I've been on vacation for about 10 days and haven't spent much time on the computer. I'm all settled down for the dive industry show in Vegas so I thought I'd post one last fish photo before the posts become DEMA realted the next couple of days.

I took this shot in about 15 feet of water kinda swinging back and forth in the surge. This is a pretty decent sized frogfish, and I didn't realized at the time I took the photo that he was "fishing". Frogfish are a member of the angler family, they have small "lures" they wiggle to attract small fish. You can see the lure off the center of it's forehead, it appears to be a small feathery object on a thread. They'll wiggle that appendage 'til something comes along to eat it, then they'll eat the unsuspecting fish. They're jaws can sort of hinge and separate to where they can eat a fish of quite some size, and the strike is very very fast... I think I remember reading the strike was in the 16/10,000ths of a second range. It's regarded to be among the fastest movements (certainly eating strikes) in the animal kingdom.

Later,

Steve

It's that time of year again... summer's over, crowds are down, water's warm and flat. We always look forward to September through November as it's probably the nicest water conditions of the year - not that they're bad at other times - it's just consistantly good for the most part.

We've had some really good diving lately. Been seeing lots of critters. Highlights of the last week or so have been frogfish, scorpion fish, flame angels, psychedelic wrasses, flame wrasses, a HAMMERHEAD!, leaf scorpions, and more. The manta ray night dive has been crazy busy, with both boats and mantas. We've been going out 2-3 night a week (a lot for us, we've only got 3 people to cover 7 days and 3 nights of diving) on top of the daily morning dives. Manta numbers have been in the teens the last couple weeks pretty much every night. The boat numbers on that dive are starting to shrink now that school's starting everywhere and tourist numbers are dropping.

Here's a nice frogfish that we've been watching grow. It's in the 5-6 inch length right now, was much smaller when Cathy found it earlier this summer. It's amazing how fast they grow. It's pretty "clean" and yellow right now. As they grow it'll get all sorts of red stuff growing on it (you can see it starting in spots) and start changing colors.

Later,

Steve

Last night we did another manta dive off the Kona airport. Water conditions were awesome... flat and clear... Our divers saw one manta in the distance on the first dive, then while we were taking our surface interval five or six mantas swam by the boat. There apparently were 11 or so mantas at the site on the night dive according to one of the videographers.

I went home after the night dive and turned on Jimmy Kimmel and straight up at midnight... the cable went out. It was still out this morning. The story I'm hearing is that somehow an undersea cable was severed and we won't have cable 'til it's repaired. Severed undersea cable? Gotta be the act of some giant sea monster surely.

Suposedly much or all of the Big Island is out of cable service. No TV, and internet options are limited. I've got service through the phone company here at the shop so I can still play on the internet. Major cable outages can effect things here, from what I understand the hospital and Kaiser both have their patient records based on Oahu and have no access to them right now 'til the cable's back up. There are notices on the radio station recommending people reschedule all but urgent care visits. My e-mail is routed through my cable connection, if I don't have cable service tomorrow I'll need to configure the shop laptop to check my mail. I can let it slide for a day, some days I'm running double charters and I just don't have time to spend on the computer, but I hate not answering e-mail reasonably promptly.

Here's a shot of a Sargassum Frogfish that Cathy took some time ago.

No charter today, too bad, it's wonderful outside. Sunny, little to no vog, mild breeze and very flat seas. Great diving conditions!

Later,

Steve

EDIT NOTE: I arrived home mid-afternoon and it appears the giant sea monster was no match for Time Warner/Oceanic Cablesystems. TV and computer are working.

LATER EDIT NOTE: The news just came on (5pm here) and said it was more or less a statewide outing of cable TV/internet/cable phones. Wow. Oahu and Kauai were restored early in the day, Maui and the Big Island had longer outages. It apparently was a single cable compromised between Maui and Oahu at about 3000 feet of depth... still might have been a sea monster that caused all of this after all. they figure it'll be weeks before they can pull up the cable and check it out, in the meanwhile everything's been re-routed.

We've had a pretty good sized south swell lately, but as long as you're at a dive site that faces somewhat north the diving's been pretty darned good. Water temperature is still sitting at 78-79 degrees.

