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Aloha Theater and Aloha Angel Cafe in Kainaliu, Kona, Hawaii
2008-01-05 22:37:00
I thought I'd talk a bit about a local South Kona Landmark. The Aloha Theater 's been around for ages. They hold plays, host musicians, and screen the occasional movie (usually independant films, we saw "My Big fat Greek wedding" there when it was too small to hit the big theaters). There's been a restaurant there since we've moved here, it was originally a breakfast and lunch spot and added dinner after an ownership change and slight name change to it's current Aloha Angel Cafe . Anyway, it's long been known for good food and Hawaii an time service (slow service is very common here). We decided to give it a try the other week and had a great breakfast and prompt service. They put out a nice breakfast, Pat and I both had one of the day's specials... this day it was Prime rib, eggs and potatoes... yummy... it ran in the 13 buck range if I recall correctly. I wouldn't hesitate to return, especially if the service continues to be that prompt.

Happy New year!
2008-01-03 20:23:00
Just touching bases... we've been really busy the last 10-12 days or so. The diving has been pretty good, there were a few predicted swells that really didn't cause much surf here in Kona. I've got a night dive tonight. We were skunked on the dive last week, but apparently there were seven mantas on the dive a couple of days back.The photo above is of White Margin Nudibranchs (Glossodoris rufomarginata). We see them quite often on overhangs, archways or caves. Pat took it on a dive at "Golden Arches". The best way to spot them is to look for their spiral shaped egg masses, if you see an egg mass the "parents" are generally nearby. Aloha, Steve
More About: New Year , Hawaii , Happy , Happy New Year , Year

Which wetsuit to wear for Hawaii?
2007-12-21 07:17:00
Aloha,I get asked this question several times a month, and see it on message boards quite often, so I might as well address this at least once. There is no single correct answer other than "wear the one you will be comfortable in" as people come in all shapes, sizes and cold tolerance. In general though, you can typically say the bigger you are the less you will need.Here in Kona the water temperature typically runs from the 74/75 degree range during the late winter to the 81/82 degree range in the very late summer early fall, with a swing a degree or two above or below those numbers every couple of years.During the warmer seasons, a 3 mil full wetsuit will do most scuba divers just fine, with larger people doing fine in a shorty or nothing if cold tolerant. Snorkelers will often need nothing, although we always throw in a shorty for the night manta snorkel just ot help for warmth and buoyancy.During the cooler seasons some divers may need more thermal protection. If you are my ...
More About: Hawaii , Wear

Moray eel cleaning station.
2007-12-20 05:27:00
Eel cleaning station from Steve on Vimeo.Well, the Brightcove video hosting experiment is over, they've stopped the uploading of personal videos to concentrate on their business applications. So this is a trial with Vimeo.com . It's pretty easy to use so far, I've only loaded this compressed video on to it. I'll try something uncompressed larger later on.Anyway, this is a cleaning station down deep. Cleaner shrimp of various types will set up and eels and other fish will come by for a cleaning. Shrimp seen here are a scarlet cleaner shrimp and a ghost shrimp. I took this with my Canon G9, and a hand held flashlight. Aloha, StevePS: Just looked at the blog... you can go into full screen mode if so inclined with this quite readily, cool, I'll have to upload some uncompressed stuff to see how it looks.
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The humpback whales have returned to Kona Hawaii...
2007-12-18 09:08:00
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
More About: Hawaii , Kona , Whales , Hale

2 mantas at the Kona manta ray night dive this Saturday...
2007-12-17 08:33:00
Actually one extra showed up at the very end of the dive. Bob and I were out with some customers from Oahu for the dive. They really enjoyed it and asked me to give them a heads up the next time we start seeing big numbers for a stretch so they could give that a try.Bob said the water temp had dropped on his computer by 2 degrees from the day before. That tends to happen in December when the temperature starts dropping, each new northwest swell can potentially drop it a degree or two. He saw 77 on his computer yesterday afternoon... still fairly warm but this year never really topped out too warm so it could be cool by next month.Above is a Wire Coral Goby (Bryaninops yongei?) that Pat took a picture of a few weeks back. These guys spend pretty much their entire lives living on a wire coral, adult lives anyway as I'm not sure what the larvae and juveniles do.I stayed up top for both dives so I didn't get to have any of the fun. My big excitment for the night was just hearing a...
More About: Hawaii , Night , Manta , Kona , Saturday

