Kona Hawaii

I had the day off today and thought I'd go out for a hike, but it turned to rain so that plan was ditched. I've been wanting to hike the trail to the Captain Cook monument, to see if I can still do it after all these years (maybe a stupid thing if I make it down but have troubles on the way up). It's been very gray yesterday and today and I figured it might be a good day without sun to do the hi

We keep seeing these little fish from time to time. Cathy found this one practically right under the boat at Golden Arches on our first charter back after the trip, so I had to pop over the side and get a quick photo. It's since moved and we haven't been able to find it. We've found several this year up and down the coast, now that we know what we're looking for I suspect we'll keep finding the

Spinner Dolphins on a dive in Kona Hawaii from Steve on Vimeo.Here's a quick video clip I took on a dive the other week. We were checking out some pinnacles and a few spinner dolphins swam by.... It's short, I had to change the camera into video mode, but you get the idea. We were probably within aobut 20 feet of them when they went by. Aloha, Steve

Last night we did the manta dive up off the Kona airport. Three mantas showed for the dive, spending the first part of the dive with the divers and then moving up to the snorkelers. I was leading the night dive, when the mantas moved off we went on a tour of the reef. One of the other DMs wrote me a message that there was a big nudibranch off the deeper end of the site. We went and checked it o

It's a fairly busy week here in Kona... Ironman is this Saturday. Ironman is likely the world's most famous triathlon event, held here annually for almost three decades. I can still remember the big worldwide showing of the '82 Ironman on television where the woman who was leading collapsed just short of the finish line and was passed after what seemed like minutes of crawling (she eventually ma

Ok, this is a pretty commercial topic. I've been checking on airfares on a trip we picked up tickets for back in the spring, we picked up ours just in time. I kept an eye on it and the price increases were downright surprising over the course of the spring and summer... nearly doubled... just recently they took a nosedive and are approaching what we originally purchased them for. Tonight I chec

The "summer" water conditions we've been wanting finally hit now that it's officially autumn. It's been really flat. The other day we did a dive down off "shark fin rock", off the old airport park, and one of our divers said he'd looked up when they got to 100' of depth and he could still see the boat... thing is, they were over 100' away from the boat at the time, and if I recall my 10th grade ma

Manta rays eating plankton in Kona Hawaii from Steve on Vimeo.The manta ray dive has been pretty active the last couple of weeks. Here's a short video from a slow night a few months back. If you want to see what it's like on a busy night, go to my May archives, or click on the "video" label below.This video does a good job of showing the plankton that the mantas feed on. Plankton is a mix of sm

Cathy found this frogfish back in February and we've been watching it grow. It was maybe nickel/quarter size back when she first found it and now we're talking 6-7 inches in length... I had no idea they grow that fast. We've got about 4 frogfish that we're checking on fairly frequently and another couple that we run into on certain dive sites. Hopefully they'll stick around where they are, but

Bigfin Squid in Kona Hawaii from Steve on Vimeo. Hi there, here's a short video clip I took on the night I got the underwater photos of the squid I've posted earlier. They change color almost constantly. They seem quite curious about the goings on of the night dive. I took a bunch of pictures in a few minutes time on that dive, and a few of them turned out, so I've got a bunch of color vari

I went downtown today. I've often wandered past a restaurant that has been voted in the local paper as having the best burger in town. I'm usually kind of dubious of those reader poll "best of" reviews, as in the past I've seen some pretty mediocre hamburgers win the award. Anyway, I went in to them to give it a try.Splasher's Grill is located across from the Kailua sea wall, it's kind of tough

Hi again,Most of the shots I post are macro shots of individual critters, I rarely show the reef. Kona is very nice in that it has lots of healthy reef near shore that we can explore.I liked this particular lobe coral in that it's a huge head and has the large antler coral growing out of the top of it, you don't see other corals growing out of lobe corals all that often. Later, Steve

OK, so the picture is of an anthurium... we don't have much blooming in the yard right now.The other week someone called me out of the blue to ask if I knew where the shop with the lady in Kailua who makes handmade clay orchids was. I don't get down to Alii drive all that often so I didn't know and wasn't any help with that question. The other day Pat and I went to town for happy hour at Don the

Kailua-Kona On The Big Island Of Hawaiiby Lena HellstenThe Big Island holds 11 different climate zones of the world, and if you're looking for a lot of sun and a gentle breeze, you'd probably spend most of your Hawaiian holiday on the west side of the island. The city on the west where most people end up is called Kailua-Kona.In the area around Kona you find a lot of white-sand beaches with calm,

