Today was a gorgeous day. Pat and I went out for a walk and decided to go to the Coffee Shack Deli up the hill in Captain Cook for a breakfast (no charter today and Pat had the day off too). The Coffee Shack provides what is arguably the best view from a restaurant on the west side of the island. It's a mostly open air restaurant on the side of Mauna Loa overlooking the South Kona coastline right on the side of the highway. They serve breakfast, lunch and desserts. Prices tend to run right in the 10-13 buck range for most everything on the menu. I had one of the specials of the day.... 3 egg omlette with bacon, mushroom, avocado, red onion, peppercini, calmata olives, tomato, cheese and topped with pesto... yum yum!
We don't get here very often, even though it's close by for us, but it's a pretty nice place.

As an extra bonus.... this place is one of those places where not only can you have a meal with a view, you can also share a meal with a wild animal!!! I decided to see if one of the resident geckos was interested in some pineapple...

Geckos gotta eat too! from Steve on Vimeo.

Aloha,

Steve

I was driving down the highway today and had to check out the Kona Commons because they'd opened up the parking lot. There were probably 50 cars out front and Petco was open. What a nice store. I'm not just talking nice because I like pet stores, but nice because I like looking at well merchandised stores. 10 years ago I was in lower level management for Petco, going back and forth between a couple of stores in Oregon, this store is big and laid out very nicely. My only gripe right now is I'd probably switch what looks to be a help desk right up front with their second register island 'til they slow down... it was crazy busy and it put a lot of people in one corner... but then again, I'm no merchandising guru and it sure looks like they did a great job on this store. Their official opening is Friday and this weekend, but they're doing just fine sales already. It's definitely nicer than any of the Petco's I've been in over the years.

I'll probably go equally as ga-ga over Sports Authority if they've upgraded their layout over the other stores I've been in (granted I don't get out much... I've pretty much only been in one in Oahu and maybe another one in years, they've always been good, but if the newer stores are upgraded like Petco has done, wow). The small note on the door of Sports Authority says it opens Thursday the 9th. Office Max is set to open on the 17th, it looks a little less ready to go at this point but the merchandise is coming in. Circuit City went from a hole in the ground last month to where it's got the building shell (not sure if it's roofed yet) and is starting to look like a Circuit City.

The highway looks fairly finished to Makala from Honokohau Harbor, south of there it's a mess as expected. They've shut off the access to Kaiwi for a few weeks to rebuild that intersection, so the Makala exit is quite busy with people turning down to the old industrial area.

Here's a pic of a Scrambled Egg Nudibranch (Phyllidia vericosa) I took the other day.

Later,

Steve

I wish these critters were around all of the time, they aren't, so when we do see them it's a real treat.

Last week we had a customer who wanted to do a reef night dive. We were able to get another who wanted to do one and weren't working the next morning... so why not? I sat on board while Bob led the divers for a 70-80 minute or so long night dive. We've done a reef night dive a few different spots and Cathy did the last one at this spot. Cathy came up very excited from her dive here in June, and when Bob came up he could barely get his regulator out before saying "Wow Steve, this is a fantastic night dive". He said it was probably the best reef night dive he'd ever done in Hawaii. He said the reef was nothing but little red eyeballs looking back at you and he was going to have to look at his invertebrate book to figure out what all the different types of shrimp he saw were. My turn next! I want to see if this place is better than what I've done so far. We don't get a lot of call for reef night dives, although I wish we could get more, the trick is trying to get enough divers to make it worthwhile for us. We're slower now so it's something we can do with fewer people IF the schedule works.

Later,

Steve

The "summer" water conditions we've been wanting finally hit now that it's officially autumn. It's been really flat. The other day we did a dive down off "shark fin rock", off the old airport park, and one of our divers said he'd looked up when they got to 100' of depth and he could still see the boat... thing is, they were over 100' away from the boat at the time, and if I recall my 10th grade math correctly the length of the hypotenuse is equal to the square root of the sum of the squares of the length of the legs of a right triangle ... in other words we had really great viz... I can't figure out square roots anymore now that I'm old and getting gray in the cerebrum these days.

Later,

Steve

Just a little College football news. Sorry to all you Trojan fans, but my attempt at college was at Oregon State.

I'll post more diving stuff soon.

Aloha,

Steve

Manta rays eating plankton in Kona Hawaii from Steve on Vimeo.

The manta ray dive has been pretty active the last couple of weeks. Here's a short video from a slow night a few months back. If you want to see what it's like on a busy night, go to my May archives, or click on the "video" label below.

This video does a good job of showing the plankton that the mantas feed on. Plankton is a mix of small critters and larval shrimp and fish and such that is on the reef and tends to come out at night. It's attracted to light like moths. Over time the manta rays have learned that light means food, so they key on the diver's lights when they are feeding. Garden Eel Cove, off the Kona airport, is a spot that's rich in plankton and most of the dive operators here run their manta ray night dive at this location.

later,

Steve

Steve

So every now and then I check into my visitor results for the blog to see how people found it... sometimes the way people find it are somewhat amusing... today someone found this blog by googling "Porta potty cleaner job in hilo". I got a kick out of that search - turns out if you do that search right now, my blog is the top result.

In the past I used to be one of the top results for "hawaiian chicken thighs" and "beer can chicken", but I no longer place well in those searches anymore, guess I'm not doing so hot with the barbequing crowd these days. Anyway, google has some magic formula to find relevant results and it's interesting to see what I temporarily place well for sometimes.

