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Here's an updated story with more news.

This is a sad thing. Rest in peace Steve Irwin.

One little note, the manta rays we have in Kona are harmless, and barbless, creatures not to be confused with stingrays. I'm sure we'll probably be hearing questions about diver and snorkeler saftey with the rays due to this incident.

Steve

Time to catch up on yardwork and everything else. The other day, on the tail end of my long stretch of workdays, the drive shaft on my pickup truck broke in half. That was kind of a noisy event. Luckily it was right at the bottom of the driveway while I was moving very slowly and I was able to roll to a spot at the side of the road, it could've been much worse. Also luckily, my wife had the day off and we were able to transfer all the gear to her vehicle and still get the charter off.

I did have a couple of days I had off at that point and it was spent searching the internet and local car lots for a new truck. It couldn't have happened at a better time... 6 years of zero percent interest and the new vehicle (Ford f-150) might run me the next couple of years little more than we've plowed into the old Dakota after replacing breaks, transmission and other assorted work done the last couple of years, not to mention this repair bill.

The diving conditions are pretty nice right now. I'm intending to get back in the water just for grins the next couple of days, maybe just play with the camera as I haven't really shot any pictures in the last couple of weeks. I don't have a charter pre-scheduled 'til Thursday, but I'll take charters if a phone call comes up.

Here's a picture a little critter I really enjoy... a medusa worm. These guys are a type of sea cucumber. They can be very long, are very soft, and have an accordion-like movement. I took this shot on a night dive, we generally do not see them during the daytime. Medusa worms, as well as other sea cucumbers, are sort of the vacuum cleaners of the sea - they pick up detritus and eat it. The medusa worms can be upwards of 3-4 feet long and slink along with their feathery fronds picking up items and passing it into their mouths. I used to have a pink medusa worm in a large reef tank I had at the front of my aquarium shop, way back when, that amazed people... one day it died and poisoned the tank... sea cucumbers tend to prolapse their guts when threatend or dieing and it's toxic enough that things stay away on the reef, in a closed system like an aquarium the toxins can have a devastating effect on the fish. I lost everything but the invertebrates and a pair of mandarin gobies.

later,

Steve

...Long time no blog...

We're entering that time of year again which can be the best time to dive in Hawaii and Kona. The water's warming up nicely, it's roughly 80 right now, and will probably go up another degree or two. Add the water conditions to the fact that the tourist season slows down in the fall, and you've got potentially ideal diving.

I'd been really busy for much of August, now I've got a slow spell schedule-wise. I still have a bit more lined up this month than I did on the second day of last month, so it may be fairly busy yet.

We had a full boat for the manta dive a couple of nights back. There were a couple of manta rays at the manta dive. We had them right under the boat the moment our divers hit the water. When this happens, we still send our divers over to the dive site that all the operators share as that will get everyone an opportunity to have a show. Most all the dive operators do that, on occasions you'll get a new company or a private boat that hits the site and doesn't send their divers to the area everyone goes to and splits the manta action, that can be annoying for everyone but it hasn't happened in quite a while.

Yesterday we did a three tank dive day. I run a three tank local dive day for $149 per person where we stay pretty much within our regular dive area so we don't have to hit passengers up for what we'd need to do for a long range charter. There are plenty of great dive sites, without having to make an hour or two long boat run, so we don't have a ton of passengers (we'll go with two) or charge a great deal to do a three tank day. We had two divers over from Oahu on the boat. Both were very good divers, so the average dive time for the three dives was in the 90 minute + range. Four and a half hours underwater is a lot of bottom time in a day for most people, but they seemed pretty darned happy with the diving here in Kona. They were used to diving Oahu and thought the viz and diving here was fabulous... it was kinda average viz for here yesterday in reality. The diving does vary from island to island, if you haven't dove Kona but have on the others, give Kona a try, you just may be impressed as we have lots of areas with reef that is better than elsewhere in the islands.

Here's a photo of a red-spotted nudibranch. We seem to see these guys sort of "seasonally". I can't pick the season, but it just seems that at times we see them frequently, then they disappear alltogether for quite a while.

Later,

Steve