We've got a pretty busy week lined up ahead, it's been kind of slow the last two weeks. Kinda wierd, I get 2 or 3 days off the boat in a row and it feels like I haven't been on in weeks... earlier this year I'd been going out 5-6 days a week pretty much, so one slow period isn't all that bad of a deal. The rest of the summer is shaping up pretty nicely on the pre-bookings. The last two years we had less pre-arranged diving and lots of last minute divers calling in, this year we seem to be back to people arranging dives in advance... I have at least a few days of diving arranged every month through October, nice for us, now we need to continue filling in the empty spots.

Here's a photo of a frogfish some of you may recall from my first year of blogging. It's about 6-7 inches long and just at the stage where it's between the juvenile yellow coloration and turning to whatever color it's gonna be in the future. They tend to take on the corloration of thier surroundings... always possible this one spends it's time in about 30 feet of water hanging out around finger corals, as that's the color it currently is, but it could change some as it gets older. They get so tough to spot once they mature.

Later,

Steve

We've been going out pretty much daily lately and the conditions have been wonderful for the most part. They've had heavy winds up north, but it hasn't affected the Kona area diving. Today we had two divers on board, decided to head up to Garden Eel Cove (yes, even though it's only two passengers we go pretty much anywhere we would normally take a full boat) to dive. On the way we came across a bunch of boats watching a whale.... Call us Ahab!!! It was white, well light gray anyway. Don't know if it was albino or awfully ill. Went to the dive and did our thing... Garden Eels, Dolphins underwater, Barracuda and more.

On the way to the second dive site we found a bundle of floaty net. We hate seeing that stuff in the water, as manmade garbage doesn't belong there, but we kind of like to explore it when we find it. The first picture is of the wad of net itself. Fish are attracted to anything floating in the ocean. The second picture is a bit closer shot of the net. ... Notice anything about the second shot? Take a look again, it's not just netting....

One of our favorite fish to find while we're diving on the reef is frogfish, they're always a treat. There's an ocean going frogfish, called a Sargassum Frogfish, that typically lives in sargassum seaweed. It also is attracted to nets. Here's the same photo as the second cropped and blown up a bit.

If you didn't see the frogfish earlier, you should see it now... look for the eye! This is the first one I've seen in the wild, last year I posted a photo that Cathy had taken at one time. I'm thrilled to have my own shot.

I gotta mention something, in the last post I raved about how hopping the manta dive was... well things can change fast... 3 days later we did the dive and got skunked. We still had a fabulous night dive. Shrimp, all sorts of life, even had a very large spiney lobster... could've had dinner, but we let it be.

Later,

Steve

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

I've been really busy this month. We had a slow September so October has been a pleasant surprise. Today we had the day off, so it was football day... we had some Corvallis, Oregon area friends visiting so we all sat down and watched the USC Trojans vs. the Oregon State Beavers football game. Good game, our team was on the wrong end of the 6 point game though.

Water conditions for scuba diving in Kona have been pretty darned good lately. We've had a run of very good divers on the boat the last several weeks, so nearly all of our dives have been in the 75-90 minute range. Bob's off in Sulawesi Indonesia for some diving fun, so Cathy and I have been splitting all of the diving the past couple of weeks.

I haven't been carrying a camera around since my G9 stopped working. Tomorrow we've got a light load with a couple of gals carrying cameras, so I might take my wife's older camera down to see if I can get some shots off. I'm so spoiled these days, after diving with a camera with a 3" LCD for a couple of years, we'll see if I can tolerate going back to something with a large postage stamp sized LCD screen. I've got my eye on 2 models right now, the Canon G11 and the Canon S90. I'm waiting to see what comes out for housings from third parties for them in the next couple of weeks. I'll discuss more of what I'm looking at in a later post.

Since I'm not taking pics right now, I'm playing around with photoshop on some of the older ones. This pic has been on the blog before, maybe a year or so ago. My wife, Pat, took this frogfish shot on a dive. My older version of it had a hotspot on the forehead, this one we managed to tone it down a bit. I'm looking at downloading the new beta version of Lightroom my next day off and playing around with it to see how well the slider adjustments work on my older jpegs.

Aloha,

Steve

It was an interesting/frustrating day.

