Been LOTS of big surf in Kona the mid part of this January....

And hopefully its gonna wane. I was looking at the Magic Seaweed Hawaii swell chart (hopefully this link works) and it looks like it's coming down and we're going to be relatively clear here in Kona the next week. Usually when it's down to 6-7 feet, and a different direction than straight west, you can find a place to tuck in and dive. On the 7-8 and 8-9 foot days it can gets tricky at times, sometimes undiveable (is that a word?). When you see solid green hit the coastline, it's pretty much shot.

I've been down at the office on the days we haven't gone out trying to make it look like a store... it's really getting there. I'll be ready to post a photo or two soon.... still got a bit of a mess to take care of before it's really ready to start showing off.

We've been debating on when to go full time with the "shop". It's kind of dead as far as diving right now (a lot of that might be because of the surf and people are getting to town and seeing it and just not calling), historically for my business the last half of January and the first half of February are very slow. I'm looking to hire 1-2 crew members the first week or two of February and then we'll probably open it up for regular hours around mid-month so we've got the routine down by the time spring break business hits. It'll be interesting.

I'm off to the office....

Steve

Happy New Year!!! We've started ours with some big surf....

I hadn't posted in quite a while... been getting inquiries about that, thanks... We've been real busy with dive charters since about the 15th of December.

Wednesday we canceled our charter because of this (the picture above). I took this photo out at the keiki tide pool out at the natural energy lab. It's a cool spot to go and watch waves crash. I took this shot Wednesday morning BEFORE the big west surf peaked. It's still big and it's now Friday morning. Pretty much the only dive companies going out are the real big boats. I'm torn, as it's possible to get in and out of the harbor if you time it... but basically you are stuck down in Pawai bay with crummy diving conditions and I can't see forcing passengers to go or pay a cancellation fee. My litmus test for cancellations is sort of, if it's a day that my wife and I would be irritated about having to pay to dive on, I can't see not at least giving customers the option of canceling their dives. Generally when I offer people an out, they take it - the one time I can recall anyone insisting we're going (former scuba instructor on the east coast) even after we got out on the water and I offered to turn around, that individual spent most of the charter throwing up... not sure how much fun they had.

I'm hoping we're back to dive-able conditions tomorrow. We're supposed to get another big swell coming on the weekend, hopefully it will be more from the north than the west - it's the west swells that really wreak havoc with the diving here.

Aloha,

Steve

Scuba diving on Kona night dives is really cool...

Kona is pretty well known for it's manta ray night dive, but scuba diving on night dives in general is very cool here. Lots of things come out of the reef at night, shrimp, lobsters, urchins, hunting eels... even squid, like this one I took a picture of last year. When I'm leading the manta dive, I try to make it a point of taking the "long way" back to the boat and look for cool critters - you never know what you might come across.

So I thought I'd put up a quick post about the surf we're expecting here. Big surf, in the 20 foot plus range, pounded the north shore of Oahu yesterday. They said to expect it to bump up to the 30-50... yes, 50 ... foot range in the next day or two. Fifty is huge, I don't think we've had that on Oahu in the years I've lived in Hawaii. In Kona we're often shaded by the other islands from north and northwest swells, and those 20-30 foot swells they get on the other islands can turn in to 6-12 here much of the time - that's still quite diveable - but it'll be interesting to see if this pans out. If it does then we'll probably be shut down for a couple of days here too. Usually we don't get significant cancellations due to swells in months outside of January and February, sometimes none in any given year.

If the surf comes up, I'll see if I can get some pictures.

Aloha,

Steve

The latest in Kona scuba diving....

Man was it windy yesterday. We ended up rescheduling last night's night dive for tonight. We had a front come by and park over the island or something because we had huge winds all day long 'til evening. When that happens it's usually a one day event... it's quite nice today.

One of the nice things about Kona scuba diving is that we're generally protected from winds that much of the island chain sees on a regular basis. This makes for all day diving on most days.

We're starting to see the winter swells coming in. So far the swells haven't been too bad here, we're fairly shaded by the other islands, so we don't see as much big water. I'll be keeping an eye on the west swell today. We're supposedly getting some huge stuff coming in starting Sunday/Monday. They're talking upwards of 40 foot faces on Oahu. There's been a couple of swells that were supposed to be in the 20 foot plus range off Oahu that basically didn't affect us at all in Kona the last couple of weeks, but a 40 foot swell usually means for big stuff here too... we'll be watching.

