Aloha,

I've been very busy this month between manning the shop and dive charters. Tomorrow's Easter and I'll take my second day off of the month since I've no charters and a decent excuse to be out of the store.

I'll try to touch on my opinion of when to book charters and other activities. This post will kind of ramble... People are so varied as to when they book activities, I used to wait 'til last minute and then do a lot of calling around myself, nowadays (since I'm in the biz) I lean towards booking things earlier for best selection.

The reality is, most of the time if you aren't interested in a specific operator and your schedule's somewhat flexible, you can wait 'ti the last couple of days and find a spot somewhere. At least among the dive businesses in Kona, most are pretty good about referring people elsewhere when they can't make your charter happen. Not sure if the other activities businesses in town are the same though. Once you have a specific operator, or a specific schedule in mind, then it probably behooves you to try to set something up in advance. We do have some really busy times here, Christmas, spring break and such, where it can be tough to find seats on short notice. Christmas week of '09 for instance, I had every charter fully booked by the first week of November... I remember it because that was right before I had my website crash (if you go back in the blog to that time you'll find my griping about it).

Every business is a bit different. I was talking to one operator a couple years back that does diving with more of a snorkel lean, and was told that about 90% of their business booked within 72 hours of the dive. For me, that'd scare me to death... I probably book 90% of my business at least 2-6 weeks in advance. It'll be interesting to see how that mix changes as the shop starts picking up. Currently I have a fair amount of biz booked in May, some in June and July, and 15 charters started in December. Late summer and fall are quiet for now. My goal is to more or less know my schedule well in advance, and then fill in the gaps with walkin customers.

Some people are surprised so many divers actually book in advance. The question I get from time to time is "what happens if it's just us on the boat 30 days from now, are you gonna cancel at the last moment?". Well, that can vary from operator to operator. In the past I have worked for operators that made the late afternoon or evening call the night before the dive to cancel on occasion because the boat wasn't full enough to run at a profit. I did it myself a couple times when I first started the boat charters, but frankly I felt bad about it and decided that's not the way I'd like to be treated as an early booking so I decided to honor all early bookings (no matter how painfull financially). What I've found is that for the most part, if I book a diver or two a few weeks in advance, 80% of the time it works out that I end up booking on top of them and it's all worth it in the long run. I get my share of "private dive" days, but they're fewer and further between than early on. I was looking at Tripadvisor earlier today and noticed a new review from one of my advance booking customers that went out solo with us. Nice to see he had a good time.

So what happens on short notice bookings? Well, that can be another story altogether. I get my share of larger groups (4-6 divers) that call on short notice wanting to go out, but I've already got 2-3 passengers on board and can't fit them on... I end up referring them elsewhere. I wish I could help them out, but it's first come first served. Sometimes I'll get a single or couple that come in and want to go diving three days from now and I've got the day open... unfortunately, in my mind I'm under no obligation to book a money losing charter on short notice. Luckily most of the short notice divers have a flexible schedule and we can usually pick a day that works for both of us or I'll refer them elsewhere. We'll be coming into our busy season here in a few weeks, and with any luck the store will start picking up and the walkin traffic will improve to the point to where I'll be able to go out every day even on short notice.

Bottom line, every industry and operator is different, some are primarily last minute bookers, some book well in advance. It's well worth checking in advance to at least get a feel for any activity or operator you're interested in.

Here's a black phase Longnose Butterfly from Kona. Hawaii has an endemic species of longnose butterfly with a longer nose than those found elsewhere in the world. In Kona we sometimes see a black phase. Nobody's sure exactly why it occurs, but they can go from yellow to black and back.

Later,

Steve

I haven't been off island for more than 10 hours (quick Oahu day trip) in over two years and it's getting to be time to get away. We've got friends that have a house in Arizona, who also love visiting Kona, so a trade was in order. Going from an extended time in medium/high humidity to zip for humidity does a number on the lips, nose and sinuses every time. Lots of chapstick and saline spray are in order... holpefully it'll settle down in the next few days.... I brought my neti pot (if you don't know what a neti pot is, do a youtube search, you'll be enlightened) just in case, but for now am trying saline spray to keep from totally drying out.

