Man, the scuba diving conditions are great in Kona Hawaii right now...

On Friday I had a double, running charters all day long. The water's really flat right now and viz was great. On the morning charter we hit the Golden Arches area and had fabulous viz, then followed it up by doing the Suck 'em Up/Skull Cave/Aquarium sites. Water was calm and great at both sites of the day. Cathy's big thrill was finding 6 different leaf scorpionfish during the course of the day.

We went out for the manta dive about an hour later. On the first dive the divers took their tour of Garden Eel Cove. Highlights were 2-3 mantas during the dive, and 10, yes ten, squid hanging out at the night dive site. On the night dive it was all about the mantas. I heard two different numbers for the night, 8 & 9, either way it was a real good showing.

Yesterday I took day off #3 for the year, this time there was no vacation rental to clean or Superbowl to watch so it was an entire day of doing nothing... I think watching bad Steven Seagall movies on some cable channel and eating frozen pizza qualifies as nothing at any rate. The downtime felt good.

Today there's not much going on, hanging out at the shop all day to see if I can get some walk-in bookings. I've got 12 charters scheduled the next 13 days so far (I'm trying to keep it to no more than 9 charters a week 'til the shop's open full time and I hire another crew member) so I'll be busy on the boat for the next couple weeks.

As for our Kona dive shop/office, we're going to open the shop on weekends with regular hours from here on. Starting Saturday the 13th of March we'll have it manned 10am to 6pm on weekends. I've been hanging out there when I don't have charters ('cept the 3 days I've taken off this year) but otherwise there's been no consistancy in the schedule. Count on us being there 10-6 on weekends for now and I'll be adding days as business starts to pick up again... we're starting to get into our busier season, winter's are slow for the most part for dive ops here.

Here's one of my favorite fish, Reticulated Frogfish. I didn't even know about these fish 'til a few years back when someone pointed one out to me. They hang out in larger cauliflower corals and antler corals. Looking at them, their faces match the color of most of the older shells, and their body resembles the pattern of a cone shell, so they're quite often overlooked. At first glance they'll easily pass for a shell, but then you see their eyes or their little webbed "feet" and catch on to it being a frogfish. We've had a couple of them "stashed" away at one particular dive site, for now they've seemed to like that particular spot and we'll be able to show them off 'til they move. Once they've moved off it'll be sheer luck in finding them again, so we're happy to have them in one spot for now.

Aloha,

Steve

No tsunami alert, back to fun.... We celebrated by making a long range dive trip to Au Au Canyon...

The ocean was really nice yesterday morning and we decided to make the long trip down to Au Au Canyon/Crater (whatever it's called, it's cool). We don't get down there much, it's an 85/90 minute boat ride in my boat and we need a sizable enough group of good divers to make a go of it. Au Au is an underwater canyon with sheer vertical walls that run about 80 feet high or so on the shore end to well over 200' high on the seaward end. It's one of the true "walls" we have here. Most of our "walls" are more like steep dropoffs or slopes.

It was a gorgeous dive. On the second dive I was Captain while the others all dove. We did a drift dive around the western end of Kealakekua Bay. Right on the corner the current was screaming, and the divers got to play Superman, "flying" with the current, for about 70-100 yards or so before reaching the calm water on the other side of the corner.

It was a long day. On the way back it got a bit choppier, then by the time we got to the middle of Kailua the winds picked up, then the last mile into the harbor was crazy windy... it got very wet very fast. One of the divers commented it was like doing a third dive. Other than a lot of spray over the bow it was uneventful and over in 10 minutes. Turned out it got apparently really nasty about mid-day up around the harbor. We came in at 5pm, around 2pm I'm told it was like a mini-hurricane there. It was sunny and windy when we arrived, Pat and I (Pat tagged along for the dives) went to the shop after cleaning up the boat and there was water all over the walkways, we thought maybe the landlord had sent in a pressure washer.

It's looking great today. Occasionally in the winter we'll get a cold front passing through that can make it nasty for a bit, this apparently was one of those days.

Aloha,

Steve

Here's the 5:45am NOAA tsunami warning supplement for the state of Hawaii...

1:30 The harbor's been reopened apparently. Boats are returning. Other than the evacuation and business closures, the tsunami was pretty much a non-event here in Kona.

Aloha,

Steve

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12:03 Finally, found a live stream... www.kgmb.com you have to click on the live streaming link.

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Update11:41am. The radio station I'm listening to is reporting the water is receding in Hilo Bay around Coconut Island.

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Update 11:05am HST Nothing so far according to the radio station overlooking Hilo Bay. The county water supply has turned off the water in the evacuated areas to prepare in case anything happens.

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Update 10am HST: I'm down at the dive shop across from Honokohau Harbor. Met up with a lot of fellow boaters getting their trailered boats to higher groud. Looking out at the ocean it's full of boats sitting a half mile out or so ready to ride out any surge if it occurs, looks like a big regatta. The shoreline drops off deep rapidly around the Big Island so if you get out a half mile you can be sitting in 2000 feet of water, most tsunamis are not more than a big long bump in the water in those depths but become very dangerous when they hit shallow water.

