Hurricane Felicia was ho hum for Kona, Hurricane Guillermo even moreso...

We rarely have hurricane weather in Kona when hurricanes pass the Big Island. We managed to get some weird winds and one evening with 3 inches of rain when it passed to the north, but looking at the weather radar it didn't seem to be directly from the storm. Anyways, other than having to tuck around corners to stay out of the wind it didn't affect the diving as far as viz and such.

We've still been quite busy. On the 13th I was looking at the calendar and thinking the next day would be one of the last charters for the month, then the phone started to ring and I'm looking at maybe 2-3 days off the rest of the month if I get no more phone calls... I'm hoping for calls to fill in empty spots, got an office to fill up.

I haven't been working in the "office" much lately, I had two days off a week ago that I thought I'd be able to get in, but spent it sleeping off a heavy cold. I'm cutting up palmwood trim to cover that white stripe in the middle of the walls from a picture a few posts back - looks real sharp, hopefully it'll be all up this weekend. I'm hoping to get the place ready to occupy by the first week of September.

The photo above is of a sponge we see here from time to time, I think it's the vagabond boring sponge. We don't have the big colorful sponges you see in some parts of the world, mostly small stuff, but it's still interesting to those who like unusual stuff.

Later,

Steve

Hurricane Felicia's coming... sort of...

We've got our first hurricane
"threat" of the season going on right now. Hurricane Felicia made it to a category 4 hurricane a day or two back, was down to a category 2 by last night or this morning and will likely be a good sized rain cloud by the time it reaches Hawaii. I think they're predicting it to be a tropical depression. Sounds like larger surf on the east side of the island is likely on Sunday. We'll see if anything comes of it on our side of the island when it passes. In years past that I've lived here, "hurricane days" have been gorgeous and good days for diving.

I've got a couple days off after tonight's dive, and I don't expect a whole lot of phone calls 'til this thing passes. I may go shorediving Monday morning to take some pictures if the water's flat. I'm running low on unposted photos, haven't carried the camera on dives in some time, so a day on my own might be fun.

Here's something you don't see a whole lot of in Hawaii... the photo above is of a gorgonian in a hole in the coral. This one's bright yellow, we also see red, white or pink from time to time. Hawaii has reefs that are largely hard corals, and we have little in the way of soft corals, large sponges or gorgonians, but we do have small amounts of the soft stuff.

Aloha,

Steve

Well, Hurricane Flossie is gone...

Not much really happened anywhere on the island. I think they had 40 mile an hour winds hit southpoint, but then they see winds nearly that several times a week. It did bring in some pretty good surf on the southwest corner of the island though.

Today we spent the morning chasing around picking up our freshly re-upholstered sofa and loveseat for our vacation rental (linked on the sidebar of this page), then cleaning up the rental for the next guests coming in shortly.The rental's pretty nice as far as rentals go in our area, and we keep changing things out over time to keep it updated. It took several years to really get it busy, but it stays booked as much as we want it these days - we're booked solid through the middle of March currently.

Here's the first glimpse of the boat. Yesterday, which was supposedly the day the hurricane was to be hitting, was so calm they finished the exterior paint job. Today they're laying non-skid on the swimstep and then they'll start mounting the engines and working all the electrical - we're basically replacing everything. When that's done it'll be prepped for the interior paint job and then we can get going.

The company who's doing the paint job is a third party who has a boat alteration business, he said the extended new rear end of the boat looks structurally sound - nice to get a second opinion from someone else who does this quite frequently. He says more and more boaters are going the way I did, removing their inboards and extending their hulls for outboards. There's still probably a couple of weeks worth of work left to be done before it's finished, so I'm guessing this year's summer season will be pretty much done by the time it's in the water again. Fall season has been picking up for me each year, so hopefully I'll be able to hit the ground running when it's done.

Quick update....11:20am...no unusual weather in Kona yet.

In fact, the water was nearly mirrorpond flat this morning. We went to the harbor and virtually nobody was out. The town is very quiet, all schools on the island are closed, as are beach parks and beach accesses. They did close some roads down on the southeast side. That's all for now.

Steve

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

Up next, Hurricane Flossie....

This hurricane's actually getting interesting. In general, hurricanes do not hit the Big Island, but we still watch them anyway. This one was expected to go well south of us a few days back, but now the southern tip of the island is within the projected possibility. We'll know a lot more tonight or tomorrow morning. I suspect south point will get surf and maybe some rain from it even if it stays fairly south, more if it touches. If the water temp was a couple degrees higher I think everyone would be more worried, especially Oahu and Kauai. Cooler waters (we're around 80/81 right now) usually cause them to drop strength.

These are Raccoon Butterflyfish (Chaetodon Lunula). I took this shot the other day using just the manual white balance. The only photoshop work I did with it was an auto levels and size reduction, pretty bright shot for no flash.