We'll be not running charters for the next short while, but will be running them again come the end of next week or so, so I'm still trying to answer e-mail and the phone for scheduling purposes... it can take a day or two right now, come this weekend I'll be settled to where I can respond quickly.

Here's a couple of lined butterflyfish. They're Hawaii's largest butterflyfish, significantly larger than most other species.

Later,

Steve

It was sunny and flat out on the water today, good day for a couple of dives. Lots of neat fishes today... 4, yes 4, Threadfin Jacks, Saddleback Butterflyfish, Lined Butterfly fish, Heller's Barracudas, Anthias, all sorts of eels, Pyramid butterflys, Peacock Flounders, and all sorts of other neat fish. Viz was pushing 150+ feet, nice and clear.

Here's a shot of some divers passing under an arch. Kona is very volcanic, there's several sites that have lava structure that has been overgrown with corals. It's always fun to explore and see what's hanging out under the archways, we find a lot of our nudibranch sightings under arches.

More diving tomorrow... maybe I'll blabber about it...

Steve

Wonderful weather in Kona today... sunny skies, flat ocean. I had the day off, work the next 5-6 days at least as calls are coming in. Hopefully the great weather and water conditions continue.... this time of year there's a good chance of that.

Here's a school of raccoon butterfly fish I took a picture of the other day. Turned out OK for a jpeg shot. It had a fairly strong blue cast to it, but I was able to go into photoshop and get in to the selective colors and turn down the blues and cyans, and boost the magentas and yellows a hair then go to levels and get it looking closer to real. I wish I could do that consistantly, it worked reasonably well this time though.

Later,

Steve

I took a quick dive yesterday with the new camera and underwater housing. First thoughts... a flash would be helpful... adn I need to shoot RAW. It was a very gray afternoon, and there was a pretty strong south swell, so the Place of Refuge was a bit more mucked up than usual... probably 60 foot of viz in the shallows and 80-90 at depth.

Wow! The camera reacted quickly, locks focus practically instantaneously compared to the cameras I've used in the past. I was using the underwater settings that are hidden on the camera... Olympus does a very poor job at explaining how to get at them in their manual, had to look it up on a message board, it's easy to get to and they have an underwater macro and underwater wide angle mode you can toggle back and forth between at will... more on that in another post. I spent most of the time just pointing at things using the underwater macro mode.

I took a bunch of photos, some of them turned out OK. The biggest issue was the dark day and lack of light made for typical underwater blueish photos. Without shooting in RAW, where you can adjust the white balance after the fact, and not taking time to custom white balance the photos underwater as I was taking them, I had to rely on my weak photoshop skills to get the proper colors on the fish. This photo of an Ornate Butterfly fish turned out pretty OK.

I'm off to the shop for the afternoon... open noon 'til 6 on weekends.

Steve

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

Sorry for the title on this post... just giving the search engines something to look at (maybe, not sure it really does anything). We've had some really nice diving the last couple of days. Tuesday morning it was pretty flat on the ocean so we decided to take the boat down to the Red Hill area of South Kona and do a drive at a site called Driftwood (Bob's favorite spot in that area)... got there and a private boat was just tieing up, so we moved on over to Lava Dome/Coral Dome (not sure which it is most often called), which is one of my favorite spots in that area. This particular site features a lot of little cuts/shelves/mini-canyons to poke around in and a very good sized dome feature inshore that is very reminiscent of the 1st cathedral on Lanai.... it's a cool dive. After that dive we moved on up nearer the harbor to Eel Cove for another nice dive. Water conditions were fantastic, and we saw lots of whales on the trips to and back from the first dive site.

