Tako Tuesday

 Big swell came up early out of the north west, and already there was a south swell running.  The usual dive sites off Kona were therefore not diveable.  Where to Go?  We decided to go where the Octopuses are, at least where they are today. 

We headed north toward the airport looking for shelter, and we found it with virtually every other dive boat in Kona either already there or arriving with us. We jumped on a mooring and geared up. What we didn't know was that we would have a very special visitor at the end of the dive. 

First up across the very healthy reef Kendall found a family of Psychedelic Wrasses.  I zoomed in on the male, since I haven't seen one of those in a while. Immediately I turned and Dot was shooting someting in a hole. It was a Banded Coral Shrimp.  Along the way I ran into an Ornate Butterfly.  These are so common that I usually pass them by, but this one wanted to give me his good side, so I obliged.  Another common but hard to photograph fish is the Peacock Grouper.  They flit around the reef and are common, but they are hard to shoot because they shy from the camera, or maybe it's the divers.  Anyway I got this guy just as he was trying to make his getaway.

As we hit greater depths everyone spread out to look for rare goodies.  Laura went out on the deep sand, I stayed a bit back on the reef, and was rewarded with a wonderfully curious and gorgeous octopus.  I managed by staying very still to coax him out on a rock where I was able to get multiple shots.  Even though his cfolor change signalled that he wasn't fond of the flash he didn't run away until later.  That part is in the video.

But this dive was just getting started.  We headed back up the sloping reefscape toward shallower water, and were met with a nice, medium size Whitemouth Eel and huge school of yellowtail Goatfish.

As the school of goatfish parted for a moment I saw Dennis pointing at somethiing, then he wrote on his slate, "Seal."  Wow, I looked up toward the mooring, which we'd come back to, and there was Waimanu in all her glory resting on the mooring line.  I moved in a little closer, carefully observing the proximity limits for divers approaching Monk Seals. She got tired of the mooring lines and moved in under the boat, seeming to hug the hull and look down at us.

Just when I thought we'd seen all the things Kendall motioned at me to follow him back down the reef slop.  There was a Clumpy Nudibranch there ona rock and moving quickly for a nudi.

Right next door was a Gold Lace nudi and two more octopuses!  The first one was digging himself a deeper hole in the sane under a ledge, so there was some sediment in the water, but the second one was just sitting there looking out from his hole.

So about then we were well over an hour and my breathing gas was low enough that I needed to get back in the viscinity of the boat.  On the way up the slope I found a Female Spotted Boxfish, not rare but still pretty, and a Flowery Flounder.  The flounder took off and I chased him with my video camera whirring.

The last and one of the coolest animals we found all day was a Locust Nudibranch.  Very Very tiny, not bigger than the width of your little finger nail.  I saw Laura boring in on a wall and thought, "She found something."  And well she did.

Here's the video link at YouTube. 

Freezeface: a story about diving and (mostly) cycling

 On the Pine Trees stretch of the Kona coast there is a dive site called "Freezeface."  It's called that because there is an inshore cave that, if you stick your head into it you get a firehose draught of icy fresh water upwelling from the accumulated rain that works its way down through the porous igneous rock of the Big Island and into the sea.

This peculiarity is a metaphorically apt description of one of the multitudes of mishaps that I ended up picking my way through today on my bike ride up the Kona coast.

Many of you who know me are aware that I attempt to be multiply-redundant in my preparation for adventures.  If we're on a dive boat and you find you have a bad O-ring, I'm your guy.  Similarly, my bike spares kit has every possible remedy for any mishap a couple times over.  But I've never had to use virtually every backup tool and resource I've carried around in my bike for the past 45 years...until today.

One of my guidelines for diving safety is that I have a three-irregularities rule: If three things happen that are a hard break in the normal flow, even though I may have solutions for each one, all three together in kitting up for a dive means I thumb the dive.  Broken mask strap? No problem, I have a spare.  Dead computer battery? No problem, I have a backup computer. Leaky regulator hose connection to first stage?  No problem, I have O-rings for that too.  But all three together...that's a sign from the universe that I should go home and play solitare or get lost in Youtube videos aboout guys who like to make movies of themselves being stung by scorpions.

I have that same rule for cycling, but often, in fact most of the time, mishaps mostly happen to you after you're already out on the road/trail/desolate rockscape.

The first unusual deviation from normal was that my rear-facing radar refused to come online.  I noticed this as I was preparing to roll out of the parking lot at the harbor where I start. OK, I thought, I rode for 50 years without radar, and am perfectly capable of just looking back to see if the road is clear.  This is important when you are attempting a left turn on a busy road.  Anyway, the next four unfortunate surprises happened to me while I was already out on the road.