Sorry no pics, it was a training dive. I had a 12 year old on the dive and a tiger shark went near us. The student probably only saw the tail end of it as it was heading off, but I got a pretty good look at it from about 25 feet away... first good look at a tiger shark since I've been here. I've only seen a glimpse of one once before, in the first year I lived here.... new divers get all the luc

Aloha Hawaii lovers,For all those of you who are planning a Hawaii visit for the fall season 2008, here is my answer to Yahoo Hawaii travel question: Is November a good time to go to Kona Hawaii? Hey, it got chosen as best answer and I got 10 points for it. What a deal!I guess 'When is the best weather for visiting Hawaii?' is one of the most asked question. Well, compared to the rainy cold mainla

I just rescued this photo from the forgotten bin. It was a little underexposed and I'd basically ignored it, but thanks to the fact that I shoot in RAW it was quite saveable. We saw this one on a dive last month and I haven't posted a photo of it yet.

Pawai Bay from Steve on Vimeo.This video is actually a hair outdated as I took it a couple of months ago when the whales were still here... and the water's generally flatter now. Pawai Bay is one of our many great dive sites. There are 6 moorings in the area, with two more at a site just to the south. It was one of the first marine preserves over here, and being protected there are a lot of fis

Manta ray night dive, Kona Hawaii May 6th, '08 from Steve on Vimeo.This is a short clip from the manta dive last night. This particular night there were roughly 50 or so divers sharing 6-7 mantas. This clip is a short uncut version of what can go on for 45-60 minutes straight on a good night. It's kinda funny, we get people who say "we've already been to stingray city in the Carribean" or "we've seen mantas on dives in 'X location'" as though they've seen it all and the night dive is going to be nothing special, then they do this dive and get 5,10,30,50 minutes (depends on the night, some nights we get nothing, many are just plain amazing) of continuous headbumping manta ray bombardment and come up raving about it being the coolest dive they've ever done. I've been leading this dive sin

Scuba diving off Kona Hawaii from Steve on Vimeo.Here's a quickie underwater video of part of the drop off at the Place of Refuge taken with my Canon G9.

The standard morning dive outing in Kona tends to be a two tank outing, diving one tank at each of two locations. Some operators do offer a three tank day on occasion. I'm not aware of any at this point that offer a regularly scheduled 3 tank trip, but several will do it when there are enough customers to make a go of it.We did a three tanker yesterday. Our first dive was up north above the airport at a spot a handful of us go to on occasional basis. It's a great live boat dive with both deep and shallow reefs so we can do a deeper multilevel dive and still do a long dive. Highlights of that dive were a manta ray right off the bat, and the reef structure of the dive... lots of grand topography.Our second dive was at Pipe Dream, which is right off the westernmost point of the island on

Wierd little video of people snorkeling with manta rays from Steve on Vimeo. We've been pretty busy lately, I've got a lull coming for several days before the spring break rush kicks in for about a month. Last night we did a manta dive. About half of our group was divers and the other half snorkelers. I posted plenty on this before, but this is a video of what it looks like to the boat Captains during the dives. The divers are down below in about 32-34 feet of water and the mantas spend their time between the divers on the bottom and the snorkelers on the surface. If you look real hard, you'll see brief instances where there's a real bright spot directly under a group or two of the snorkelers on the left side of the video about half way in... that's actually a manta ray doing belly

Surf, Sand and Stars Buffet at Four Seasons Kona Hawaii from Steve on Vimeo.We went out for our big meal of the year this weekend. We went to the Four Seasons for their Saturday night beach buffet. It's a spendy (75/78 bucks or so a head) and very delicious meal. I'm getting old, so I restrained myself and only had 10 lobster tail halves, a couple pieces of steak, a bunch of lillikoi pork ribs, a pile of steamer clams, a few salads (I didn't know fried chicken could be a salad, but they had fried chicken salad... and here I'd been overlooking salads all this time) and a few deserts (the chocolate souffle was delicious)... I skipped the sushi table altogether. It's a delicious dinner, and even the kids at the place had fun... they break out a fairly sizeable telescope after dark.Sometimes