Here's a nice elkhorn coral head. We're always looking inside of these for critters, some of our nifty oddball fish tend to hang out in them.... Reticulated Frogfish, Leaf Scorpions, Gumdrop Gobies, Harlequin Shrimp and other stuff can be found on occasion.

Later,

Steve

Time for a Hawaii underwater nudie photo...

Here's a shot of a Gold Lace Nudibranch (Halgerda terramtuentis). Looking up the scientific name, I just learned something new... this nudibranch is apparently only known from the Hawaiian Islands... cool, another piece of trivia. I was down doing a "Captain's dive" a week or two ago and saw this one under an arch.

The surf is really up right now. We've had a big south swell for several days now, and it seems to have peaked (hopefully) the last 2 days. We've got turquoise looking water all along the coast right now... people think it's pretty, but for divers it kind of sucks... it basically is light reflecting off all of the sand in the water, not clear water showing off it's beauty. I didn't go out today, but I had a buddy today that went out and said he had to do both dives at Kealakekua Bay and the viz was horrible - considering the sand is nearly 90 feet down at that spot, for it to be kicked up enough to make for horrible viz says something. Tomorrow's a big marathon/triathlon event in Kona, between that and the surf we're taking the day off. I'm hoping for better conditions come Monday... the weather report says the surf's coming down.

So, sort of big news for me - I signed a lease yesterday. I've been operating out of my garage and pickup truck for years, now I'll have an "office" in town where I can hang my T-shirts and store my gear. It's near enough to the harbor that it'll be quite handy. I've been wanting to have a spot to meet customers ahead of time to try gear on and sign papers to maybe speed up our morning pre-dive rituals. It's not a big spot, but big enough for my needs at this point. I'll have more information as time goes on... today Pat and I were looking at paint chips, it's currently gloss white, I'm looking to spice it up a hair if I can clear it with the landlord.

That's it for now.

Aloha!

Steve

Still no diving for us today, but the surfers are very happy....

Here's a shot of the Keauhou Sheraton from a distance. You can see what the surf was doing today. It's pounding off the Sheraton observation deck (the old Kona Surf saltwater pool area) pretty well. It was actually down a bit today. Tomorrow I expect it to flatten out, it might be OK by morning, nice by evening, and should be pretty nice come Tuesday.

If you take a look at the photo, you'll notice a more toothpaste blue in the shallows to the right of the splashing. The last day or two that's pretty much been all along the coast. It's pretty to look at, as long as you're above the water, it sucks to dive in. I'm not sure if it's a combination of sand and air bubbles or what, but the viz is really bad when the water looks like that from a distance, and unfortunately it's been that way on most of our dive sites the last couple of days. We only need about 12 hours of relatively non-heavy surf for it to all fall out and clear up for diving.

Aloha,

Steve

Heavy surf to start off the new year... water's cooling down too....

We've had heavy surf from the west/northwest the last 4 days or so. We've been able to get out and dive during the daytime, with most of the diving being limited to Pawai Bay/Old Airport area and the south Pine Trees dive sites.

We canceled our night dive on the 1st because we went up and checked out the bay off the Kona airport (home of the manta dive) that afternoon and there was basically 10 foot surf in shallow and little viz out to about the 60-80 foot depth. We checked it again on the 2nd and it was much better, doable but still not real nice conditions. Today the surf is down a bit and I suspect other sites are opening up again. We've got the day off today but have bookings the next several days.

The water temp off Kona is 75, maybe even 74, depending on the computer you use. It could get pretty cold this winter if the lack of 81-83 degree temperatures this fall is any indication. It pretty much topped out at about 79 this fall.

This picture is a re-post of a picture I took earlier in the year. If you are getting about 2/3rds of the photo on your screen, just click on it for the whole picture... I've never tried linking a full sized picasa picture before. Some of the message boards have "your favorite picture of '08" threads, and that got me to thinking - I think this is mine, although I really like some of the squid shots I took earlier this year too.

Aloha,

Steve

Winter snow season has arrived in Hawaii...

I took the liberty of stealing this picture off the Keck observatory webcam on this webcam page that has live webcam shots of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. I'm not sure if this is one of the first snows of the year or not up there, but it was a pretty good snowfall by the looks of it.

