A rare windy day in Kona Hawaii...

Last week we had a windy day, well three of them. Normally the winds run east to west in Hawaii and the volcanoes block the winds from much of the Kona area. Last week there was a front parked somewhere that brought in a ton of wind from the north. It was still quite diveable, in fact the viz was well over a hundred feet underwater the day I took this video.

Funny thing is, back in the day I was diving the Oregon coast, we would be totally thrilled to have this kind of day for diving. We're spoiled here.

Kona scuba diving with manta rays.....

Manta rays from Kona Hawaii, April 2010 from Steve on Vimeo.

Here's a 2 minute video I took on last night's manta dive. We had 3 customers on the boat and went up for the night dive. It was a very good show. We spent 48 minutes watching the mantas, the last few minutes most of the other divers had left the manta area and the mantas were closer than in the video here... lots of head bumps at that point. At the end we did about a 15 minute reef tour taking the circular way back to the boat to find a couple of mantas under the boat. Fun evening.

Today was gorgeous in Kona the first part of the day, turned a bit gray later on. We had a charter this morning with the 3 from last night and a couple of intro divers. Cathy and a DM/Captain friend who's filling in for Bob (Bob's in the Phillipines diving right now... jealous) switched off with the certified divers, I took the intros. The intro divers did very well, did dives of 60 and 55 minutes. For those of you who don't dive, intro dives are something to consider if you enjoy snorkeling and are comfortable in the water. You essentially get the full diving experience without taking the course. My intros from today had never dove before this trip, today was their second outing with us... they're getting to be pretty good "divers" and should consider getting certified in the future - Intro dives are a good way to get an idea if scuba diving is for you without committing time and money into a full class.

Later,

Steve

Uggh... my e-mail's down. Been down since the weekend, just figured it out...

Now I've got to figure out how to get it going again. We just upgraded the computer to Windows 7 and apparently something's wrong with my sending function. I've answered a lot of mail the last few days, sorry if you've written and my response hasn't gotten through.

I can't figure it out, I'll have someone less technically challenged (my wife Pat) look at it tonight or tomorrow morning.

Steve

If you were a tree, what kind would you be?????

Not that I'm going to even attempt to answer that question... I've always wanted to post a photo of a Gold Tree, it's evidently a Brazillian native that we find sprinkled around Kona. They have a short time where every leaf turns bright gold, they're in that mode right now. They really show spectacularly at times.

It's another very nice day in Kona today. No charter so I'm hanging out at the shop. The entire state was under a high wind warning this last week, in Kona south of the airport the winds were quite mild or non-existant. Up north it was a battle just to get a car door open from what I heard. Our customers staying up north were calling up asking if we were still diving... quite diveable in the Kailua area, while we did have a couple days of choppy water there was nothing that affected the underwater conditions.

Later,

Steve

Seahorses and scuba diving in Kona....

We've been really busy diving the last month or so. Diving conditions have been good, we've had some big winds, and finally a couple days of rain (thank goodness, we've been having a drought and the local green was turning brown) but those don't generally effect the scuba diving here.

So we're diving outside of the harbor and one of the divers came up from the dive and starts talking seahorses, apparently he'd taken a photo of a seahorse on the mooring line. He showed me a pic, it was blurry but it was definitely a seahorse. I was bummed because I was up top captaining and I didn't have a housing for my camera handy that day. When the next diver came up, he mentioned the seahorse was RUBBER. The diver with the camera was so intent on the back of his camera LCD that he didn't notice the algae covered tie wrap holding it on, and the wind was up that day and shaking the boat so the mooring line was bouncing around and the seahorse did look like it was moving. When Bob surfaced, I mentioned the divers saw a seahorse on the mooring line... well he was all over that and descended immediately - came back up smiling and saying "that would be the rare Hawaiian rubber seahorse".

One of the other dive groups had obviously mounted it down there. Apparently there's a rubber snake on the other side of the chain as well. We do see seahorses here from time to time... mostly at the boat washdown... The Big Island doesn't really have any readily findable reef seahorses, we have a deep water/open ocean species that the fishermen see at night when they hang lights. Occasionally they'll clean a mahi-mahi and one will fall out of the entrails, that's how we see the most of them. Apparently Hawaii does have a reef species or two that can be found on rare occasions on the older islands, and I heard of a sighting on the reef up in Puako this last year, but seahorses are not one of the things we expect to see here at all.