It's a beautiful day in Kona Hawaii
2007-12-13 22:15:00
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 ...
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Great weather, great water conditions, great diving....
2007-12-12 07:25:00
This was our first day back out with a charter since the weather and water took a turn for the worse almost a couple weeks back. It's actually been diveble the last couple of days but we didn't have anything scheduled. Kona's nice for diving in that with our rocky shores, the water doesn't really get messy/muddy, if the wind and surf comes up and make it poor for diving all's you have to do is wait it out and you'll have good conditions again in a day or so. We had 70-80 feet of viz on the dives today in the shallows, better out on the edge of the reef.We got to the first site and the viz looked fabulous, so I took the perrogative and chose to lead the first dive while Bob played Captain. It was good to get back in the water again, got to see some fun stuff, including Flame Wrasses (my pictures turned out horrible) and Flame Angelfish. On the second dive I stayed up top and Bob led a drift dive. They saw a Dragon Moray! Bob has all the luck!Now normally nothing happens ...
More About: Weather , Hawaii , Great , Water , Diving

Whoohoo!! The power's on this evening.... also.... Time lapse photography w
2007-12-07 06:11:00
Aloha, We've had a heck of a week here. Following the floods of last week, we had a single decent diving day and then things started to go downhill. By earlier this week, pertty much every boat in Kona was off the water due to a cold front that brought in strong southwest winds to do battle with the northwest surf. The winds started getting fairly strong over land a couple of days ago and we've had a bunch of power outages. We've spent most of the last 2 days without power at home. Yesterday brought in another freak rain. I'd heard last week we had something in the neighborhood of 7.5 inches of rain in a few hours. Last night it was close. It didn't seem like it rained that hard for that long, but our neighbor's 4 inch rain gauge was overflowing after he emptied it yesterday morning. Pat talked to someone locally at her work that had a 6 inch gauge overflow yesterday. At any rate we had rivers in the yard again just 20 minutes into the rain, at least they didn't take...
More About: Photography , Hawaii , Time , Time Lapse

Sloppy water in Kona the last few days...
2007-12-04 05:03:00
Aloha,We've hit a rare little stretch where the water is quite rough. Surfers are probably loving it, but it's not great for diving in. On the manta dive the other night it was pretty nice, but the surge was coming up. On the way home the winds were sort of battling the swell and it was a rough ride, and it seems to have more or less stayed that way for a couple of days. This afternoon I could hear the surf from my home, which is about 2.5 miles by road and over a mile as the crow flies from the ocean. I'm hoping it settles down, the news said to expect big swells on Oahu - sometimes they hit us, sometimes they are blocked by Oahu and Maui.The picture above was taken by Pat on a dive a couple of weeks back, it's a semi-closeup shot of a cushion star. The neat thing about this photo is the critter that was on it - here's a closeup.... This is some type of Imperial Shrimp which hangs out on the cushion stars. Different colored stars will have shrimp that more or less match t...
More About: Hawaii , Kona , Water , Days , The Last

Sunset from the manta dive.
2007-12-01 10:22:00
Here's a sunset from the manta dive last week. Today I had charters in the morning and evening. When I packed up my camera today, I forgot to pull out the memory card from the computer... which seems to practically guarantee we'll see something interesting I can't take a picture of... as it so happened, I noticed a fin sticking up on the way to our first dive site and slowed down to find a good sized pelagic manta ray. These guys are different than the manta rays we typically see on the night dive, they're solid black and typically larger than the ones we see regularly. We were able to put our divers in with it for a few minutes.Tonight's manta dive was very good. Bob said there was probably at least a dozen. We had a pretty sloppy ride home (northwest swell and southwest winds sort of stacks things up) and pretty good surge on the dive, but the divers had a great time. Later, Steve
More About: Hawaii , Sunset , Manta , Kona , Dive

Had some flash floods in Kona yesterday. One came through our yard....
2007-11-30 06:50:00
I wanted to post this yesterday, but our cable/internet was down for over a day.After yesterday's charter the weather started looking bad. I called my evening clients to give them a heads up that they could cancel if they wanted but they said they'd prefer to meet me at the regular time and we'd look at conditions before making a decision. 20 minutes later the thunderstorms began and I got a call saying they'd take a raincheck... good idea. Pat was in town so I met up with her and we went to lunch at the Harbor House (which is a great place for lunch and a beer at Honokohau Harbor) and we're stopping off at Macy's on the way home when we got a call from my parents (who arrived for a visit the night before). They said a veritible river, full of boulders, was coming out of our driveway and blocking Napo'opo'o road. I'm telling them "oh, that happens all the time" thinking it's the typical 4-6 inches deep of water streams with rocks tumbling through that we often see in v...
More About: Flash , Hawaii , Kona , Yesterday , Yard