Last week my friend Laura told me she had picked up a staple in her tire and got a flat.  Bummer.  Next day I picked up some radial tire wire and flatted.  So we commiserated.  

So when, today, I heard the little tick tick sound of something stuck in my tire, stopped and found a staple sticking out of my rear tire, I thought, "hey, a coincidence...I'll have to tell Laura the staple demons are still out making mischief."

 

This was a completely normal flat repair situation, one that I've repeated countless times.  My regular riding group at one point started timing our repairs, and if it took more than 10 minutes you were fair game for ridicule.  

I had a half-used CO2 cartridge alread screwed into my Lezyne cartridge thingy, and it filled up my newly installed tube almost all the way. But I felt I needed to just pump it up a bit further because right now there is a lot of nasty debris on the shoulders of Big Island roads.  Unclipping the pump everything looked fine.  I screwed the pump hose onto the valve core (a potential risk of unscrewing the valve core from the tube when you take the hose off), and started pumping.  Oooops, the pump fell apart in my hands.  Seems the connecting ring that holds the pump handle to the rest of the pump shaft had unscrewed itself and everything fell in pieces onto the asphalt at my feet.  That's two things.

From that point the flow chart had an added process: put the pump back together and secure it well enough to get some more air in my tire.  That job done, I topped off the tire, folded up the bad tube, collected all the rubbish off the road resulting form the repair, put the wheel back on and secured my pump to the bike.  Off we go, wheee!

During my repair process a couple of riders had stopped and asked if I needed help.  "Nope, I'm good,"  and they took off.  I caught up with them and we chatted a bit before I went on ahead.  

From that point I enjoyed five blissful, mishap-free miles until there was a steel bar that I didn't see lying across the wide shoulder of Queen Ka'ahumanu Hwy just south of Kekaha Kai State Park.  I rode straight across it, and my rear tire, already a bit low because it's hard to hand-pump a tire to 100 PSI, went immediately flat.  It was a snake bite puncture from the tube being caught between the rim and the hazard I'd hit.  

Two flats is not uncommon, but it's always a drag because you aren't out there repeatedly to bend over your bike in the hot sun taking your tire apart and doing the flat-repair drill.  Fortunately, I carry two spare tubes, one in my pocket and the other in my spares kit.  So I dug the extra tube out of my spares kit and put it on the wheel, put the second bad one in my pocket and got out my one remaining CO2 cartridge to inflte the tire.   OOOps, upon screwing the cartridge into my Lezyne inflator thingy it exploded through a side seam spraying freezing CO2 all over my face (Freezeface) and hands.  That's three things.

So, good thing I have my recently repaired hand pump (the process flow chart is getting more boxes) and I'm thinking about the movie The Martian.  Just have to math your way through this, even thought there isn't a lot of math involved in fixing bike malfunctions.

This is all happening on the side of a road on which cars and trucks go by at 60 mph.  A big truck has a massive bow wave, and I was getting blown into the lava rocks each time one went by.  It was like being blown off underwater rock faces by heavy surge while diving, an annoying thing that had happened to me yesterday.

Where was I?  Oh, unclipping my hand pump from the bike and screwing it onto the new tube valve to inflate the tire the old way.  I'm down with that.  I'm trying not to drip sweat on the drive train of my bike as it lay on the shoulder of the road. It takes a little while to pump up a tire with a frame pump because they have small capacity.  But after a while I noticed that the tire wasn't inflating.  Checked the connection and the pump; it was all good and working.  Deduction: my last spare tube was defective.  More boxes slotted into the flow chart, and that was four things.

When you are out of good tubes you have to repair one of the bad tubes you have.  Fortunately I have a patch kit with everything I need to repair a punctured tube.  I pulled out the patch kit, opened it, and picked out the tube of glue.  I had a sinking feeling when I noticed how squishy it felt.  Yep, glue was all dried up.  I don't count that as a thing because dried up glue tubes is operator error, not random fate.

OK, but I have some handy no-glue patches!  I dug them out and put everything on the side of the road to organize what I needed to do.  Immediately a truck wooshed by and scattered all that stuff into the lava rocks.  Ha ha.