Now there's a phrase that's probably not gonna be googled a lot. Something few people know is that several species of fish are actually hermaphroditic. In the case of these fish, Psychedelic Wrasses (Anampses chrysocephalus), they all start as females that form a harem under a dominant male. If the male ever disappears, then the dominant female will change sex and become a male. Protogynous hermaphrodites go from female to male. The reverse is true in protandrous hermaphrodites. I suspect there are some Hawaiian fish that might do that, but you'd have to ask a marine biologist... but there are some recognizeable fish elsewhere that do just that. The most common ones I can think of are several of the clownfish (everyone seems to know them as "Nemo" these days) species. They start as

Here's a shot of some spinner dolphins right outside of Honokohau Harbor. Several days a week we might see a resident pod that hangs out in front of the harbor and a few other spots. When they are in, you have a fair chance of seeing them on nearby divesites... way cool!!!

Hi again, The last post was sorta commercial, but hopefully informative for some, so I thought I'd bump it down a post. I really don't post many pics of divers doing their thing. Part of it is I don't want to infringe on anyone's privacy and lots of times I take pictures with divers in them I'm close enough to really tell who they are, and more often than not, when I take a shot from a distance it comes out crummy to where I can't photoshop it well. Typically they get tons of red in them after the fixes, these I took out as much red as I could. I'm hoping with the RAW function on the Canon G9 (which I really didn't use on my Olympus sp-350) I'll be able to get a relatively accurate color of the deeper scenes. Diving in Kona is different from many places in that nearly all of our dive

Wish I had some pictures of Humpbacks, Banded Coral Shrimp will have to do. Pat took a shot of these a couple weeks back. I really liked this picture because of the second shrimp being in the background.We've been hearing reports of whale sightings lately. We joined in on a garage sale on the weekend to get some old junk out of our garage and could see them off in the ocean off Kailua town in the afternoon.Maybe this will be the year I get to see the whales underwater? Bob has, Cathy has, even some of my customers have on dives I've captained... I'm about due I hope. Aloha, Steve

Aloha,This is a Scrambled Egg Nudibranch I took a picture of the other day. They're about our most commonly seen nudibranchs off Kona. I forgot to mention the water temp on the last dive... surprisingly enough the big swell we had didn't seem to drop the temp any. Bob and I were both still seeing 79 degrees on our computers.Today I'm finishing up cleaning up our vacation rental as we have renters coming in tonight. The rental and the immediate yard in front of it were spared any of the flood damage. We've finsihed cleaning the mud out of the garage and have sandbagged around the back end of the house to hopefully keep it getting wet again if we have another huge rain. We talked with someone from the county and they told us to hang tight before re-doing the yard as a coffee farm above us is where the waterflow problem is and they'll havve to fix their property to keep ours from getting nailed on huge rains. Hopefully "huge" means huge, we've seen 3 rains in the last two wee

Just playing around with the new camera. The video looks pretty darned good straight out of the camera. Youtube compresses it a great deal so it's not quite as nice. I did a dive this afternoon just for fun with the camera. I've got to learn the Canon menu, but a few things turned out fairly Ok and look as though when I go into photoshop I'll be able to get them looking the way I want.

Aloha!I've just realized the blog's over two years old and has over 300 posts. I'm about flat out of pictures that are decent. This is a shot of a Leaf Scorpionfish I took a couple of years back, there's another angle of it very early in the blog. Feel free to go back through the archives to see lots of underwater photos, as well as an excess of verbiage.Been busy the last little bit... some charters off my friend's boat.... some chasing around for my boat and trailer.... and a whole lot of worrying.... but the boat is back, and so far it seems better than ever. We've had it out the last few days breaking in the new engines and getting used to the differences in the handling. It's been pretty choppy on the water and I've only had it up to three quarter's throttle so far, but it moves pretty good. I've got enough time on the engines I can run it at full throttle for a couple minutes if I want, it's been a little too choppy on the water to do that so far, the reality is

I took a drive up north the other day. I'd forgotten how dry the South Kohala area can be compared to where I live. The Big Island has so many different climates, you only need to go an hour or less in a different direction if you want a change of scenery. You can usually count on sun up north, even if it's raining in coffee country or Kailua, as they only see maybe 10-12 inches of rain annually in much of that area.They do have some nice beaches up north though. This is a shot of Kua Bay, which is still in Kona. It's at the north end of Kekaha Kai State Park (formerly known as Kona Coast State Park) It runs from Kua Bay down to the south entrance of the park which is about 3 miles north of the Kona airport. There are several beaches in the park, with Kua Bay being the smallest but easiest to reach as they've put in a nice new road to it. The road at the south end is kind of rough, but manageable (although I haven't been down it in 5 years so it could be pretty bad by now)

