it'd be almost 5 months.

The weather's been pretty nice lately. We had some nice cool mornings this week as though winter is coming, but it's kind of muggy this evening. Just another typical fall day here.

Later,

Steve

Cool and wet up mauka today...

I spent today pretty much around the house. It's cool (71 degrees at 4 PM today) and damp up at the house, I'm sure it's warmer down at the coast.. it was yesterday and the weather was much the same.

I've been busy working the other job the last little bit. I do have a couple of charters this week, but it's still rather slow. I already have 15-16 charters tentatively set up for next month, and most of the booking inquiries won't even start 'til the month begins, so I suspect I'll probably be working through the summer.... 7 days a week is the goal and then the airport job can likely disappear, but it's nice having it during the slow months.

We re-carpeted the vacation rental this week and are just finishing touching up the paint, after the next couple of guests we have a few days off to re-upholster the couch and love seat and then I'll post a couple of new pics of the place (there's a link on the right side that goes to the older photos). We were looking at the booking schedules and realized we basically only have 2-3 open weeks between now and the middle of next March in the rental - wow, I can remember when we first started renting it out and we were lucky to get a week every month or two.

I clicked another shot of a gecko hanging out in the bananas.

Aloha,

Steve

Saturday morning lizzard convention

We've got a bunch of these guys hanging around outside our kitchen these days. We hung some bananas out for the cardinals and finches to pick at and we also get about 8-10 madascar day geckos at a time showing up.

This morning we went to U-top-it down in Kailua for breakfast on the way to picking up carpet for our vacation rental we're recarpeting. U-top-it's located in behind Lava Java off Alii drive. Lava Java is quite known for their breakfasts, but U-top-it doesn't play second fiddle to anyone. It probably puts out the best breakfast I've had in Kona. I had their Loco Moco Attack... lots of fried rice, 1/2 lb hamburger patty, 2 fried eggs and grilled pepper slices, all smothered with a curry gravy (you get a choice of gravies), all on a large taro crepe (not a traditional crepe, thicker, more like a thin pancake). This meal was $8.95 and filled me, many people wouldn't be able to finish it I'd suspect. DELICIOUS. A big thumbs up from me, and I generally don't like breakfasts. Pat loved her breakfast too. The place gets raves on the local message boards at Konaweb and I'd highly recommend it for breakfast - they also have one of the best burgers in the area too. Most of the menu items run in the 4-9 buck range, so it's not a spendy meal for here.

Aloha,

Steve

Warning, this post contains a graphic visual death scene...

We did cancel today's dives. I only had to get part way into town to know it wasn't worthwhile. On the way into town you could see the water was fouled (actually, it looks a very pretty light blue at a distance) from the highway for a couple hundred yards offshore to where there was nothing of diveable depth available, and there were wave sets that were miles long in length coming in from the west. It's apparently coming down fast on Oahu right now and hopefully will be flat and diveable in the morning tomorrow here.

So today was a day to relax. Pat had the day off and we went into town to dump a load of greenwaste. Kona has a spot where you can drop off yardwaste (unfortunately it's not really in a spot near where anything grows, and things grow like mad here, so it probably down't get as much use as it could if it were near where people actually have green stuff to get rid of) and they compost it and offer free compost to the public. Anyway, we take a truckload in every so often. When we get to cutting things it's easy to get 4-5 truckloads of stuff and hardly make a dent in the jungle surrounding our yard. On the way we stopped at the recently opened (for the second time, they got shut down for not having proper permits earlier) Hooters to try 'em out. I'd say they have better than average chicken wings, and the other stuff we had (burger, cobb salad)was OK, but for a couple bucks more the food is better down at the Hard Rock in both Pat and my opinion.

I forgot to mention something about yesterday's dive... we still have whales hanging out off Kona and yesterday while the divers were down a group of whales came within a couple hundred yards of the dive site. There was a calf breaching... neat. I hadn't seen a calf that small (I'm guessing maybe in the 15' range) breaching before.

Now on to the gore... Last year some time I wrote about how ants had taken over the electronics in our microwave and were turning it off and on at will. This year our oven started not working properly. Pat was wondering what was going on and I took a sniff and said it smelled like a dead reptile (remember, I spent more than a decade in the pet biz). We've had geckos fry a laser printer, the mother board of my computer, and generally make a mess of things with droppings, so it was time to order a new controller for the oven.
Luckily Pat grew up with a dad who could fix anything and she learned from him, so we could avoid having a repair guy come out and replace it ourselves... so a couple hundred bucks in parts later here's the old part.

Yuck. These little guys like to wedge into tight spaces, sometimes it gets the best of them apparently. Anyway that's my latest story about the pleasures of paradise.

later,

Steve

Yummy.... Mango!

This is our resident kitchen Day Gecko. Pat found out some time ago that it really digs dried mango, so we leave a litte piece out for it and spritz it down with a little water every now and then so it can lick away at it to it's heart's content.

It's still windy as all get out on the water today. The cruise ship that came into town today turned right around. I suspect that's also why I saw one heading south yesterday morning... probably on it's way to Fanning Island (due to the Jone's Act, foreign flagged vessels are required to visit a foreign port at some point during thier tour here) a day early. We usually only have a handful of days in the winter the water's so rough the cruise ships can't tender.

Aloha,

Steve

Madagascar Day Gecko - now common in Kona.

I took this shot earlier today. We've been living in our house since mid-'99 and we didn't see any of these little critters the first couple of years. Now they are everywhere, with resident geckos in every room it seems.

Hawaii has lots of geckos, with most of them resembling the common "house gecko" you can pick up at most pet stores for a couple bucks. At some point somebody introduced the day gecko on the island and they have been spreading ever since. The day geckos are rather aggressive feeders, and not only compete for food with the other geckos, which generally come out only at night, but also eat the other geckos. We're hearing a lot less gecko barking (the original gecko barks/chirps often at night) around the house these days.

Unfortunatly, no matter how cute these guys are, they are still one of the many non-native invasive species than now thrive on the islands.

I've added a link on the right to my
litte webshop at Cafe Press where I'm putting up some shirts and stuff with pictures on them. Take a gander at them, I'll keep putting up more photos/products - who knows, something might be interesting. Purchase at your own risk, I'll be picking up a few items for myself to see if the quality's Ok, if not I'll yank 'em.

Aloha,

Steve