Scuba Diving Vacations

Halloween has come and gone. Between eating like a pig for a football game, then going to a Halloween party by one of Pat's co-workers, I somehow managed to put on about 5 pounds of bloat. Too many carbs in one day. It probably would've been worse if if the suits weren't so hot and sweaty.

Diving's been real good lately. We had some big northwest stuff the last couple of days, a little limiting on Friday, but otherwise we could dive most of the dive sites. Kona water temp is still in that 78-80 range.... nice and comfortable.... they say it's a mild el-nino year so it'll be curious to see how cool the water gets this January/February vs. last. It may stay quite comfortable, who knows.

Later,

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

I just realized my blog is 4 years old now. Initially I figured on about a post a week, well 4 years and nearly 600 posts I'm a little above the number of posts I expected to be making... that's a lot of fish pictures.

The weather on the Big Island, at least Kona side, is gorgeous right now. The state had a flash flood watch out the last week or so, and a couple islands got hit with a lot of rain, we had about 1 evening of reasonably heavy rain and that was it.

The diving's been consistently good, maybe a bit of an algae bloom the last couple days, and the water's still warm. No need for the thicker suits just yet, that'll probably occur some time in December.

Here's a shot of that rare yellow phase spotted puffer we've been seeing. I took the shot last year, but we still see this fish from time to time - it's always a thrill for us. Cathy's been leading dives here since the late 70's and it's the only one she's ever seen.