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

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.

Cruisin' with the turtles...

This one was straight from the camera into Brightcove. Pretty clear.

Here's a macro shot with the Canon g-9

I took advantage of the sun today to take a shot of one of the plants outside of our house. The camera can get much closer, but I wanted to show a bit more of the bloom. This is a closeup photo of a Blue Ginger (Dichorisandra thyrsiflora) which is found in many Hawaiian gardens.

Later,

Steve

Test, test, test...

I stumbled across a different video hoster while checking out another local blog so I thought I'd try uploading a manta video I've posted a couple of times over the years. The hosting service is called Brightcove and uses the latest Adobe Flash codecs, supposedly it might be a little better than what I've been using, I looked at the old video (June 24th, 2007) and couldn't see a lot of difference.

later,

Steve

Hardly a cloud in the sky in Kona today....

It's a gorgeous day in Kona today. There weren't any clouds over Hualalai (the volcano over Kailua) earlier today. One of these days I need to get a shot of the mountain to show.

Here's a Gold Lace Nudibranch (Halgerda terramtuentis) that Pat took a photo of the other day. We find them under archways and cave mouths quite frequently. Pat took this with her Canon A620... she's drooling over my G9 now, primarily because of the large LCD it has, even though the A620 is a very capable camera.

Been fairly busy on the boat the last little bit. Bob and Cathy (she gave me permission to use her name so she'll get mentioned every now and then) have handled the diving the last couple of days. Lot's of long time Kona divers might recognize Cathy as she's been working the Kona area dive boats off and on since the late 70s or early 80s. She brings a wealth of Captain and Divemaster experience along with her.

Water temp... Bob and I are seeing 79 on our Suunto computers, Cathy saw 75 or so on her computer... I tend to go with the Suunto readings myself, but it could be a degree or two cooler.

Latest on the mantas... we did a manta night dive two nights ago... it was spectacular, with 13 of them showing up... so much for the theory that they don't show on the full moon, as this was the most in a few weeks. We had low amounts of plankton early in the month and tht tends to slow the show a bit.

Coming to Kona for Christmas? Better reserve early....

Aloha,

Just thought I'd post a couple of little items now that the holiday season is upon us. It seems almost every year lately I get people inquiring around mid-December asking for recommendations for places to stay for the holidays. I'll say it now.... now's the time to make as many arrangements as possible. Air and hotel first... immediately arrange for a rental car as Kona is not a place to be without one for most people... then start working on your activities. You may find if you wait 'til early or mid-December that you'll be out of luck in at least one of those areas.

This is sort of a followup from my post earlier about reserving early. I thought I'd bring it up again as I already have 6 days between the 20th of December and 5th of January fully booked already, but I still have loads of space avaiable on the other days as of yet. In an ideal world I'd always be scheduled out at least a week or two in advance year round, but that won't be the case for a long while I suspect as I haven't been around for a decade or more just yet as a business, but it may happen for a period this holiday season... I suspect other dive operators are in the same position.

By the way, since the inquiries are coming in, I won't be scheduling any training dives from the middle of December through the middle of January except for short notice stuff, and that's IF I have availability at the time. It's basically myself, Bob and one other part timer (I haven't asked her if I can use her name on the blog yet) running the show and while I expect to work every day during the holidays, I need to give them some time off.... with intros and Open Water students it wouldn't happen, so I'll leave that stuff to the larger operators 'til I see how the schedule continues to shake out.

Here's a shot of the boat that Pat took from the water the other day.

Later,

Steve

More Canon G9 video taken underwater...

Bob had some customers/friends that have dove with him over the years and has been handling the dives the last couple of days. Yesterday I took a quick 35 minute dive between dives while they were having their surface interval. Here's most of the dive compressed into about 8 minutes. Highlights were, cleaner wrasses working a variety of fish, parrotfish feeding on corals, a spotted eagle ray, the biggest unicorn tang I've seen in a long time, garden eels, anthias, various trigger fish, a juvenile razor wrasse, a rather large toby, a helmet snail chasing down a meal, a whitemouth moray hunting with groupers, a large school of heller's barracuda and more....

The camera takes pretty good video. This was just taken with the standard underwater setting at all depths. I didn't try to customize the white balance as I basically was just cruising around shootinng and not trying to do anything special. The soundtrack's a bit wierd, it was the only thing I could find on Youtube that was the appropriate length.