Today I put a couple of my passengers on my friend Ron's boat. They dove with me a few years back and came over to dive again. Today's experience was sort of one of those "once in a lifetime" experiences for them. These four shots were taken by Alan from Scotland on the charter.The group was just finishing their first dive and Ron noticed a group of boats offshore, figured it had to be a whaleshark or something exciting. The group got about a half hour of snorkeling with it before it was all over. This last photo gives you an idea of the size of the shark compared to a person. Aloha, Steve

I'm already planning a trip with my sister, and that would kinda burn half of the leave I have. So it's time to plan something for my boyfriend as well? I have to be fair to both parties, right? Come to think of it, I've never actually gone overseas with my dearest, darling, boyfriend of mine. Gosh and we've been together for nearly 2 years! Tsk. How pathetic... Damn, I'd probably be going Hawaii with my sister (or not), so it wouldn't make much sense to go there with my boyfriend as well, right? WRONG! Hawaii is kinda big. Almost every part of it is amazing. Beside, my boyfriend's nickname is "monkey", and I would assume that monkeys love the sun, right? So, maybe I should consider going for the "kona hawaii vacation rentals"? I mean there's no harm going for a double "Hawaii Travel"... as long as it's not exactly the same place right? Advertisement: Continue reading...

We had a cool cloudy day in south Kona today. I had the day off and didn't make it into town, so I have no idea what it was like in Kailua or north today. That's one of the wierd things about the Big Island, the weather where you are isn't necessarily what the weather is 15 miles away... we have to explain that to customers sometimes when they're up at the resorts and it's blowing a gale, it's often windfree down where we're diving. A little news I saw in yesterday's paper that may affect some shoredivers... The ladder at the old wharf at Mahukona apparently washed away during big surf recently. There's been some type of ladder there for years, it was rebar for a long time, then sometime in the last couple of years someone put in a stainless pool ladder. Anyway it's gone and nobody at the county is making a decision as to whether they are responsible for replacing it or not. They noted they'd make a decision later in the week. I suspect some local mystery benefactor h

This is my last post about the earthquake unless something real interesting on a personal note comes up. I thought I'd pass along some links to the local paper and one of the Oahu TV stations... Take a look at West Hawaii Today and The Hawaii Channel for more thorough information.The earthquake made for an interesting morning here in South Kona, but was far more of an event up Kohala and Hamakua direction. One of Pat's co-workers who lives up north apparently had major home damage, as in the roof fell in and windows blew out. I'm sure we'll be hearing lots more stories of more serious damage tomorrow. Hopefully the first reports that nobody was seriously hurt hold up.Take care all. Steve

Just kidding. We rarely have any earthquakes of any real damage, in fact I can't think of any actual damage from a quake here since I've moved here. Here's the only real evidence near my property. We've always had some rock overhanging near the road just down from our property line. It fell, didn't go very far. There are lots of smaller rocks, primarily from the older rock walls, along side the roads in many parts of Kona also.Pat called to tell me to not be surprised if our next renter calls wondering if things are OK. I'm gradually hearing from friends and family on the mainland also wondering. Not too much looks out of the ordinary at the home though. Apparently the upper floor of the hospital took a pretty good hit, also apparently North Hawaii Hospital also was damaged.Here's a bonus natural phenomenon photo... We saw three funnel clouds the other day, I remembered I actually had the camera in the car. Tornados are not a problem here in general, but we do see wate

We had a nice couple of couples on board the other day. It was a nice day of diving for all. Bob found a little frogfish at a site that I need to try to get to with a camera before it moves on... it's a type of frogfish we don't see all that much.I get busy again for a while starting tomorrow night. We've got a group of divers coming over from one of the other islands for the manta dive. After that we'll be off Friday and then pretty much working every day of the month, with maybe a day off on Wednesday. Bob leaves for the Galapagos (man, is that gonna be some fun for him) on the 1st, so I'm trying to work out coverage for the first half of next month 'til he gets back.Above is a photo of Spanish Dancer Nudibranch eggs, also called a "sea rose" by some. In real life, this egg mass is about 2.5 to 3 inches across. I saw a large Spanish Dancer (say 10 inches or so long) on the night dive last month, it was a full group so I didn't bother with the camera, I wish I'd had it.