A little blog housekeeping... I've never really stated a "comment policy". Several months ago I was getting bombarded by spammers, primarily in the travel industry, so I added comment moderation to the blog. I flat out delete pure spam. I also decided at that time I'm not going to print direct links to product or non-subject related blog posts. I've got a handful of comments I'm sitting on that were good comments, but contained links that I consider to be re-directs for my readers. I can't figure out how to edit out the links, so I oppologise to those who aren't seeing their posts. I've got no problem with identity profiles linking back to other blogs or websites, but I'm basically not approving what I consider unrelated re-directs or commercial links in signatures following the comments. If I'm posting a frogfish pic and someone says "cool pic, did you see this post about a frogfish that ate a diver" with a link to that post... I'd post it (assuming it were genuine that'd be one heck of a big frogfish)... but comments followed by links to t-shirts for sale with frogfish on them, or vacation rentals in Maui (or anywhere else for that matter) or just plain unrelated blogs aren't going to pass the moderation. I realize commenting to help generate traffic is pretty commonly done by bloggers... in my case just make sure your identity is clickable (blogger.com identities work well) has the appropriate hidden link and I've got no problem posting most comments.

So the eel pic above is another shot of a Dragon Moray (Enchelycore pardalis) that I posted a shot of a couple months back. Look back through the archives, click on the "moray eel" label below, or do a search for dragon eel in the search bar at the top left of my blog page to see a couple of other shots of this and another dragon eel or two. Dragon eels are around, but we don't see them often so they're a highly prized find. More often than not, when I do find them what I first notice is the distinctive pattern on the body in a hole in the coral as they don't seem to spend quite as much time with their heads looking out as some of our more common eels.

Later,

Steve

Cathy found this frogfish back in February and we've been watching it grow. It was maybe nickel/quarter size back when she first found it and now we're talking 6-7 inches in length... I had no idea they grow that fast. We've got about 4 frogfish that we're checking on fairly frequently and another couple that we run into on certain dive sites. Hopefully they'll stick around where they are, but they're likely to get harder to spot as they grow due to the fact that frogfish change color to blend in with their surroundings as they grow.

Aloha,

Steve

We've been continuously busy for a while now, but it looks like I have a few days worth of break time after our charter tonight. Just thought I'd make a quick post as I haven't in a while.

In Kona news, they've opened the second south bound lane between Honokohau Harbor and Makala street. It's improved the southbound traffic between Makala and the airport. It used to be backed up beyond Kaloko industrial (Costco, Home Depot and a lot of warehouses) for much of the day, now it's smooth sailing south of the airport 'til you get to Makala. It'll be interesting to see how the traffic is once they finish it all the way to Henry Street.

Here's an octopus photo from a few weeks back.

Later,

Steve

I just returned from another manta ray night dive up off of the Kona airport. There were 4 to 5 mantas tonight, it was a good show for all on board. We haven't been seeing squid the last few times out, I'm glad I had the camera with me the night this group showed up... I still have more shots I'll post later.

Aloha,

Steve

This is a new major intersection on the north end of town, down from K-Mart on Makala. They're putting in a large shopping area there. Sports Authority and Petco will be opening sometime this month, with more stores opening later in the year. Circuit City is putting up a building just makai (seaward) of the structure you can see here, and Target is starting to build in Phase 2, which is just to the south of Makala blvd.

The new highway is coming along. They were putting lane bumps and directional arrows on the southbound lanes from Honokohau harbor to Makala this last week, so it's looking as though they may open up 2 lanes southbound to there quite soon. The area from Makala to Henry street still needs a lot of work and most of it is torn up. They're supposedly supposed to be done with the highway work in December and then start working the span from the harbor to the airport starting some time next year.

I'm sure there will be people claiming that Kona and Kailua will be ruined by the new development, but for people who live here it'll be nice to be able to have easy access to what the new businesses have to offer. Downtown along Alii Drive will still be the same wonderful/quaint/feel good experience it's always been. Looking at the highway, it appears they're leaving 70-100 feet of open area between the northbound and southbound lanes, hopefully they'll landscape it nicely, as there's an opportunity to really spiff up the appearance of the entry into town.

Aloha,

Steve

Now here's a fish picture I know I haven't posted before. It's a Crocodile Needlefish. These guys get up to about 3 feet in length, maybe a bit more, and we see them from time to time diving as they are soliciting cleaner wrasses to pick the parasites off them. This one was hanging over the top of the arch at "Golden Arches" as I was doing my safety stop. You can see the cleaner wrasse just on the other side of it's head.

We occasionally see these fish above the water, leaping across the water repeatedly. They cover quite a bit of ground when they do it, I suspect they're escaping something or possibly chasing down baitfish. They're also apparently attracted to lights at night and occasionally people will get hit by them. There was a "diver" - sadly the local media doens't distinguish between freedivers and scuba divers - I heard later he was a freediver, who was impaled by one of these while spearfishing at night with a flash light off Oahu a few years ago...
Here's a report I found on it. Initial reports on the news were that a "diver" was attacked by a barracuda. The guy was pretty severely injured as the beak of the needlefish punctured his liver, I never did find out how it all turned out.

In general they're nothing to worry about, they spend most of their time in the top few feet of water. These guys are tough to get a good picture of as they blend in well with the blues of the water. I was still in macro when I took this and the fish was about 12 feet away. I also realized afterwards that I'd bumped my ISO setting to 400 accidentally (high ISO makes for a grainy photo) so I'm glad I got what I did.

later,

Steve