Yesterday we had a combination of north swells, light southwest winds and a boat full of newer divers so we went on down to Pawai Bay to get out of the swells. Had a couple of real nice dives and then it was time to head home. By then the south winds were howling, and the northwest swells were coming up. When that happens, and the wind is strong enough, the swells get bunched into a series of back to back mini-walls of water. Fortunately that is very rare here, I've probably been in water like that a handful of times in the years I've been doing this. It was nasty enough that the waves were breaking in deep water, luckily my boat's a Radon, originally made for rough water urchin harvesting from what I understand, and is quite heavy for it's size so it handled the conditions quite well. I'm just glad the conditions hadn't turned like that on our long trip south, it'd been a long slow ride home if that were the case. I can usually cruise around at 20-24 mph when I'm covering some distance, it wouldn't have been so yesterday. Anyways, we had fantastic whale action on the way back from Pawai Bay.

This has turned into a relatively busy February for us. I've noticed the companies with multiple boats are actually using multiple boats this year, I'm not sure that was the case last February. It looks like the tourist numbers might be inching upwards if my guess is correct.

Here's an underwater photo of a Longnose Butterfly. They're one of our more common reef fishes here. Hawaii technically has two species of Longnose Butterfly, a short snouted one that is found throughout the Indo-Pacific, and an endemic (only found here) species with a significantly longer snout. Oddly enough, the frequency of which one you see can vary greatly depending on which island you are on. The "common" longnose is readily seen on Oahu, they rarely see the longer nosed endemic one.... here the longer nosed fish is quite common. We even see the black phase version of the endemic species here, I'll show you that on the next post.

Aloha,

Steve

We've got a morning charter and then the night charter coming up tomorrow. I was told by a friend from another company the final count for manta rays on the night dive on Friday was 16 - Hopefully that'll keep up for a while.

Today was another internet battle. I've been working a bit on the website since we migrated over to our new web address and I tried to upload the new information and couldn't manage to get it done. When I talked to the tech support, they tried a few things and managed to crash the site. Took all day to get it all working again. I gotta hand it to Fatcow (my new webhost) though, the tech support is quick to respond (their "heiffercratic oath" swears they'll respond in 2 minutes, although I think it might have been 3 minutes on one call I made) and it's here in the USA so there aren't any language barriers.

Google's indexed my new website address and it's starting to make the slow climb back to the first page. As people stumble across my "de-hyphenated" address in the web search results and spend time on the website it'll climb up in position. I'm hoping the old results go away on their own fast.

Here's a couple of divers checking out a school of Raccoon Butterfly Fish (Chaetodon lunula). We have a couple of spots where we have good sized groups of these that haven't moved from their home base coral head or rock in the ten years I've been diving here.

Canon has announced the release of the new Canon G11. I've been using a G9 for a couple of years now and love it, but the housing's getting a bit beat up and occasionally the buttons stick and lock up the camera at depth... so the obvious cheap solution is to shop for a new/used housing... but man, I'm really wanting to get into an Olympus or Panasonic micro four thirds camera and housing some time in the next year as the line develops and the new models come out (but we're talking some $$ though, and I've got more than enough other things I need to spend it on for a while already). Now Canon announces the new G11... a few less megapixels than the G9, but an improved sensor and processor for less noise and improved low light performance... hmmm, might be more affordable sooner in my case... hmmm....

Summer vacations seem to be ending, we're still going out nearly every day but the numbers on the boat are down. We're actually in the prime season for diving Kona for the next couple of months - I figure August through October/mid-November seems to have the warmest water and best consistent viz in general. I was planning taking a large chunk of October off this year, now I'm hoping to take a weekend off maybe. The shop/office is going to take precedence over any travel at this point. We are looking at a trip to Denver late May where Pat will do the walk and receive her Doctorate degree (she's a long distance Colorado Buffalo) and a chance to have some Rocky mountain oysters at the Buckhorn Exchange.

The weather's been nice, but a little humid/muggy the last few days. Yesterday morning the water was super flat, I could see the reflection of the cruise ship in Kailua Bay off the ocean as I drove into town. We've been having some real nice diving the last little bit. Tonight we head out for an afternoon and evening manta ray trip. I don't usually run them on Thursdays, but we didn't have any scheduled for my regular days this week and I had customers that could do it tonight so we're going.

