Wow, this is early. I usually hear of early sightings in mid-October.

Aloha,

We opened up the retail shop this spring and ran it 9 am to 5 pm all summer and have taken a look at the numbers coming into fall. Reluctantly, after realizing keeping the shop open adds about 3000 bucks to the payroll each month, which means the combined boat/shop needs to do about 5000 bucks more each month than it's already been doing without the shop, we've decided to stop manning the "store" all day, everyday.

Happily, the boat business is as strong or stronger than ever coming into the fall, and we'll be keeping the "office" location for morning meets, classes, and sales after the charters. I'll be manning the shop for an hour or two after day charters, and by appointment. Coming into our "slow" season, this move will give us the ability to continue servicing our charter customers and give me the ability to take an occasional day off (woohoo!) when I don't have dive charters going out.

It was a very busy summer for us, just not quite the numbers needed to justify keeping the shop open full time coming in to the leaner months. Hopefully we can revisit the whole retail thing at a later date.

Diving!!!!!!!! I've got a manta dive tonight, intros tomorrow, three manta dives next week and day dives the rest of the time, so my month is pretty much filled out. It'll be exciting to see what October brings.

Here's a picture of a diver taking photos of a group of Bluestripe Snappers that hangs out at a spot we dive. These fish are one of 10-12 species imported back in the 50s with the idea that they'd be a great addition to our reefs... now, along with the Bluespot Grouper, they're a pest. I think only 3 of the introduced species survived through to today.

Later,

Steve

I can't get enough of this guy.

OK, the picture's not flattering, but it shows fairly well where our dive shop is. We're just up above the Tesoro station on the highway across from Honokohau Harbor (that's the shop top center of the photo).

Just thought I'd post our hours. We've been bouncing around a bit since opening up late this spring, but with everyone's schedules we can man it 10-5 daily. Come on in and visit! 1-877-DIVE KONA

Aloha,

Steve

Aloha,

I've been quite busy since about the 18th doing charters, have a day in the shop today so I thought I'd catch up on diving conditions. The water temp has bumped up, we're seeing 79/80 on the dives right now. We've had a couple pretty big south swells swing through the last 3-4 weeks, they tend to stir up the south facing sites a bit so we tend to do north facing sites on those days.

Mantas mantas mantas. We've been going out two evenings a week this summer for the most part, were skunked 3 times in the last month or so.... bummer, but Friday night was really quite the show. There were 14 mantas at the light circle when I got my divers down, and then it started to get crowded. A total of 21 mantas showed up for the evening. It's almost overwhelming when we get that many mantas, but it was nice to see that many as it was kind of sporadic the previous 3 weeks. An additional highlight of that dive was on the roundabout tour back to the boat at the end when we came across a pretty good sized Bigfin Reef Squid (sorry no photo, but if you search the blog using the search function in the upper left I've got several squid photos that will show up).

Here's a local cerianthus anemone. In the aquarium trade we called them pacific long tentacle anomone. These guys are found down deep in the sand. I took a picture of this one at about 110' several years ago, I generally don't get down that deep often so we don't see them on tours all that often.

Later,

Steve