The tsunami sirens have been going off hourly all day. We talked to some friends down in Napo'opo'o, which is on the water, that said their sirens weren't working... not good if this occurs in remote communities.

It appears there was a pretty orderly evacuation of downtown Kailua. I came in to town at 8:30 to get the boat and traffic leaving the area was minimal. By the time I was leaving the harbor with the boat they had the area blocked off and were only letting people in to move their boats.


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They do state to expect wrap around on all islands. I'm glad I don't live on Hilo side at this point, gonna be hectic over there this morning.

http://www.prh.noaa.gov/hnl/tsunami_msgs/HEBTSUHWX.201002271749

6am and the tsunami sirens went offf.... so'd the neighborhood dogs...

Well, I've always wondered how long the sirens went off in case of an actual tsunami threat. 5-6 minutes worth. They test the siren system at 11:45am the first weekday of each month for about a minute or so... I've heard them once or twice when they've gone off accidentally at oddball hours, that usually causes a stir.

Latest news is they're expecting some wrap around on this side of the island, sounds like a cancel for our charter. It's not worth taking a chance of something unexpected occurring.

Big earthquake in Chile. Tsunami currently expected to hit Hawaii about 11am to noon...

Something woke me tonight and I'm up a couple hours early and saw the tsunami warning. Supposedly they're seeing 4 foot deep ocean waves in the Pacific, which means a tsunami is expected once the wave hits shores. All the arrival time listings are 2119z - whatever that means - I finally found a report that gave a 11:19 Hawaii time estimate.

The report said our civil defense sirens to go off at 6am and again 3 hours prior to arrival.

I've got a charter today... not so sure I'm going...

Scuba diving with wild spinner dolphins in Kona Hawaii...

Went scuba diving... dolphins swam by from Steve on Vimeo.

It's uncommon, but every now and then we're lucky enough to have dolphins swim around us on dives. A couple days back we were out on a dive up at Makalawena and the moment we entered the water we were greeted with the sounds of whale songs. A couple minutes later I heard the dolphin sounds and looked over my head to find this pod approaching. On the first clip the dophins were right there, this is zoomed out wide, they were probably within 5-8 feet of me at one point. It was a pretty good sized pod and I was lucky enough to be carrying a camera, I think this is the first dive shots of dolphins I have.

We've been real busy with charters this month, busiest February in at least a couple of years, if ever, for us. Next month is looking good at this point and Pat and I are working on a plan to open the shop portion of our Kona dive business for regular hours on weekends starting about the middle of next month. It'll take a while, but eventually we'll have the shop open full time - it's by appointment or luck at this point as we're open around our charter schedule.

I'm in the shop today for a half day, I've got a manta ray night dive night dive meeting up at 3:15 this afternoon. Last night they apparently had 10 mantas up at Garden Eel Cove, hopefully it'll be another great show tonight.

Aloha,

Steve

Great scuba diving in Kona Hawaii today....

Today was a blast. We went up to Makawena, a site way up north by the cinder cone you can see along the highway near the resorts, and had a very nice first dive. That area was practically inundated by whales, and we had whales swim very close to the boat at the dive site. During the dive the divers were treated to a group of dolphins underwater - I've got video, check back on the next post.

For the day we had some nice sights... archways, lava tubes, a whitetip reef shark, dolphins underwater, scads of whales above water, a barracuda and much more.

Here's a picture of a juvenile Dragon Wrasse. These guys are very tough to get a good shot of, this is about as close as I can get most of the time. They tend to flitter and drift with what little current or surge there is so they're always on the move. Very cool looking.

Later,

Steve

Endemic Hawaiian Longnose Butterfly Fish... They're not just yellow, there's a black phase too...

Longnose butterflyfish from Kona Hawaii from Steve on Vimeo.

Here's a short clip of Hawaii's endemic version of the Longnose Butterflyfish. They're real unusual in that they have a black phase (this one was especially black, lots of time you can see some yellow mixed in). I'm not sure that anyone's actually figured out why they'll sometimes turn black. We see the black phase in Kona on a fairly regular basis, but they're uncommon on the other islands from what I understand.

Tonight we're doing the manta night dive again. Most of the last couple of months we've been making the trip down to the Sheraton for the manta dive, the mantas kind of scadoodled from Garden Eel Cove when the surf came up and the plankton level dropped for some reason. I suspect they don't care to eat a lot of sand that gets kicked up by heavy surf - that's as good a theory to make up as any, so I'm sticking with it. We've had a week and a half or two without major northwest swells and apparently they're back again... 10 last night... Yahooo!!!!! Most of the dive operators really prefer to do the manta dive at Garden Eel Cove off the airport, it generally has better water conditions, larger numbers of mantas, and is a great night dive to boot in comparison to the Sheraton site. We'll be happy to do the dive there again.

later,

Steve