Cruisin' with the turtles...
2007-11-27 00:44:00
This one was straight from the camera into Brightcove. Pretty clear.
More About: Hawaii , Turtles

Here's a macro shot with the Canon g-9
2007-11-26 04:40:00
I took advantage of the sun today to take a shot of one of the plants outside of our house. The camera can get much closer, but I wanted to show a bit more of the bloom. This is a closeup photo of a Blue Ginger (Dichorisandra thyrsiflora) which is found in many Hawaiian gardens. Later, Steve
More About: Canon , Shot , Macro , Acro , Anon

Test, test, test...
2007-11-26 02:06:00
I stumbled across a different video hoster while checking out another local blog so I thought I'd try uploading a manta video I've posted a couple of times over the years. The hosting service is called Brightcove and uses the latest Adobe Flash codecs, supposedly it might be a little better than what I've been using, I looked at the old video (June 24th, 2007) and couldn't see a lot of difference. later, Steve
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Hardly a cloud in the sky in Kona today....
2007-11-25 23:55:00
It's a gorgeous day in Kona today. There weren't any clouds over Hualalai (the volcano over Kailua) earlier today. One of these days I need to get a shot of the mountain to show.Here's a Gold Lace Nudibranch (Halgerda terramtuentis) that Pat took a photo of the other day. We find them under archways and cave mouths quite frequently. Pat took this with her Canon A620... she's drooling over my G9 now, primarily because of the large LCD it has, even though the A620 is a very capable camera.Been fairly busy on the boat the last little bit. Bob and Cathy (she gave me permission to use her name so she'll get mentioned every now and then) have handled the diving the last couple of days. Lot's of long time Kona divers might recognize Cathy as she's been working the Kona area dive boats off and on since the late 70s or early 80s. She brings a wealth of Captain and Divemaster experience along with her.Water temp... Bob and I are seeing 79 on our Suunto computers, Cathy saw 75 or...
More About: Hawaii , Today , Cloud

Coming to Kona for Christmas? Better reserve early....
2007-11-22 22:50:00
Aloha, Just thought I'd post a couple of little items now that the holiday season is upon us. It seems almost every year lately I get people inquiring around mid-December asking for recommendations for places to stay for the holidays. I'll say it now.... now's the time to make as many arrangements as possible. Air and hotel first... immediately arrange for a rental car as Kona is not a place to be without one for most people... then start working on your activities. You may find if you wait 'til early or mid-December that you'll be out of luck in at least one of those areas. This is sort of a followup from my post earlier about reserving early. I thought I'd bring it up again as I already have 6 days between the 20th of December and 5th of January fully booked already. In an ideal world I'd always be scheduled out at least a week or two in advance year round, but that won't be the case for a long while I suspect as I haven't been around for a decade or more just yet...
More About: Christmas , Hawaii , Early , Reserve

More Canon G9 video taken underwater...
2007-11-21 18:46:00
Bob had some customers/friends that have dove with him over the years and has been handling the dives the last couple of days. Yesterday I took a quick 35 minute dive between dives while they were having their surface interval. Here's most of the dive compressed into about 8 minutes. Highlights were, cleaner wrasses working a variety of fish, parrotfish feeding on corals, a spotted eagle ray, the biggest unicorn tang I've seen in a long time, garden eels, anthias, various trigger fish, a juvenile razor wrasse, a rather large toby, a helmet snail chasing down a meal, a whitemouth moray hunting with groupers, a large school of heller's barracuda and more....The camera takes pretty good video. This was just taken with the standard underwater setting at all depths. I didn't try to customize the white balance as I basically was just cruising around shootinng and not trying to do anything special. The soundtrack's a bit wierd, it was the only thing I could find on Youtube that ...
More About: Video , Canon , Hawaii , Underwater , Anon