Now you're probably thinking to yourself "gee, it seems to me that it was only three years ago I saw a picture just like this on the blog". Yup, it's a repeat, but slightly altered. Yesterday I was looking through some old stuff thinking about finding something for a window in the shop and I saw this Saddleback Butterflyfish photo. I wondered what it'd look like if I could brighten it up a hair, so I turned up the brightness a hair, turned up the contrast a hair, and burned in the background. Now I'm trying to imagine if it'd show up from the highway if I blew it up to 3'X4' and trimmed off the background and stuck it on the shop windows. I've got 2 8'X8' windows that need something, fish photos might be in order, it's a thought anyways.

Aloha,

Steve

I've got the day off today, which is a good thing at this point. I've tentatively only got 3 days off between now and the 3rd of April, and I'll probably fill those if I can... you gotta work while you can get it. I went to the airport to pick up Pat last night - man is that place dead. I worked out there as a greeter for a shuttle company a couple of years ago during my slow season and the 7PM United SFO flight usually arrived full, last night it was only half full at best and we're hitting spring break.

The picture above is of Tinker's Butterflyfish (Chaetodon tinkeri). They were considered to be "endemic" to Hawaii but they've found them (or something extremely similar) elsewhere in the last few years. They're a deep water fish, at least a 100' for the most part, and that might explain why they're just now finding them elsewhere, not a whole lot of divers doing the deeper reefs in some locations.

An interesting thing happened to the camera at this dive site, and it's happened here before so now I'm thinking it's depth related. The camera (Canon G9) freezes up and shows a line of rotating blocks with numbers on it, looks much like some of the countdown clocks you see on some websites. I'm not sure what it's all about, but it quits when I get shallower. Yesterday it was at about 100', so I could only manage 4-5 shots and couldn't really get underneath the Tinkers without it locking up again. I'm guessing the housing compresses enough at that depth to press a couple of specific buttons at once and causes the screen to default to what it's showing. Guess I'll have to download the CD for the camera to find out what that screen means.... I pretty much read just the quick start manual.

It's been cool and cloudy, wet in the evenings, the last several days. We've missed the flooding that some of the other areas of the state have had, and the only effect on the diving was a swell that came in the last two days limited the sites. Today we've actually got some sun... yahoo! It's actually been foggy up mauka around Honalo to Captain Cook in the afternoons, felt like being back in Oregon... only I'd probably freeze myself numb going back to foggy and 40 degrees for days on end, foggy and 66 is almost too cold anymore.

Whales have been out in force the last few days. We could hear them on all the dives, and two days ago I was diving at "High Rock" and had gone out to the spot called "Lionfish Arch" and another name or two, and a trio of whales swam between our group and the boat - unfortunately we were keeping our eyes out towards deep water. The northwest swell was just coming up that day so viz was lowering, probably in the 60-70 foot range, the whales were probably 60-100 feet the opposite direction of where we were looking.... Man, I WANT TO SEE WHALES UNDERWATER, preferably soon. So close.

Later,

Steve

OK, now that seemed to work.

Today was a great day out on the water. We had an 8-10 foot northwest swell so we decided to head south and go around the corner of Kaiwi point and dive sharkfin rock and Pawai Bay for the day, it was nice and relatively calm in there. The divers came up from the first dive very excited about all the whale singing, so when we moved over to the second dive site I took a "captain's dive" while they had lunch on their surface interval with Cathy.

Boy were the whales loud!!! I half way expected them to show up out of the blue at any time. Turn up the volume and listen between my breaths on this video and you can hear them. The sound of the whales through the camera housing doesn't do them justice, it was quite loud underwater.

While the divers were on their second dive I was up top on the boat and had a couple of whales swam to within 30 feet or so of the boat... very cool. They went right towards where Cathy had taken the group but probably cut outside when they hit the corner our group was around so the divers missed them.

This video clip is of a Lined Butterfly (Chaetodon lineolatus). These are Hawaii's largest butterflyfish species, reaching up to a foot or so in length. We typically see them in pairs, this one's partner was just a few feet out of the shot.

