Scuba Diving Vacations

Turtle Cleaning Station Kona Hawaii from Steve on Vimeo.
Today's diving was good. Cathy did the first dive, at Golden Arches, and reported viz approaching 200 feet, mentioned it was warmer too. I did the second dive at Turtle Pinnacle. As we approached the dive site we were in very deep water (I didn't have the sonar set up, but we were off the reef and in deep water, probably 150-200 feet) and could still see the bottom. We pulled up to Turtle Pinnacle and probably had 135 feet or so of viz on the reef. This site is not one that's known for it's viz, so conditions were excellent today.

Turtle Pinnacle is a turtle cleaning station. Turtles will swim to there and solicit a cleaning from tangs (surgeonfish). In it's heyday, you could generally count on seeing several turtles there. The last few years it's been more hit and miss. We had two turtles at the site today. One was there for a cleaning, the other looked like it was just looking for a ledge to tuck under for a sleep at the time.

The turtles will often lay down and spread out for a good cleaning. The video above shows classic swimming cleaning behavior. This can get fun if there's several turtles wanting to be cleaned. It's almost as if they get jealous... turtles will swim over to a swimming turtle being cleaned and cut in tight trying to steal their fish!

Later,

Steve

Aloha!

As you probably notice, I'm pimping our vacation rental a bit this post. It's been running full and I just looked at the availability calendar and noticed we've got lots of availability yet for this summer. We're located down in Captain Cook between the upper highway and the water, on the road that goes down to the old wharf that people use to launch their kayaks to paddle over to the Captain Cook Monument. We like to think it's a nice spot. It's roughly a 25-45 (traffic can be slow on school days in the morning) minute drive into Kailua, so it's away from the touristy crowds. If you are curious, you can check it out here.

I've got two days off in a row, the only time this month. We've been pretty busy, that's a good thing. Yesterday I put together a quick e-mail newsletter to send out to the mailing list. I've ignored putting out a newsletter for about a year... I can't bring myself to take the time to write one up send one out when there's not a whole lot new going on - I can do that here. Today I've got another project in mind that will keep me busy for the day.

The fish above is a Titan Scorpion (Scorpaenopsis cacopsis). This one's probably about 15-18 inches in length. They can sit right out in the open and blend in with the surrounding rock and coral.... they're tough to spot, and just as tough to photograph to where they show up in the photo. They're one of the "stonefish" you hear about, with venomous spines. This particular one seems to like a specific rock outcropping at one of the sites we dive, but it's so difficult to spot we only find it every now and then, usually in the same general area.

Later,

Steve