Living in Paradise is cool!
2007-11-16 08:56:00
We had a mouse run across the floor just now. Pat thought is was cute. After years of spiders, roaches and other not-so-cool critters that have almost become part of our everyday life (OK, maybe not everyday, we are terminix customers) over time, we're becoming fairly desensitized. A few years ago we had polynesian tree rats go crazy in the area... now they were cute, hopping around like pint sized kangaroos. I suspect we'll be setting out traps soon. Aloha, Steve
More About: Living , Cool , Kona , Paradise

So, when should you place your dive outing reservations?
2007-11-16 03:50:00
I started to write a long look at reserving activities, then I realized it was just a bunch of paragraphs that really didn't say much......so here it is in a nutshell. There really is no hard and fast rule for reserving activities when traveling, but if it were me, I'd pick the thing or two I really want to do, and reserve it in advance so I know it's locked in, leave some open time in case I get there and discover something interesting I want to do, then go from there. What brought this on is one little thing... Christmas is coming. Quite often I get lots of calls around 8pm looking for a dive tomorrow morning, it seems to happen almost every day during Christmas week - Sometimes I can make it happen, oftentimes I can't, it's much more difficult at that time of year.... I suspect this is true with most dive operators, especially during the busiest times.In Kona , our absolute busiest time for dive and other water oriented operators is probably Christmas week. Depending on wh...
More About: Hawaii , Reservations , Outing , Place

Long day for me today....
2007-11-15 13:20:00
We had a fun charter with a couple that have been diving with us off and on for several years. I played captain for both dives as I agreed to fill in for a few days at the job I had at the airport last spring as they were shorthanded and I had a light schedule this week. I got off work at the airport just before midnite, so I'm up way past my normal bedtime right now. The biggest highlights of todays dives were dolphins underwater and a good sized Dragon Moray Eel (wish I'd been on the dive with camera in hand for that one). They saw plenty of other great stuff, but those two sightings aren't typical of just any dive day here in Kona.I've been playing around with the camera trying a few things that wouldn't work with the cameras I've had before this just to see if it could be done with this one. This shot is uncropped, on board flash only, taken from about 20-24 inches away. The fish is maybe an inch long, if that, might be more like 3 quarters of an inch. This camera h...
More About: Hawaii , Today , Long

Today's dives were a blast....
2007-11-12 09:16:00
We went diving today and had a great time. The gentleman who was stuffed up yesterday was much better today and joined us. We dove at Hoover's, which is just off the north end of the Kona airport and at Kaloko Arches/ Kaloko Canyons or whatever you choose to call it.I had something interesting happen with the camera housing - started clouding up and got a spot or two of moisture in it so it went back to the boat - turned out to be a hair on the o-ring. Hair on the o-rings of housings has killed many a camera over the years, I lucked out. I'm going to relube and reseat the o-ring and take it diving to a reasonable depth before taking the camera out on the boat againBob led the first dive, we swapped captain's duties after the first dive so I'd have a chance to dive. Both of these sites are great and are among my faovorites over here. Highlights of the dives were nudibranchs, psychedelic wrasses, several flame angels, flame wrasses (can't wait to get a shot of those), a male...
More About: Hawaii , Blast , Were

First underwater pics with Canon G9 digital camera with Canon WP-DC21 housi
2007-11-11 10:43:00
I went for a long shallow dive (106 minutes, still had roughly 1200 psi left) the other day and took some shots with the new camera. I realized only today that I had a bunch of focusing problems because the camera was using it's default focus method which takes most of what's in the picture into account, and I really wanted to do a spot focus so I could pick exactly what I wanted in focus. This Yellow Margin Moray Eel did turn out quite nice using the default focus though.We had a fun charter today. One of my passengers showed up obviously stuffed up so I suggested he take the day off. He's also scheduled for tomorrow, if he's cleared up by then he'll be joining us ... otherwise Pat, myself and a friend will go fishing and diving and call it a holo holo day. later, Steve
More About: Digital Camera , Camera , Canon , Digital , Underwater

OK, now this is wierd.... Sombody "borrowed" my long forgotten video...
2007-11-10 08:32:00
So I was showing Pat the video from the G9 I put on Youtube on the last post and noticed they've added a new feature at the end of the clips where they show related images.... so I click on one and some music comes up and then the images start and gosh they look familiar... turns out it's some stuff I shot back in 2000/2001 on my Sony trv-120 and put on this webpage http://www.wanna-dive-kona.com/kona_divin g_videos.htm back in '01 that I haven't updated since since I stopped carrying a video camera when I got real busy with instructing. I actually posted the octopus portion of this video back in November of '06 (check the archives). Turns out apparently some instructor in the UK must of liked it, put some of it to music and loaded it onto Youtube.... Here's his version of my stuff.... It's kind of neat to music, I probably should pull the video camera out of mothballs and try shooting some stuff and try editing myself, or I may see what I can do with the new point and shoo...
More About: Video , Long , Wierd , Forgotten