Aloha,

Steve

Here's a shot of a couple 4 Spot butterfly fish that Pat took. These guys are quite attractive and fairly common, but I'm thinking they're somewhat under appreciated as I can't recall ever hearing any divemaster brief for them. We see them picking in and around corals on the reef quite often.

So our surf went down Saturday night and Sunday morning it was like glass out on the water 'til the wind picked up later on the day. This particular surf episode messed things up for about 2 days. I didn't take my camera as I wasn't diving (got some kind of infection/bug that'll keep me out of the water for a few days) and I regretted it as Sunday morning was one of those days you could see the reflections of the clouds on the water. When we got to our mooring, the water was exceptionally clear. It's amazing how it can go from nasty surf to great conditions overnight here - One of the nice thing about a young island is that the shore is mostly rock so there's little sand or soil to get stirred up and keep the viz down. Anyways, the last couple of days the diving's been terrific... 2 frogfish, a shark, dolphins underwater, a hawksbill turtle and a whole lot more for the divers. Water temp is inching down to 77/78 degrees but hasn't taken a big drop just yet.

Starting Thursday, I'll probably be running charters at least once a day for the rest of the month. I still have a couple days wide open Christmas week and several spots to fill on most of the days, but the month's filling in fast.

Aloha,

Steve

The Jimmy Buffett concert was great, getting free tickets was a bonus. Once we started to head towards the concert from our hotel (more on the hotel in a minute) we realized there's more going on at a Buffett concert than what's happening on the stage. There's a whole lot more paraphernalia, or should I say parrotphenalia, involved than any other concert I've been to. We stayed at the Signature at the MGM Grand, which is out back of the MGM where the concert was, and in the 6-7 minute walk to the concert we literally saw hundreds, maybe thousands, of people with parrot hats, shark hats, cheeseburger hats, grass skirts, men with water filled plastic bikini tops and such. The crowd was a sellout, which apparently is in the 15K-17K range at the MGM Gardem Arena, and probably half of the crowd had been to the bar before the show.... lots of atmosphere at the show... and I suspect most of them have been to a concert of his before.

On the MGM Signature: This is the nicest place I've ever stayed. We used VRBO.com to get a rate that was around half off rack rate. Be careful when you use this service as you'll be dealing with individual owners of the condos, we've always had great luck, but we had family members who rented from an individual who had his condo foreclosed, made for a sticky mess on arrival, luckily they paid by credit card and they'll get their money back. This place is 5-6 minutes from the MGM monorail station, and only minutes from the MGM concert venue. We went to see Earth, Wind and Fire up at the Waikaloa Queen's shops venue at home a couple months back and it took an hour and a half to get out of the parking lot, this show had at least triple the attendance and we were back to our room within 10 minutes or so.

I'm using Pat's computer tonight to post, so I have access to her photos... Here's a very nice pic of a Raccoon Butterfly she took on a dive earlier in the month.

Aloha,

Steve

This hurricane's actually getting interesting. In general, hurricanes do not hit the Big Island, but we still watch them anyway. This one was expected to go well south of us a few days back, but now the southern tip of the island is within the projected possibility. We'll know a lot more tonight or tomorrow morning. I suspect south point will get surf and maybe some rain from it even if it stays fairly south, more if it touches. If the water temp was a couple degrees higher I think everyone would be more worried, especially Oahu and Kauai. Cooler waters (we're around 80/81 right now) usually cause them to drop strength.

These are Raccoon Butterflyfish (Chaetodon Lunula). I took this shot the other day using just the manual white balance. The only photoshop work I did with it was an auto levels and size reduction, pretty bright shot for no flash.

We had a very unusual cancellation yesterday. One of the family we were to have on fainted at the boat when we met. We decided it'd be best to send them to urgent care or the hospital to be checked. I'm hoping all is well, but that has to be scary for them. It likely was dehydration and excitement, but you never know. I'm glad it happened where it did... really makes you think about what you'd do if that occurred on, or under, the water.