Here's a shot of a couple of Moorish Idols (Zanclus cornutus) on the reef that Pat took. These attractive fish are always a pleasure to see, and we see them quite often. Most people will say they saw an "angelfish", the true angelfish species we have look nothing like a freshwater angelfish you'd see in an aquarium. The Moorish Idols are in their own family, sharing many of the traits of our butterflyfish and surgeonfish.

Aloha,

Steve

Blog post

My wife Pat took this nifty picture of a nudibranch some time ago. I don't have a picture that looks like it. I thought it might be some kind of nudi I'm unfamiliar with as it doesn't quite look like the typical scrambled egg nudibranch, a look at Keoki Stender's Phyllidia page has a shot of a juvenile scrambled egg nudi (fried egg nudi) that looks very similar. I guess it's a juvenile that hasn't developed as much yellow spotting. Very cool.

I had a double scheduled for yesterday, diving in the morning was good, but we had big winds pop up this afternoon and met our customers for the evening. It was getting pretty sloppy and we decided to reschedule for Saturday evening. The winds of this strength aren't common in Kona and should settle down by today or Saturday.

Busy week full of dive charters in Kona ahead....

Well, I know my schedule for the next 5 days. I'm basically full through Friday. There's plenty of openings after that, hopefully things will continue to be busy.

Today was an awesome day on the water. There was essentially no swell this morning. We headed out for a couple of nice dives. I Captained the boat, have a very mild cold (popped so much vitamin C the last couple of days I'm turning orange) and need to be ready to finish off a student tomorrow. Bob and the group dove Golden Arches and Kaloko Arches, we had a pair of whales milling around maybe 200-250 feet off of both dive sites during the dives. I was hopeful the divers might get a peek at them, no such luck today.

We semi-officially opened the "shop" above the Tesoro across the highway from the harbor this weekend. We're going to man it 10-6 on the weekends and then add more days as we can. I'm still spending time after charters there every day I don't have a night dive on top of the day charter, so we're actually around in the late afternoons on most days 'til about 6pm. My wife Pat was manning it today.

Here's a very nice shot of a Wire Coral Goby that Pat took on a dive a while back. It's the best one we've got between the two of us. This is a magnified version of the real thing. These little guys spend pretty much their entire lives on wire corals.

Aloha,

Steve

Very good diving conditions in Kona Hawaii lately....

We've been going out pretty much daily lately and the conditions have been wonderful for the most part. They've had heavy winds up north, but it hasn't affected the Kona area diving. Today we had two divers on board, decided to head up to Garden Eel Cove (yes, even though it's only two passengers we go pretty much anywhere we would normally take a full boat) to dive. On the way we came across a bunch of boats watching a whale.... Call us Ahab!!! It was white, well light gray anyway. Don't know if it was albino or awfully ill. Went to the dive and did our thing... Garden Eels, Dolphins underwater, Barracuda and more.

On the way to the second dive site we found a bundle of floaty net. We hate seeing that stuff in the water, as manmade garbage doesn't belong there, but we kind of like to explore it when we find it. The first picture is of the wad of net itself. Fish are attracted to anything floating in the ocean. The second picture is a bit closer shot of the net. ... Notice anything about the second shot? Take a look again, it's not just netting....

One of our favorite fish to find while we're diving on the reef is frogfish, they're always a treat. There's an ocean going frogfish, called a Sargassum Frogfish, that typically lives in sargassum seaweed. It also is attracted to nets. Here's the same photo as the second cropped and blown up a bit.

If you didn't see the frogfish earlier, you should see it now... look for the eye! This is the first one I've seen in the wild, last year I posted a photo that Cathy had taken at one time. I'm thrilled to have my own shot.

I gotta mention something, in the last post I raved about how hopping the manta dive was... well things can change fast... 3 days later we did the dive and got skunked. We still had a fabulous night dive. Shrimp, all sorts of life, even had a very large spiney lobster... could've had dinner, but we let it be.

Later,

Steve