We had a heck of a squall come through yesterday. My boat was already out and the surf was coming in crazy tight sets from the south so Cathy and Bob stayed right outside the harbor where it's protected from the south. I had a medical appointment yesterday so I was off the boat. The rain hit hard about noon time yesterday. The Big Island was soaking, but the most rain fell on the other islands... parts of Oahu got over 14 inches of rain yesterday!

Today the flood warnings are up 'til 4pm, but it's not raining right now. I looked at the Magic Seaweed Hawaii surf page last night and they were predicting 7 foot surf from due west for today, and called the divers and we decided to take a breather from today. We rarely see surf from straight west, usually it's north or south and easy to get out of. I haven't been out yet to see if the surf materialized, but if it does it won't be a pleasant day for diving anywhere on the Kona side.

Brrrrrr, it's cold.

Steve

Bluefin Trevally, one of the jacks we see most frequently in Kona....

Here's a cool shot Pat took of a Bluefin Trevally (Caranx melampygus) on a dive. This one's a pretty good sized one. We run into them patrolling the edge of the dropoffs fairly frequently.

The surf's up this weekend. Yesterday was really pretty bad, borderline diveable. It was down some today and we have a charter set for tomorrow. We'll take a look at it in the morning tomorrow. According to This great surf site we'll probably have 5 foot surf in the morning. It all depends on the angle it's coming in at that point as far as whether we can find good spots to dive, 5-6' stuff is usually quite doable this time of year, when it comes in straight from the west it can be a mess, but if it's from the north we can usually tuck into a flat spot.

We've been messing with computers yesterday and today. My "main" computer I've used since I started the business died about a year ago and I've been unable to access my website program since. I finally was able to retrieve the site information and get it loaded on an XP machine so I can edit the site again. My new "main" computer I picked up last year has done fine for everything but the website, my old copy of Frontpage isn't compatible with Vista, and lately it's been getting buggy and locking up on me..... rats. It looks like it's time to reformat. We're trying everything short of that today, reformatting is next. A lot of this stuff is beyond me, but luckily Pat's quite computer savvy. I'm trying to sneak a post in before the computer crashes again.

later,

Steve

Hawaii surf news... it's up!

We've had a bit of a spell with sloppy water because of southwest winds brought on by a cold front hanging out to the west, well it's here and it's bringing some big northwest and west swells in with it. We cancelled last night's dive after it was getting real messy on yesterday's day dives, and it's likely we'll have to cancel todays diving (we'll take a look at it when we get down to the water this morning). Tthings are supposed to calm down by tomorrow morning and then back to our usual weather pattern by the weekend.

Here's the clip of the manta from the day dive last week I mentioned earlier. We have a spot that where manta rays occasionally visit for a cleaning. They'll come up to the reef and find a cleaning station with a cleaner wrasse on it and then circle around slowly in an expanding circle in an attempt to pick up even more cleaner wrasses which will work over the manta ray picking parasites off it. When you find this, all you have to do is stay put and you'll have a manta circling you for a while.

Aloha,

Steve

Ewa Fang Blenny !!!!

I managed to capture a decent shot of one of these fish the other week. They're tough to get a good shot of because they are free swimming and dart around. When frightened they'll dive down and back into a hole, sometimes you can get a shot of their head while looking out of a worm hole or sponge.

The Ewa Fang Blenny (Plagiotremus ewaensis) is one of the blennies that seems to mimic the cleaner wrasses. The have similar coloration as the juvenile Hawaiian Cleaner Wrasse (Labroides phthirophagus) and swim in the same fish enticing motion as the cleaner wrasses, however when a larger fish presents itself for a cleaning, they take a bite of scale, gill, skin or mucus. The fish don't seem to like that. I did see a Parrotfish chase one about 30 feet one time after the blenny took a nip of it's gill.

We've had some cold clear nights here lately. It managed to get down into the upper 50's a couple of times at our place. The surf is finally down... big surf for a whole week this time, that's not common. I feel sorry for anyone coming over specifically to dive this last week. Most everyone cancelled all week, and I personally wouldn't have wanted to dive Monday through Friday of this week. I had a buddy who dove Sunday of last week, before it got bad, who said they had fairly heavy surge at 80' that day. They're expecting surf again later this week, but not as big as the last go around.

Later,

Steve