So I'm down at the office at 8am and left for only a few minutes to put the boat in for the charter. I'd made arrangements with the phone company to have the technician call a few minutes prior to arrival. I received no call so I'm thinking things are OK. By 4pm and no technician and I'm thinking maybe they didn't call and I missed them, so I call the phone company and the gal on the end says they have no record of an order for my phone number. She apologizes and sets it up for next week with a new case number... I'm a bit aggravated because I had to pay an extra employee for the day so I could hang out all day rather than work the charter....

15 minutes later I decide it might be smart to double check on the status of the new case, just to make sure they got it right and I didn't recall her repeating my address. I get a hold of a nice gentleman and he looks up the filing for my phone number and says, we have you down for Tuesday morning Mr. Kenoi... What? My name's Frisbie, are you sure things are right here? He at that point gets someone from the business department on line and she checks my phone number and says something to the effect of "oh, he's a business customer" then repeats my correct name and address... I don't exactly get this, as the phone number was the same, why would that have changed things if I was a residential customer? I'm handed back to the guy and I say, "bottom line... do I have a visit set up?" He says, "Yes, but it's today not Tuesday, the earlier person set you up with an appointment for another address. Our Tech is busy now but you're next up on the queue." He advised me to wait.

By then it's 4:50 and I'm figuring maybe the tech will swing by in the next half hour. I wait 'til 5:45 and call back to the repair department and get the same guy. At that point he's apologetic and says he doesn't know for sure if the guy's still working, but that since we've got "call before arrival" on the ticket he should call me and let me know if he's coming or not... most likely, the dispatch has shut down for the day and there's no way to reach the tech. So I figure I'm hanging out for a while yet....

6:40pm and no sign of the tech, so I call. I get a woman I haven't spoke with before and give her my number and I'm checking to see if the tech is coming... Her answer was a gem... "You'll have to call Wanna Dive and ask them if you want this settled"... "I'm Wanna Dive. I've been waiting since 8 am this morning for the tech." She says "he was there and you told him you didn't have any phone problems at 6:35" --- that was just 8 minutes ago. At that point I'm telling her he obviously went to the wrong place, she says no way, then I ask her if she has my contact number, she gives me my contact number and I ask if the tech was under instructions to call that number, she says he was and I tell her that's the number I'm calling from and he never called. She finally believed me after we verified the address and my address matches the one on the order and I told her I've called 3 times this afternoon and she verified it.

At any rate, no phone 'til at least next Tuesday. Supposedly they're guaranteeing me it'll be a morning visit... I'm not totally counting on it at this point.

So here's yet another frogfish I've not posted before. It's a big one for the amount of yellow it still has.... roughly the size of a junior football. Back earlier this decade I went a few years without seeing a frogfish. Now we find them with pretty good frequency... Yahoo!!!


Later,

Steve

Here's a shot of the same frogfish from the other day that I took this morning. Today it was gorgeous in Kona... bright and sunny, no clouds over the ocean and few on the mountains. We had some customers on board today that were great on air... 84 minutes the first dive and 72 on the second. They'll be on the next several days, it'll be curious to see if their bottom time improves even more. We had a ripping current on our first dive, so we turned it into a one way dive and I followed their bubbles to pick them up down the coastline so they didn't have to battle the current the whole dive... those dives are always fun as you can cover quite a bit of ground and see some spots we generally don't see when we're moored the whole dive.

Current water temperatures are still a quite comfortable 80-ish. This is a great time to be diving in Kona.

I'm making slow but steady progress on the office between charters. Been busy varnishing bamboo sheeting the last couple days among other things. It's coming together.

Just thought I'd make a quick post.

Later,

Steve

Pat joined us on the boat yesterday and had a blast diving.... frogfish, dolphins underwater, eagle rays and turtles, a huge snowflake eel hunting with a grouper - all kinds of neat stuff. I've been recovering from the darned cold, staying out of the water and Captaining the boat 'til I stop draining, but Pat had her camera along and got this shot of the frogfish.

Water conditions have been exceptional the last couple of days. We had 150'+ viz today on the dives.

Today we had a couple of intro divers on board. Neither of our intros had ever scuba dived before so we went in search of calm water with good viz. We had to go up to the airport, north of Keahole point to find very good water for intros. Several spots between town and there were pretty OK, it's just that with intros we have to do skills on the mooring line and it's tricky to do them with new divers while they're holding on a line tied to a bouncy boat. The intro divers had a great time. Highlights of the day were mating octopus and a nice juvenile frogfish and lots more.