We had a very unusual cancellation yesterday. One of the family we were to have on fainted at the boat when we met. We decided it'd be best to send them to urgent care or the hospital to be checked. I'm hoping all is well, but that has to be scary for them. It likely was dehydration and excitement, but you never know. I'm glad it happened where it did... really makes you think about what you'd do if that occurred on, or under, the water.

Gorgeous hurricane weather today....

Here's a couple of views from up the hill this afternoon. It's quite nice today. Everyone's been keeping an eye on what was at one time Hurricane Cosme. I think it's currently classified as a tropical depression and is located well south of the island.

We occasionally get inquiries about hurricanes, more specifically we get inquiries about avoiding "hurricane season"... while technically we do have a hurricane season here, they usually have little to no effect on Kona itself. Hurricanes in our part of the world tend to develop in the eastern Pacific, off Mexico or Central America and then head west in our direction. They tend to peter out for the most part by the time they get here as they swing over cooler water as they approach us. Oftentimes when they do reach here they swing south or north around the Big Island... something to do with a 13,000 foot high wall (Mauna Loa)redirects them a bit usually. The east side of the island does seem to get plenty of rain, wind and surf, but Kona tends to sit in the shadow of the mountain and gets very little activity. I've only seen rain or wind from a named storm maybe once in the 8+ seasons I've been here. Today it's sunny, calm and flat out on the water.

So something's gone awry with my little Olympus sp-350 camera. It started a couple outings ago and is definitely a problem now. The flash is only operating intermittantly. I noticed it wasn't working as I blew a bunch of easy shots, tried looking at it and taking a shot and nothing happened, readjusted it, took a few more dark photos, readjusted it again and pointed it towards myself to see if it's working - it did, but only for this shot. It still isn't working properly otherwise. Pat liked the shot, especially since it makes me look, in her judgement, about 70 pounds heavier than I actually am.


Aloha,

Steve

Hurricane Daniel was a non-happening in Kona

Just a little update on Hurricane Daniel... it dissapated into a tropical depression and caused rain on the east side of the island and on some of the other islands. As much as 2 inces of rain fell in some parts of the state yesterday as a result of the ex-hurricane.

Kona was sunny and hot for the day yesterday, the day it affected everywhere else.

We did manage to get some nice rain today later in the afternoon in Kona, but that wasn't part of "Daniel" and didn't effect the diving. Hopefully we're settling down into our regular summer weather pattern - sunny in the morning with clouds building on the mountains and occasional rain in the late afternoon/evening, with most of tghe rain being near the mountains. We had nice diving conditions for the charter today, doing dives at Golden Arches and Turtle Heaven with a group doing a combined Open Water coruse and refresher.

The photo above is of a Fourline Wrasse (Pseudocheilinus tetrataenia). These little guys are tough to get a picture of. They tend to dart into coral heads when you approach. This particualr individual was relatively tolerant of me being near, I was able to snap off a few shots and this one was probably the best of the bunch. My first shot of one of them.

later,

Steve

It's "Hurricane Season" again in Hawaii.

As I type this, there is a Hurricane sitting about 900 miles to the southeast of the island. It's losing power. For the most part, hurricanes seem to peter out before they make landfall here due to hitting cooler water.

The current hurricane, Hurricane Daniel I believe, is expected to maybe make it to the islands downgraded as a tropical storm. In a way, many here are actually hoping to see it bring the rain, it's been kind of dry. I just noticed that things were starting to show some signs of dryness in our area. Normally the water's a degree or two warmer by now and we're seeing convection rains in the late afternoon 3-4 days a week at our place, we've really only had one decent rain the last several weeks.

Since I've been here in early '99, hurricanes have had little to no effect in the Kona area. There've been two or three that brought in surf and winds to the other side of the island. We've got a 14,000 foot mountain in the way that seems to act as a bit of a barrier. I'd heard that Kona never actually saw winds and major weather disruption from hurricanes in all of the last century... just big surf on a couple of the biggies (Iniki comes to mind) that swung by from the south. Those particular hurricanes went northwest after rounding the Big Island and caused troubles on Oahu and Kauai.

I'm just posting this because every year I get questions about how the hurricanes affect our diving. They haven't at all in the 7 seasons I've been here. Kona is probably one of the places (tropical destinations anyway) I'd least worry about hurricanes ruining a trip.

Here's another photo forwarded to me by customer Mike from Texas. It's of a pair of Ghost Shrimp, I don't really have any decent shots of my own of these critters so I thought I'd post it. Ghost shrimp are a pretty good sized shrimp that tend to set up shop in one particular spot for several years. We've got a few spots where we can pretty much nearly guarantee you'll see them. Notice the little fish in the photo... I'm not exactly sure what they are, but they are common in dark holes, one of these days I need to make it a point to find out what they are.

Have a nice day,

Steve