Back to the topic of the title... gettting around in Kona: I've always recommended getting a rental car when you come here, but there are many people who do want other options, so I'll discuss them here. First thing one needs to know when coming to Kona is - there is no walking to anywhere from the airport. I had someone asking me how long of a walk is it to the Fairmont Orchid from the Aloha terminal last week, and while I'm not exactly sure, it's something in the range of 27-34 miles or so (a longer distance than most people want to roll their luggage). The Kona airport is roughly 6-7 miles from anywhere, out in the middle of a 200 some odd year old lava field. Kailua is 6 miles away to the south, the nearest resort is roughly 7 miles to the north, and most are quite a bit further.

The second thing you should know is, there is essentially no public transportation system as known on the mainland. While there is a bus that circles the island daily, and a bus that services part of Kailua and south Kona a couple times daily, there is no readily available bus system to hop onto.

That basically leaves you with two other options for getting to your hotel (the hotels here don't have specific shuttles, but I suspect if you throw enough $$ their way they might arrange for private transportation) when coming to Kona and determined not to rent a car - Taxis and Speedishuttle. Just a note, in many cases, a day's car rental will be less than a taxi or shuttle ride. Taxis are readily available at the airport upon arrival, and if you are wanting to get somewhere immediately, this may be the quickest method. Speedishuttle is a company I didn't even know existed until 3 weeks ago when I decided to pick up a part time evening job, apparently they've been operating here for years with 4 or so shuttles servicing the west side so they weren't highly visible, but they are increasing their fleet size so you see more of them at the airport now.... OK, gotta tell you, I'm working for them now as a greeter at the airport a few evenings a week, so I guess this is a plug for my employer, but they are a legitimate option for getting around. Anyway, the shuttle does service all the major resorts, is usually a bit cheaper than the taxis generally and can carry a bunch of luggage without a per piece charge. One hint though, see if there's a greeter for them outside the luggage carousel when you arrive and arrange for the shuttle before you wait for your luggage - you will wait for your luggage in Kona, as this is a small airport and you can walk to the carousel in roughly 60 seconds - that way a shuttle is very likely to be waiting or on it's way when you do get your luggage. Shuttle service is generally not a long multi-stop thing here as it is in bigger tourist areas, it's still sort of a fledgeling industry here in comparison to Orlando or Vegas or major cities, you very well may have the shuttle to yourself or one to two other groups from what I've seen. Both taxis and shuttles are not inexpensive, as there's generally a fair amount of distance to be covered to get anywhere from the airport, but they can be handy for someone who wants to stick to the resort areas or Kailua.

If you do get a rental car, don't be overly concerned about getting lost. I get questioned about how difficult it is to find your way around Kona on occasion. Kona essentially has only one north/south highway and Kailua has maybe 2-3 north/south streets with a limited number of cross streets. It's small. There were only 6 or so stop lights on the entire west side of the island when I moved here just 8 years ago, and now maybe up in the teens... it's not an elaborate road system.

I hope this helps some. For those wanting specific locations check out the online mapping services, and then keep in mind they arent' necessarily accurate or complete, Mapquest used to be about a mile off on our street address, showing a completely different subdivision.

later,

Steve

Here's a shot of a Tinker's Butterly (Chaetodon tinkeri) from the other week. This is one of a pair that was VERY cooperative. I had a customer on board who wanted to take some photos of the fish we'd seen earlier in the year. Tinker's tend to hang out quite deep, but they saw us at about 75' and came directly up to us. Couldn't ask for more, other than to maybe back off enough to get both fish in the same shot. They can be a very curious fish.

Well the topside conditions on the water were much nicer than the other night. Flat and fairly sunny.

Our intro divers were a nice couple. One admitted to being extremely nervous, even to the point of not really wanting to come out on the boat this morning. At the end of the first dive the first words out were "I think I've got a new favorite hobby". It's always fun seeing how excited people can get trying scuba for the first time.... it's a different world.

The photo above is another pic I took recently of a Saddleback Butterflyfish (Chaetodon ephippium).I think I posted one back earlier in the summer, but this pic was a little closer. Colorful fish.