I haven't been taking a lot of photos lately, busy with students or larger numbers of customers, also was out for a while with a back/rib problem that has resolved itself. This photo above was one of an eel on a late afternoon dive spring of last year. Tonight I decided "what the heck" and ordered a copy of this photo from www.jumbogiant.com. This is a company I heard about several years ago, they do enlargements at a very reasonable price. The copy on this post is about 56K in size, the one I uploaded to them (took several minutes) was about 5.5 megabites in size. I ordered a 24"X36" photo luster print using "best crop". I figured I'd challenge them a bit with this photo, see where they crop it, as well as the fact that there's a bunch of white to deal with, to see how they do. The guys in town that do prints would charge pretty good money to do a giclee print of that size... Jumbo Giant charges $19.95 plus about $9 in shipping, about a quarter of what the photo enlargement shop I visited last week charges locally... so I thought it would be worth a shot. I'll let you know how it turns out, and how fast it gets here (just ordered it 20 minutes or so ago).

Been real busy lately.. I had 6-7 days off in early May but the month filled up after that, I have another 6-7 day stretch next week with nothing, but the phone's been ringing again and I've got 1-2 charters a day 'til July 3rd except for that little stretch. It'll probably fill in too though,if it does that'd mean only 1 day off this month.

Kona Water Temperature News: I've been whining about how cold the water was this year... well, about the first week of May things started warming up and haven't stopped... we're up about 7 degrees the last 5 weeks. The water is now sitting at a pleasant 79 degrees, touching 80/81 on our computers at times. YAHOO!!!!

Do you twitter? I've been playing around with it the last month or so. I picked up a new phone that takes OK pictures and has internet, so I can send them to twitter from the boat. In theory I could answer mail from the boat, but that involves figuring out how to set up my e-mail accounts on the phone... too much thinking for me right now. Anyway, I manage to update conditions several days a week via the phone on twitter, if you are interested, you can find me at http://twitter.com/wannadivesteve

Aloha for now,

Steve

The tradewinds died out and were replaced by north and northwest winds the last few days, it blew all the vog out and the skies have been clear and bright. Today was partly cloudy but still absolutely beautiful.

I had the day off today, start another stretch of diving tomorrow. It looks as though June will be quite busy at this point.. lots of charters started, now I just need to add additional passengers on the dives to fill things in.

Here's a frogfish from one of our recent dives.

Aloha,

Steve

Wow, what a difference a few weeks makes... the water temp has risen to a point where it's quite comfortable for those of us who dive here nearly every day, and the water's flattened out most of the time lately (not that it was all that big of surf earlier). Water temp today was a very comfortable 75/77.

Earlier in the week we were able to go south to the Red Hill/Kealakekua region, and yesterday we were able to go way up north to a spot that we pretty much only go with "regulars" - don't feel slighted if we don't get there with you, it's just that it's different and once you've been to 30-40 dive sites we here want to start showing our "regulars" something new. It's fun for us to dive something we don't see all the time so on occasion we try to cover some distance when the boat has people we've done a lot of diving with.

Today we had a light load, went up to the Golden arches area and just slowly scanned the area for a couple of 78-80 minute dives... were rewarded with a good sized frogfish (here it is, check out the full belly, must've eaten recently), Leaf Scorpion, Peacock Flounder, Harlequin Shrimp, and loads of other cool stuff.

Aloha,

Steve

Aloha,
We've got a couple days off, start up again on Thursday, and I've been working our vacation rental prepping it for our next guests. I thought I'd post a quick picture of a juvenile frogfish. I'm thinking it's probably the same one I found several weeks ago, but it's a few hundred feet removed and about 4 times larger than it was then if it's the same one. Cathy told me she'd seen it in a particular area about two weeks ago so I checked a couple days back and it was still there. I'm hoping it's settled in for the next few months so we can watch it grow... we had three or four last year we were able to watch grow from nickle size to softball size or more.

This very cool picture is one that Cathy e-mailed me. She took this some time ago and had told me about it and I really wanted a copy of it for the blog. This was found on a net floating at sea off Kona.

Sargassum Frogfish (Histrio histrio) are an angler fish species that lives in floating seaweed and other debris. They can blend in quite well with seaweeds, and snatch up small fish. Any time you have something floating in the ocean, it'll create an oasis of life in short order.... if you aren't sure of how true this is, do a blue water dive, I've seen people have a following of tiny fish in as little as 30 minutes or so.