Problem with patching a tube on the road is that it's hard to find the hole.  What I did was attach the pump to the tube and drape it over my head so I could maybe hear the sound of air escaping from the tube.  Also, you can feel down the length of the tube to maybe feel air coming out.  Both of those strategies worked and I found the hole.  Now you have to not lose its location while you dig out the repair stuff.  I opened up the no-glue patch bag and pulled out the abrasion tool, rubbed it on the tube over the hole and put on a patch.  Next, I needed to unscrew the pump hose from the tube valve.  I did that but it pulled out the valve core from the tube valve shaft.  Dang.  That's the valve core and tube I need to get back on the road Problem is that now the pump hose has a valve core jammed into it, making it inoperable, and my patched tube doesn't have a valve core.  That's five things.

Fortunately, I have a tool that will extract a valve core from the pump hose connector. So I was able to get the valve core out of the hose connector, screw the core back into the tube I'd repaired, get the tube into the tire and pump it up, ready to go.  Did the no-glue patch work...seemed that it did.

Meanwhile, many riders stopped to offer help, including the two who had offered help the first time I was stopped 5 miles back.  "No," I said, "I'm OK."  But after a while my response morphed to, "I think I'm OK."  One guy said, "I'm turning around about three miles up the road and I'll check on you on my way back."  That was comforting, but I felt pretty good about my chances to get back to my car.  I still had food and water, and more no-glue patches in case of more silliness.

How great it felt to be back on the bike and rolling down the road.  I elected to turn around at the first easy place to do that, which was at the bottom of the hill I was on.  I didn't want to tempt fate when I was down to no-glue patches.

I ended up with a decent ride, even though it took an hour and a half longer than it wouled have had I had no probems.  But multiple redundancy and a fluency in flow charts enabled me success and a safe return to my car.  While packing the bike into the back of my car I thought about the feeling of relief of getting back to the dive boat despite underwater mishaps or freshening current making the swim back a hard slog.  It was pretty much the same feeling I had today.

Beating the incoming swell, but not the surge

 Swell model showed a south swell arriving mid=day today.  So lets get out there early!  Which we did, and moored near the harbor so that saved us more time. Vis good at about 80 feet, and we dodged through the structure and headed for the sand flats.  Someone on the boat was hoping for Rubber Duckies out on the sand flats, but it's not quite the season for them yet.

It's been z week for frogfish, and today was no different.  Divers were waving at me to come over to the rock they were huddled around.  I circled around and immediately saw the bright yellow spot on the rock.  

Some of the usual suspects showed up: a Blackside hawkfish, an Orangeband Surgeon fish and an Ornate Wrasse.

Next dive site and immediately under the mooring, even as I was descending and turning on the camer I spy a nice, fat Devil Scorpion.  The surge was so strong I couldn't just hover there but had to shoot as I swung by him.  So I kept rocking back and forth and got a few shots off.  The surge would get worse as the dive continued.

The site we were diving has a lot of nice pinnacles out toward the deep end, and we found them heavily populated with the locals.  Suddenly Doug reached out into the water column.  Up he came with a tiny Trembling nudi.  here it is in his gloved hand.

Kevin found two bicolor nudis on the top of a ledge near the mooring on the way back.  I tried to steady on a rock to get a shot, but the surge ripped me off the rock and even folded up my camera strobes as I tried in vain to  hold on.  Later I saw Laura finding better purchase than I'd had and she probably got the shot so you know it happened.

BAck in an inshore alleyway I found a nice Pacific Trumpetfish and a Whitemouth Eel that looked like the Alien Xenomorph, except smaller and less hostile.

Back to North Pine Trees

 Swell model looked great today; calm ocean, so a good day for diving.  I arrived so early at the Harbor that the Kona Honu Staff hadn't pulled up to the gate yet, so I angled over into the gravel and waited about 5 minutes.  A guy on a bike came over and unlocked the gate just in time for me, the dive staff and their truck to roll through.

Out on the ocean to the south there was a huge cloudbank with a distinctly dark appearance; it was the one I saw from my house and thought, "Just don't drift north."  But at the boat slip everything was sunny, with no wind. Would have been a great day for a bike ride too, but I'd made my choice.

Rob suggested we go to Dotties.  Mo chimed in that that was a good idea, and so did I.  Last time at Dotties I missed my favorite Zoanthid soft corals, so this would be another chance to see them. The Big Island doesn't have a lot of soft corals, so the protopalythoa Zoanthics are a treat to see. and there's a huge wall of them at Dotties.

Splash!  wow, it's still 77 degrees. Glad I am still wearing my ratty old 5 mil with a hooded vest. Rob asked, "Is that wetsuit going to hold together?" Honestly not knowing, I thought, "I hope so."