Not that it's really all that slow, but it is compared to summer and the holidays. My week's starting to fill in because of a couple of phone calls. Today I'm heading down to the boat to sand for a few hours. I'm going to try to repaint the interior of the boat on my off days this week, then when I hit an empty spell in the next month or two, see if I can get the exterior repainted. It's a work boat and will never make the cover of boat beautiful, but it definitely needs some cosmetic work while it's slow.I've been getting occasional "last minute" calls lately... last night I got one at 8:35PM wanting to go on the night dive... which started at 4PM. As a head's up, I would suggest that people try to arrange to schedule at least their first dive of their trip in advance. If you know for sure that you want to dive, I'd recommend setting up at least the first dive before you get here, if you know you want to dive a lot then try to set it all up well in advance. Kona is not

We had great viz and other diving conditions today. I'm sort of on the front end of working at least 13 of 14 deys, likely will see that stretch lengthen before it slows down again later this month or early next month.We've been going out with a couple of certified divers the last few days, and then had some Open Water certification students yesterday afternoon and today. We had lots of nice diving in that time. This is a picture of an eagle ray that was at a cleaning station. We've got a spot where the eagle rays occasionally lay down and take a cleaning from the cleaner wrasses. You can see at least two wrasses, the little yellow and blue fish, picking parasites off this ray. I think there were actually four working the ray over at the time. I didn't really get all that close so as not to bother it while it was getting cleaned. This shot was probably from about 15 feet away, I used manual white balance to keep from getting too much of a blue cast which is so common in und

This isn't the best picture of one of these little fish, but it's the only one I have. They are interesting fish in that they have an almost eel-like flexibility that you generally do not see in freeswimming fish. Looking at the photo you can see the false eyespot on the tail - the real eye is on the right side in this picture. They do tend to dart into holes when you approach, we don't see them often. I took it today on a quick "captain's dive" (I captained the boat today, but one of my crew is also a captain, so I was able to sneak in the water during the surface interval) between dives one and two on today's charter.It was a quick dive, but I managed to see an eagle ray, a tiger moray that was burying itself into the coral before I could get there, a school of Heller's barracuda, the Curious Wormfish (Gunnellichthys curiosus), bunches of anthias and about a 40-50 pound Jack and ohter goodies. I was in a hurry and didn't get close enough to anything to get a decent shot, s

Well, besides watching turkeys - yes turkeys are gettting quite common at elevation here, we've got 2 hens with chicks up our road right now - you've got all sorts of stuff to do here. This particular shot was taken just up the hill from us, those are mac nut trees in the background. We tend to see more pheasants than turkeys in our yard.The two things that you can do here which I consider to be world class, as in you are unlikely or hard pressed to be able to do this anywhere else in the world, are the manta ray night dive and visiting the lava flow. The lava flow does happen to be on the other side of the island, which is a bit of a trip (2 .5 hours or so by car) but well worth it when the lava is flowing and you can approach it. The lava flow is also worth a blog on it's own, I'll leave that for someone else.Today Bob and I finished off a student's Open Water certification class. It was a very easy day as he was very well prepared and had better buoyancy control than many o

Ok, stupid post title, I'm just giving the search engines something to digest. I keep forgetting that I do have some short videos I can post... I'm running out of newer photos.The surf is quite up today. It'll probably be up again tomorrow and then will hopefully settle back down for a while, we've had a cold front hanging off to the northwest.Octopus are neat critters. Lots of DMs/dive guides will grab these guys 'til they're inked out and then hand them off the customers. I prefer to just lay low and sit back a few feet to see if they'll give a show. It's neat how they can change their textures and colors practically instantly. The video doesn't give it justice, but it does give you an idea of what they do. Good evening, Steve

Stupid title, but I just noticed I've never really put the word "blog" in a title in my blog and I get lousy position results when doing a google for "hawaii blog" and such... just thought I'd see if titles mean anything to search engines.So this is a Cerianthus tube anemone. We don't see them all that often. I found this one about 120 feet out in the sand, and I've talked to a tech diver who said they're usually found at 150'+, which is beyond the standard recreational depth of 130' and shallower. We used to keep them in aquariums and they were fairly hardy, but they can take up a lot of space in the tank, clownfish generally won't go into them, and they are kind of nasty... I had a customer who said her's was actively hunting and eating her fish and I hadn't see that before so I went for a visit and saw it first hand. When a fish went near you could see the tentacles all move in the direction of the fish. There was no need to make contact, the tentacles would all sway t