Scuba Diving Vacations

This post will be all over the board (as if I'm always on topic, not hardly).

The surf's cooperating nicely, we have a charter set for tomorrow so it'll be nice to get back on the water after a few day layoff as it's been slow.

I just renewed my commercial harbor permit and insurance for another year... I hate writing checks when it's slow, perhaps I should see if there's some way we can move the renewal dates to a busier season?

Pat comes home this evening... Yay! I'll probably try to catch the first part of the underwater photo club meeting before getting to the airport. I've been a member, but I'm not what you call active in it at all... I should make the attempt.

Just perused Undercurrent.org and I'm happy to find I've been getting good reviews there. They claim to be "Scuba Diving's Most Unbiased Information Source". Essentially, it's a pay to use review site and lots of the divers on it are fairly frequent dive travelers that tend to research a bit before picking their dives (believe it or not, if you're a diver that's found this blog you've probably done at least a minimal bit of research... a fair amount people just walk up to their hotel desk and ask the likely non-diving employee behind it "who should I dive with while I'm here"... which is sort of the equivalent of asking me "where do I get a good salad?"). Anyway, Wanna Dive fared quite well for the reviews for 2008 diving. It'll be interesting to see the next "Diver's Chapbook" they put out. To anyone who happened to have put a review on there, thank you.

Sad economic news maybe... this article came out and mentioned a foreclosure may be looming for one of the big hotels here. I'm hoping it doesn't come to pass. Things have slowed down enough that several of the hotels are scheduling temporary closures or partial closures later in the year for remodeling. In the good news... the Mauna Kea Resort has "softly" opened and will have their grand re-opening in a bit over a month.

I noticed the other day that the blog has grown to over 500 posts... wow, I never thought I'd keep it going that long, or at least with that frequency, to where I'd see that many posts.

These little guys are Redspotted Sandperch (Parapercis schauinslandi). They're a cute little fish that hang out in deep sandflats. They're tough to get a decent shot of because of the combination of depth and sand... at their depth it's dark enough that the photos want to go blue, and the sand's white enough, as well as them, that the strobe flash can get overpowering. Pat took a picture of these ones, I want to say it was out in the sand at Crescent Beach outside of Honokohau Harbor.

Later,

Steve