We took a bearing toward the dropoff and eventually to Preacher's Arch. On the way i found a Day Octopus scrunched down in a crevasse of rock and coral.  It eyed me from a distance and as I slowly approached it seemed to settle further, though his eyes w3ere locked on me.  Great creatures, Octopuses.

On a wall rob found a puka with a tiny Dwarf Moray sticking its nose out, which is about all my camera was able to capture.

Toodling along I saw a large number of common butterfly fish.  here's a not as common one, a Four Spot Butterfly.

Oh, forgot.  Right under the mooring Rob found a very large yellow Frogfish, the first of two we'd find today.  As soon as I dipped back toward the bottom a Spotted Puffer swam right at me.

Here sitting on some healthy Antler Coral is a very common ambush predator: the Arceye Hawkfish.  Further on, under a ledge I found some Big Scale Soldierfish and a strand of Wire Coral.  Later, at our second dive site I found the same Wire Coral Gobie I shot last time here, last week.  Today's pic was not good though, so to see a nice  Wirecoral Gobie go back one blog post.

Here's yellow Frogfish number two for the day.  He was presenting more to the world than just his face, so you can see how they like to set their feet on the rocks for stability as they engulf their prey in a few hundred thousands of a second.

Near the end of dive number two we found a harem of Psychedelic Wrasses.  I didn't see a male–drat, but the females were frolicing around in the coral, or maybe they were trying to get away from me, probably that.  Anyway, I got a shot of them after chasing them across the reef for a while.

Only two eels today: an Undulated that was sitting right above the spot where a Helmet snail was gorging on an urchin.  The other was a small white mouth eel just watching the passing show.

Here's a video of me following Rob around, but he found some cool arches.

Chance surprise meeting with an old friend

Today was no-shadow day in Kona.  That means that the sun, in its way across the tropic of cancer, passed directly overhead.  Laura wanted to be sure to get back to the dock by 12:20pm when the event was to happen.  In the water and out in the channel we found Dolphins and Sandy! She is a friend and dive guide who, while I was away on the mainland,  moved to another part of the island, making seeing her and being in the water with her a much less frequent treat.  However, today as our group crossed the sand flats outside the harbor, she and a group she was shore diving with appeared, and much hugging and bubble-blown greetings ensued.

Sandy!

 

Next dive site was going to be Kaloko Ledges.  I was stoked because I had thought to find a bearing from Kaloko Ledges to Kaloko Arches (Canyons) moorings,  because if you are on your own, as camera people sometimes are, you can dial in 40 degrees from the outer mooring and that will get you to the inner mooring.   Anyway, current came up so we ditched that site and headed back toward the harbor, stopping at Turtle Heaven where there was no current.

This is a great dive ste, with healthy reef, lots of fish and eels, and close enough tot he harbor that you often get to see big animals like Tiger Sharks, though none presented today.  

What did present, however, was a wonderful cast of vertibrates and non vertibrates. 

First up was a very large Hawksbill turtle, I think anyway.  It swam right past me headed north.  In the same area of reef I found a juvenile Yellowtail Coris passing an Ornate Wrasse going opposite directions.

At one point on the way back around our big circle route Rob and Laura found a giant Cowrie with a Fried Egg nudi in the same crack.  Moments later, a Fried Egg Nudi on his or her own.

These are two different White Mouth Eels, found about 50 yards apart. They might be sibllings who live just close enough to help each other with chores.  Or they might just be friends with benefits.

Anoth3r great find by Laura: Jewelled Anemone Crab, hiding under a deep recess off the sand flats.  Had to really open up the aperture to get that one, he was so far back.  AS I looked up to find my group there swam by a male RingTail Wrasse.  Hip shot...I didn't even have time to look in the fviewfinder.  Lucky I got anything.

BAck near the mooring there was a nice overhang with wirecoral popping out from under the ledge.  Goodie!  Lets look for gobies and shrimp.  No gobies but Dot pointed at a section of one of the strands, and..Yay!.. A Wirecoral Shrimp!  I had to wrestle with my rig to get under the ledge far enough to capture him, but managed it after a while.  Later Doug said, "I saw you working your rig to get under that ledge."  Understatement.

 

Just about on my safety stop and here's a nice, stationalry animal, out in the open (ambush predator) for me to shoot.  I don't care that Blackside Hawkfish are everywhere and unremarkable finds.  I just didn't want to work to get a nice photo.

Here's a video with Laura and a Horned helmet about to have lunch, plus a Square spot Goatfish also looking for lunch.