Canon G9 video underwater, in Kona Hawaii
2007-11-10 04:43:00
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.
More About: Video , Hawaii , Kona , Underwater

No rain today, just wind....
2007-11-07 06:05:00
When all else fails, take a blurry picture, photoshop the heck out of it and call it an attempt at "art". Anyway, this file fish was really cool, very teethy, but out of focus.Today 's charter went well. We had 3 divers and a snorkeler and Bob took them down. I'm still waking up with a headache from whatever's going around...Pat has it too. We had a pretty brisk northwest breeze today, as well as a strong south swell that is supposed to be dropping tonight. The "new" boat's doing just fine. Bob commented afterwards that with four passengers on the boat, it felt like it used to with just two - the extra space from removing the inboard engine, as well as the additional storage space I had put in seems to really help. anyway, the group had a couple of nice dives... lots of eels, a male Whitley's boxfish, cleaner shrimp, anthias, Dragon wrasses and lots of other stuff.Tomorrow we're doing the manta dive. I hadn't done it in quite a while, but it's been hopping. Apparently...
More About: Hawaii , Wind , Rain

The Hawaii weather report is.... WET
2007-11-05 22:14:00
Friday evening on the news, they announced a flash flood warning for the entire state through late Tuesday night. We haven't had that much "weather" in Kona , but it poured on Sunday. Apparently they had real rain troubles on Oahu. It's gorgeous today so far, but I won't be surprised if we see a few more downpours later today or tomorrow.I've been working on the boat getting it ready for charter. I just have to finish the main cabin door and hang it, along with a few other little things. Tomorrow we start chartering again. So far I have charters lined up for Tuesday, Wednesday evening, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. November in the past has typically been my slowest month, so it's not looking too bad from here on.Here's a couple of shots of the cockpit of the boat. That's me, dirty shirt and all (much to my wife's horror), sitting on the transom and coming out of the cuddy cabin.It's a bit difficult to get a handle on the size of the boat. It's not a huge boat by any m...
More About: Weather , Hawaii , Report , Weather Report

New Camera.... Canon G9 with housing for underwater photography....
2007-11-03 02:12:00
Well, I done did it. I've been debating about sending my camera back to Olympus to see if they could repair the flash, buying another camera, or just living with manual white balance 'til I could afford a new camera in the spring.... then Pat said the magic words... "Bill me later". I was unaware of this, but many of the big photo/electronics companies contract out with bill-me-later.com to offer 6 months free interest for their goods. That's about perfect timing for me, so it was done after two days of research.Here's the camera I chose... I also picked up the housing for it. The Amazon link actually has pretty good pricing for both the camera and housing (which is available as an accessory), I paid a few extra bucks at the time getting it from a company that had the delayed billing options.One little story on shipping... very fast and efficient through UPS, however we tracked it and for some reason it actually spent a day in Taiwan after it first reached Honolulu. A coupl...
More About: Photography , Camera , Canon , Housing , Underwater

My Kona Hawaii Scuba Diving Blog has turned two...
2007-11-02 06:44:00
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 ...
More About: Hawaii , Blog , Kona , Scuba Diving , Diving

Arc-eye Hawkfish
2007-10-26 08:31:00
This Arc-Eye Hawkfish is probably one of the last pics I took with my Olympus sp350 before the flash went out. One of these days I may send it back in for repair as it's a pretty darned good camera still even without the flash, but for now I have a different plan... yup, I ordered a new point and shoot camera and housing, thank goodness for 6 month free financing programs some companies offer. More about the new camera later when it shows up.The boat is really coming along, when I went by today at 3:30 they were wiring in the last of the deck lights and the red over white over red restricted maneuverability lights (they're sort of the night time version of a dive flag). The engines appeared ready to go, but they hadn't installed Raycor filters (oversized fuel filters with water separators) just yet and I told them I had to have them on the boat. It may be done already, I can't wait to get tomorrow's charter off and see if it's ready to start breaking in the engines as I nee...
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