Man, can they eat. Years ago, I was really, really, really into aquariums... worked in the trade and eventually had an aquarium store. I picked up a Sargassum frog at one point and had it at the house. I was in my early/mid 20's and few things appeal to a 20 something-ish year old beer drinker and his friends on a Saturday night as much as one of these fish (except girls I suppose, but they were in short supply that evening). We had some people over and decided it was time to feed the frogfish, then it turned into time to see how much the frogfish could eat.... 5 live goldfish later, 2 of those about the same size as the body portion of the frogfish was originally, it finally stopped chasing down fish. We were thoroughly impressed... able to eat 3-4 times it's original body weight in one sitting, all us guys wished we could do that. It looked like someone stuffed a bunch of jawbreakers in a balloon and stuck small leaves on it. I think I sold it to someone shortly after that.

We had gray skies today, it was dry though. We've had a bit of both a south and a north swell the last couple days, but it's settling down quite nicely. By the end of our second dive it became nearly glassy flat.

Manta update... the manta dive has been hopping up at the airport manta site the last couple of days, up in the mid/high teens in numbers. We have a charter on Saturday evening to do the dive... should be good!!!

Later,

Steve

Just an early happy new year wish for all as I'm going to be too busy to post for a few days. We've been busy the last couple of days and it'll stay that way through the holiday and then some. I may have some time to post after the 2nd or 3rd of the year.

Kona water conditions, at least for diving, have been superb the last few days, horrible for surfing as it's been glassy flat in the mornings with only some small chop in the afternoons. Hopefully it'll stay at least close to flat the next few days. We've been seeing lots of cool stuff on the dives lately, but we're still waiting for the big prize.... Whalesharks. This time of year seems to be the time that people are seeing them. My wife's boss saw them while he was fishing down south on the weekend and we've heard of other reports in the area. I'll be keeping my eyes open for a collection of boats on the water the next several days - when one boat finds one, then soon there are several as the whalesharks often stay put and check out the boats for some time.

Here's a shot of a frogfish I took back in May that I apparently haven't posted. We're seeing mostly larger ones right now, although the divers found a bright yellow medium sized one earlier today that we've not seen before.

Hopefully everyone has a great holiday.

Aloha,

Steve

We keep seeing these little fish from time to time. Cathy found this one practically right under the boat at Golden Arches on our first charter back after the trip, so I had to pop over the side and get a quick photo. It's since moved and we haven't been able to find it. We've found several this year up and down the coast, now that we know what we're looking for I suspect we'll keep finding them.

Last night's manta dive trip was a success. There were four mantas off the Sheraton, they also apparently had mantas up north off the airport again. There's definitely more surge off the Sheraton site than on the airport site, and as the surf was up a bit yesterday it made for an interesting dive for the divers -- it's hold on for dear life at times. Everyone enjoyed it. I hadn't done a trip down south for the manta dive since getting the boat back as we've had good luck up north pretty much the entire year. It's kind of fun heading south for a change though, and the boat makes the trip much faster and more smoothly than it did before the hull extension and engine change.

Later,

Steve

Last night we did the manta dive up off the Kona airport. Three mantas showed for the dive, spending the first part of the dive with the divers and then moving up to the snorkelers. I was leading the night dive, when the mantas moved off we went on a tour of the reef. One of the other DMs wrote me a message that there was a big nudibranch off the deeper end of the site. We went and checked it out and found a big Clumpy Nudibranch ("Clumpy" is the actual common name of this species), roughly 5 inches by 7 inches in size. Pat took pictures, I'm hoping she'll let me post one. We also saw a couple species of lobster and tons of shrimp on the dive as well as a few other goodies.

We've got another night dive tonight with a group snorkelers that contacts me whenever they have family coming into town. They tried it several years ago, thought it was fantastic, and continue to do it when family is in town and the mantas are showing.

Here's that Reticulated Frogfish (Antennarius tuberosus) I promised in the last post. These small angler fish (you can see it's lure in the center of it's forehead) tend to hide in coral heads, and look like a cone snail with encrusting coraline algae growing on it. We're always excited to find these.

