Scuba Diving Vacations

It was nice and sunny the other morning and I was in the area so I stopped at Kahalu'u beach and took a short video. I need to learn the Olympus Pen camera still, next time I'll try manual focus, the automatic focus in video mode tends to drift.

Kahalu'u is a little public park on the south end of Alii drive in the Keauhou area.
It's technically outside of the town of Kailua, but I consider it all to be Kailua - there's ancient family names for all sorts of villages here. Kailua is now the business hub of Kona (which extends from the south end of Anaehoomalu Beach up north to the south end of Manuka Bay to the south). It wasn't all that long ago that Captain Cook, up in coffee country, was the center of commercial and governmental activity on the west side of the island. I went to a traffic meeting back in about '04 or so and the Mayor said many of the problems here stem from the fact that in 1970, Kailua had a population of 291 (under 300, I may be off by 6 or so in either direction) and there's been not all that much time to effect major changes to keep up with the population boom. I came here with family as a kid back in 1972' or so... the town pretty much ended at Hualalai road, the Hilton (now the Royal Kona) was practically out of town, the King Kamehameha hotel was a grocery, and there was a long barely 2 lane road from town that, from what I can remember as a kid, ended at the little blue church on north end of what is now Kahalu'u park. We went down there nearly every day to body surf next to the church - I had no idea how good the snorkeling was here at that time.

Back to the beach... it's got a bit of a beach for sunning, but you kind of need to get there early to find space. The highlight here is snorkeling. Resident turtles, lots of fish, some reef (please do not stand on it, try to stand only on sand, best not to stand at all... just snorkel to your heart's content) and shallow water makes for good beginner to intermediate level snorkeling. When Pat and I came out here on our first visit, we hit the park and snorkeled in the late afternoon (actually, not the best time of day) and loved it.

Later,

Steve

Last night we did another manta dive off the Kona airport. Water conditions were awesome... flat and clear... Our divers saw one manta in the distance on the first dive, then while we were taking our surface interval five or six mantas swam by the boat. There apparently were 11 or so mantas at the site on the night dive according to one of the videographers.

I went home after the night dive and turned on Jimmy Kimmel and straight up at midnight... the cable went out. It was still out this morning. The story I'm hearing is that somehow an undersea cable was severed and we won't have cable 'til it's repaired. Severed undersea cable? Gotta be the act of some giant sea monster surely.

Suposedly much or all of the Big Island is out of cable service. No TV, and internet options are limited. I've got service through the phone company here at the shop so I can still play on the internet. Major cable outages can effect things here, from what I understand the hospital and Kaiser both have their patient records based on Oahu and have no access to them right now 'til the cable's back up. There are notices on the radio station recommending people reschedule all but urgent care visits. My e-mail is routed through my cable connection, if I don't have cable service tomorrow I'll need to configure the shop laptop to check my mail. I can let it slide for a day, some days I'm running double charters and I just don't have time to spend on the computer, but I hate not answering e-mail reasonably promptly.

Here's a shot of a Sargassum Frogfish that Cathy took some time ago.

No charter today, too bad, it's wonderful outside. Sunny, little to no vog, mild breeze and very flat seas. Great diving conditions!

Later,

Steve

EDIT NOTE: I arrived home mid-afternoon and it appears the giant sea monster was no match for Time Warner/Oceanic Cablesystems. TV and computer are working.

LATER EDIT NOTE: The news just came on (5pm here) and said it was more or less a statewide outing of cable TV/internet/cable phones. Wow. Oahu and Kauai were restored early in the day, Maui and the Big Island had longer outages. It apparently was a single cable compromised between Maui and Oahu at about 3000 feet of depth... still might have been a sea monster that caused all of this after all. they figure it'll be weeks before they can pull up the cable and check it out, in the meanwhile everything's been re-routed.

The past couple of weeks I had a couple different sets of customers say they've read some nice reviews of us on www.Undercurrent.org. Undercurrent is sort of the bible for travel divers. It's a pay site and members review operators from all over the world, so it's a handy spot to look up reviews from fairly frequent experienced dive travelers. I hadn't been on there in ages so I thought I'd take a peek at the reviews in the Hawaii section. It's nice to see that I must be doing something OK, from 2008 through today (2008 was about the time I started getting to where I was going out at least 4 days a week) I've got about as many or more positive reviews on the site as any of the operators here in Kona, and I'm small potatoes (as far as the actual number of divers I service) compared to several of the big well established operators. I'm done patting myself on the back now.

Anyway, that got me to thinking about review sites where people can go to at least check on potential operators when visiting a new dive location. A good one I like to check out is Scubaboard. It's a busy forum website with forums covering pretty much all things scuba, it has a travel forum section broken down into regions (states, countries and such) and is a great source for picking up some info on operators. Scubadiving.com is another message board that has a number of followers, although it doesn't seem to be as busy as the previous one I mentioned. Over the past couple of months I've found Yelp and Tripadvisor have review spots for businesses of all types, including dive operators.

With most of the non-pay sites it seems the big operators get the bulk of the comments, it makes sense. For instance, being a 6 pack operator I'll probably never get the kind of comment activity that larger established companies receive. My best month ever (so far) was March of this year, I had 34 total individuals come on the boat, most for multiple outings... some companies here can, and do, put that many customers or more on their boats in a day. Word of mouth takes time... so on that note, I'll do a one time solicitation... if you've been on my boat in the past and had a great time, feel free to visit yelp.com or tripadvisor.com and post something nice some day, it can't hurt. Thanks in advance to anyone who posts something.

Anyway, there are sites that you can research to find out a little more infomation about operators so you're not going in completely blind when looking at a new operator to try out.

Aloha,

Steve