Scuba Diving Vacations

My wife Pat took this nifty picture of a nudibranch some time ago. I don't have a picture that looks like it. I thought it might be some kind of nudi I'm unfamiliar with as it doesn't quite look like the typical scrambled egg nudibranch, a look at Keoki Stender's Phyllidia page has a shot of a juvenile scrambled egg nudi (fried egg nudi) that looks very similar. I guess it's a juvenile that hasn't developed as much yellow spotting. Very cool.

I had a double scheduled for yesterday, diving in the morning was good, but we had big winds pop up this afternoon and met our customers for the evening. It was getting pretty sloppy and we decided to reschedule for Saturday evening. The winds of this strength aren't common in Kona and should settle down by today or Saturday.

Well, I know my schedule for the next 5 days. I'm basically full through Friday. There's plenty of openings after that, hopefully things will continue to be busy.

Today was an awesome day on the water. There was essentially no swell this morning. We headed out for a couple of nice dives. I Captained the boat, have a very mild cold (popped so much vitamin C the last couple of days I'm turning orange) and need to be ready to finish off a student tomorrow. Bob and the group dove Golden Arches and Kaloko Arches, we had a pair of whales milling around maybe 200-250 feet off of both dive sites during the dives. I was hopeful the divers might get a peek at them, no such luck today.

We semi-officially opened the "shop" above the Tesoro across the highway from the harbor this weekend. We're going to man it 10-6 on the weekends and then add more days as we can. I'm still spending time after charters there every day I don't have a night dive on top of the day charter, so we're actually around in the late afternoons on most days 'til about 6pm. My wife Pat was manning it today.

Here's a very nice shot of a Wire Coral Goby that Pat took on a dive a while back. It's the best one we've got between the two of us. This is a magnified version of the real thing. These little guys spend pretty much their entire lives on wire corals.

Aloha,

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