Later,

Steve

Ok, this is a pretty commercial topic. I've been checking on airfares on a trip we picked up tickets for back in the spring, we picked up ours just in time. I kept an eye on it and the price increases were downright surprising over the course of the spring and summer... nearly doubled... just recently they took a nosedive and are approaching what we originally purchased them for. Tonight I checked travelocity.com for some flights from the mainland to here just to see if the prices have dropped coming this direction... nice to know you can get here from Seattle for 350, Portland for 480 and Los Angeles for 550 or so again now... I'd had people tell me of much higher rates a couple months back.

While I'm at it... I might as well mention our vacation rental still has a bunch of openings in November and December, kind of slow for this time of year, but it's loading up the first quarter of next year quite nicely. I suspect a lot of the hotels and vacation rentals have availability if you're thinking of coming over.

Weather wise and as far as diving condions lately... it's been wonderful! We've done some great diving the last few days, primarily intros and students getting their open water certifications. Our intros the other day got to see a white tip reef shark on thier very first dive!!! The students got to see a lot of great stuff too, I wasn't able to produce a shark, but today we saw a great big (well, great big for here, nothing like the Pacific Giants back in the northwest) octopus at Kaloko - maybe 20 feet from where we saw a similarly sized one just over a week ago, if it is the same one I'm hoping maybe that's it's favorite hangout for a while - who gave us a great show posing/shape changing/color changing for a couple of minutes. We were able to approach it from slightly below it so it didn't seem to take us a much of a threat.... no pictures though as I don't take cameras on teaching dives.

Anyway, I thought a heads up on the airfares might have been in order just in case people've been looking earlier and seeing them go nowhere but up.

Aloha,

Steve

One of my almost pet peeve questions that I hear fairly frequently when people sign up for a dive is "do you know where you're going?". I'm getting to dislike that question, but I guess I just need to get over it. There are some places that feature one or two better dives and practically everyone goes to the same spot, practically every day... thank goodness Kona isn't one of those places. We've got lots of very good dive sites up and down the coast that we can do. Actual choice of where we are diving on any given day depends on what customers want to see, what they've already dove, and the water conditions of the day, and in some cases if there's a mooring available when a lot of boats are on the water. We rarely pick dive sites 'til we're outside the harbor on the water and can check conditions.

Kona has a fairly extensive day use mooring system, primarily between the Kona airport and just north of Kealakekua Bay. The mooring balls are roughly 15 feet down and chained to the bottom, dive operators will send a crew member down with a rope to tie off to it. The first day I hopped on a boat with the first operator I worked for, I'd never really jumped a mooring before. Being the new guy, that was pretty much my only job - the instructions from the boat captain were "I'm going to head the boat towards the ball, and when you think you can reach it, jump." OK, easy enough... so I go for my mask and fins and am immediately informed that those are "only for sissies". Anyway, it's pretty easy to make it down to the balls unless you have a stiff current, there's a couple that are sitting at around 22' that are tougher to get to if you aren't expecting to have to dive that deep.

The story behind the moorings is kind of interesting. Kona didn't always have a mooring system, the dive operators used to drop anchor everywhere. From what I understand (I wasn't here yet in those days), a rather well known individual (start guessing who now) inquired as to why we didn't have a mooring system like some of the places in the Caribbean. I think the response was money, so he decided to help out. Anyway, he had the means to generate the money to get the mooring system started and the dive ops contributed the labor to put them in. Nowadays there's a local non-profit that raises funds for maintaining and adding moorings to the system. Oh, the individual's name was Jerry Garcia, of the Grateful Dead, and he was an avid diver. Apparently they held a concert to raise the initial funding... a very nice thing to do.

Anyway, the mooring system has been great for the reef as anchors are only dropped infrequently by dive operators anymore. We do have some anchor sites, and most boats take care to make sure they're hitting sand when they drop anchor. This spring I decided to start keying in our positions on our boat's GPS, and we're up over 50 spots already (still haven't keyed them all in, I try to add them as we dive them), so we've got a lot of variety to choose from as long as the swell cooperates.

Here's a shot of a diver taking a picture of a yellow frogfish in a rubble area. Cathy found this frogfish back in February or March. It was about the size of a nickle/quarter back then, we've been watching it grow since and it's getting to be pretty good sized... I hadn't realized they grow that fast.

later,

Steve