Later,

Steve

A lot of scuba diving has happend off the Wanna Dive boat the last couple of days. We've managed to see most of the "rare" stuff... Or should I say my crew has anyway. I've been playing Captain for the most part.

Yesterday we had a newly certified couple join a group of four that's been diving with us. Newly certified divers can be fun to dive with... occasionally you get those cases of "beginner's luck", yesterday was no exception... part way through the dive Bob looked up and a WHALESHARK was swimming over their heads. The first diver up was one of the newly certified divers and he was extremly excited, going on about seeing a shark that was bigger than the boat.... for those of you who aren't familiar with whalesharks, they are harmless plankton feeders and can grow to 40-60 feet long - they are HUGE. Now Bob has well over 4000 logged dives and this was the first whaleshark he had seen on scuba ever... they got it on thier first try. It's all downhill for them from here on.

Last night we did the manta dive again. My regular nights are Tuesday and Thursday, but we had a family who wanted to go out on Saturday and it worked for us, so why not. They were all snorkelers so I figured I'd leave Bob to captain and I'd go down and play with the camera. We had several mantas, and when I went to turn on my camera I noticed it was slightly floaty, rather than slowly sinking... I thought that odd 'til I went to turn it on. No batteries. Oh well, maybe next time. Unfortunately, last night would've been a great night for the camera as there were a couple of squid that came by the dive site and swam with the divers and snorkelers. That's the first time I know of that happening. I've never seen them yet, I'd already surfaced after finding I had no juice to the camera.

Here's a fish that is kind of special. This is a Saddleback Butterflyfish (Chaetodon ephippium). They are one of our more ornate reef fish. I used to get real excited seeing them, but I seem to see them more often these days. They are one of our larger butterfly fish and tend to hang out in pairs. If you see one, another is usually nearby. I did a short captain's dive between dives the other day at Golden Arches and there was one of these right under the boat. The one wouldn't have anything to do with me, but it's mate seemed to not mind me, even seemed curious and kept coming near. I managed to click off 4 decent shots, all just mostly out of flash range, but with enough light to give it a chance with photoshop. This guy turned out with realistic color after a few adjustments.

Aloha,

Steve

This morning's e-mail said there with something like 18 rays on the dive last night. I haven't been out on the night dive this week, do have a trip or two scheduled for next week though, hope it holds up.

We've had a couple of days off, so it was time to do some important maintenance work. I had the carburetor overhauled and gave the engine a tuneup, as well as the more frequent stuff (oil changes, etc). Everything runs great right now.. then again, it's a boat, I should be good for another good length of time though.

Here's a little video of yellow Longnose Butterflyfish (Forcipiger longirostris), along with a few yellow tangs and such, on the reef. They spend much of thier lives poking their beaks into coral heads looking for tidbits to eat. This particular species is quite common here, but apparently they don't see it much on Oahu - they consider it to be "rare", they more often see Forcipiger flavissimus which is considered to be the common longnose butterfly. In this video you will also see the black phase, which is pretty much only found in Kona. I'm not sure that they've figured out why they turn black at times.

Later,

Steve

My wife and I went to our favorite mexican food spot in Kona again for dinner yesterday. Senior Billy's is a small sit down style restaurant located in what was South Kona's mexican fast food spot. It changed hands a couple years back and the new owners fixed it up some and changed the menu and made it into a decent little restaurant. The menu isn't huge by any means, but the food is good and the price point reasonable by Kona sit down mexican food standards.

I've been diving the last several days. Played with the camera again a bit today. I have just one customer on the boat so it was a light day. He didn't mind if I carried a camera (as long as I'm willing to e-mail him some pics if they turn out). I tried playing with the manual white balance today. It basically changes how the camera sees color and in theory you can color correct on the fly underwater with just a little effort. It seems to work, at least as long as you don't change depths. I didn't bother resetting the camera at each depth because I just didn't want to mess with it that much, but it seemed to work well when at the depth I set it at. Good thing to know. I don't have a whole lot cooking next week as of yet, if I have a few days off I may have to play around with the camera a bunch. Here's a 4 spot butterfly and a pair of finescale trigger fish guarding a nest of eggs.