Scuba Diving Vacations

Well, I took a vacation in November for a couple of weeks... Phoenix area and Vegas, with the DEMA dive show being the focus of the end of the trip. I haven't posted other than a couple of times in the trip, so I'll try to get back into it. Rather than bore you with DEMA reports, I'll bore you with highlights of my trip.

First and foremost...



After that it was pretty much all downhill.

Actually, a customer we had on the boat the week before the trip knew Phoenix and recommended we go to Gallo Blanco, a small mexican place that was real good. It was close to the airport so we decided to do lunch there after landing. This is a shot of the tacos and a torta we had. They were wonderful. It's a really good little spot for some good mexican food for a good price... she didn't even mention the urinals!

Here's a bunch more photos from the trip.

We hit a zoo/aquarium, ate more food, saw some Vegas, ate at the Horny
Toad in Cave Creek Arizona(who's motto "Enter yourself and enjoy" is a classic. Mannaged to see an ancient Indian cliff dwelling. It was an interesting spot, sort of idyllic with a river, flat area beneath the cliffs to grow crops. Interesting it went vacant around 1500 or so.






We were able to spend some time with our parents on the front end of the Vegas portion of the trip... good fun for us as we don't get to see them all that often.

All in all we did a whole lot of very little. I'll close with a shot of my 52nd birthday dinner meal - a 22 inch loaded hot dog at Alice Cooper's restaurant in Phoenix. Now I can say "been there, done that", if not for the fries, two would have been a cinch to eat.

That's it for a vacation report, I'll spare you the details of DEMA other than it was a pretty busy show.... lots of dive stuff to look at.

Later,

Steve

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

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