So I've made a New Year's resolution... and all's it's gotten me so far is....

...a noticeable limp.

I generally don't make resolutions, but this year I decided to make one. I've decided that since I'm in my 50s, I want to get to where I can walk 1300 feet without stopping or huffing and puffing. That would be 1300 feet uphill.

The day after Christmas Pat and I had the morning off and we decided to tackle the Captain Cook Monument trail. I haven't done the whole trail in probably 8 years, and had done the top 2/3rds a few times last year and had gotten pretty gassed. That day it wasn't so bad, but I still had to stop a few times and my knee was swollen for several days. I decided then I need to confront that trail and win before I get any older.

Well today was trail attempt number 1 of the year. We went down to our 2/3rds turning/viewing point and back. It's about an 800 foot elevation change in 1.2 miles. The section below is shorter and steeper, with more loose rocks underfoot - I'll add that on after I master the top section. Today's walk was better than the other week's attempt, stopped twice for a couple of minutes. At this rate I'll be walking the whole trail next month sometime. My knee swole up immediately today... it's actually the going downhill that bothers it the most. Quite the noticeable limp about an hour after the walk. I wrapped it up and iced it and it's shrinking already this evening, yay. Next time I wear a brace on the way down.

Gettin' old's fun. I figure it's time to take it on now. Anyway, it's a fun walk/hike. The trailhead is about 200 yards down from the top of Napo'opo'o road. It cuts through tall grass and scrub brush for much of the top two thirds and then opens out to a picturesque view of the ocean. The vog has been pretty much non-existent the last few days and we had a great view for miles. Once I get to where I'm handling the top portion readily I'll add the bottom portion. It's a worthwhile hike as the monument area is some of the best snorkeling (not so great for diving though, I'll have to write about that in another post) in the entire state.

Our surf of the other day went down yesterday. I had a charter in the morning and we were able to get out and find decent water. By mid-day it was pretty decent. Today the ocean was pretty nice. It should be fairly nice tomorrow, but by the looks of the swell chart at Magic Seaweed it'll bump up a bit for mid-week. Looking at the chart now it's not going to be as large of surf as it appeared when I looked at the chart around noon time. Looks like the bulk of the heavy surf will be north of us. This site is a great site to check on surf conditions for the next day or two.

Here's a shot of the sunset starting this evening. We're in that time of year where the sunsets are fantastic. My camera batteries ran out before it really got going this evening.

Later,

Steve

Sunset from the manta ray night dive in Kona Hawaii with Wanna Dive

Here's a bit of a sunset photo from the manta dive the other day. We've been doing the Kona manta ray night dive a bit more frequently lately it seems. We're getting into that season where we get treated to some very nice sunsets.

The phone's starting ringing quite frequently lately so we're pretty darned busy through the end of the year. I'd recommend if you are looking at diving on vacation over the holidays you might want to pick up the phone and make inquiries/reservations soon, if other operators (no matter where you are headed) are seeing what I'm seeing it might get tight for people trying to make dive reservations last minute.

Whoohoo!! The power's on this evening.... also.... Time lapse photography with the Canon G9

Aloha,

We've had a heck of a week here. Following the floods of last week, we had a single decent diving day and then things started to go downhill. By earlier this week, pretty much every boat in Kona was off the water due to a cold front that brought in strong southwest winds to do battle with the northwest surf. The winds started getting fairly strong over land a couple of days ago and we've had a bunch of power outages. We've spent most of the last 2 days without power at home.

Yesterday brought in another freak rain. I'd heard last week we had something in the neighborhood of 7.5 inches of rain in a few hours. Last night it was close. It didn't seem like it rained that hard for that long, but our neighbor's 4 inch rain gauge was overflowing after he emptied it yesterday morning. Pat talked to someone locally at her work that had a 6 inch gauge overflow yesterday. At any rate we had rivers in the yard again just 20 minutes into the rain, at least they didn't take more of the yard with them. We've been sort of lucky compared to some, the South Kona Fruit stand was basically oblitterated by a rockslide... they cleaned it up and Tuesday afternoon looked as though they could open later this week... today it was full of rock again, water was still running in the non-stream next to the stand earlier today.

I wanted to try the time lapse function on the camera. I got home a bit late to get the front end of the sunset but got the tail end. We're entering the season of spectacular sunsets. This is the tail end of the cold front, about 58 seconds into the video you can see some rain falling. Apparently the cold front is beginning to wrap around and threaten Kauai again so we may be seeing more rain soon - it's rare that we get more than 2-3 days of poor weather in a streak.

later,

Steve

Sunset from the manta dive.

Here's a sunset from the manta dive last week.

Today I had charters in the morning and evening. When I packed up my camera today, I forgot to pull out the memory card from the computer... which seems to practically guarantee we'll see something interesting I can't take a picture of... as it so happened, I noticed a fin sticking up on the way to our first dive site and slowed down to find a good sized pelagic manta ray. These guys are different than the manta rays we typically see on the night dive, they're solid black and typically larger than the ones we see regularly. We were able to put our divers in with it for a few minutes.

Tonight's manta dive was very good. Bob said there was probably at least a dozen. We had a pretty sloppy ride home (northwest swell and southwest winds sort of stacks things up) and pretty good surge on the dive, but the divers had a great time.

Later,

Steve