I was betting that the warmer ocean readings I was getting last week would be more than one-in-a-row, so I booked a spot on Sunday's charter with Kona Honu Divers to see if the warmer water would hold. I arrived at the slip to see that there were only 6 divers signed up...so, like a private charter. The rain forecast was wrong–it was clear, and the wind forecast for light breeze was right. That, plus the calm ocean forecast, all combined to promise a great, relaxed day in the water.
The visibility had settled after the swell last week to be pretty good, maybe 60 feet. The spot we dropped first, High Rock, is known for eels and lots of fish that feed in the rubble still left over from the great storms of the past few years and the coral bleachings of 2015 and 2017. I was greeted almost as I reached depth by a pair of Four Spot Butterfly fish. Another feature of this site is the large patches of Leather Coral, here is a typical patch.
Sometimes I see things I can't ID. Here's one: a transparent animal that I first took to be a plastic bag. But it's a living organism, perhaps one of the deep water jellies that live deep in the abyss and only come up at night. This one's clock was clearly off. Turned and almost immediately found a nice Stout Moray in a hole. They hardly ever come out, and just stick their heads out to view the passing show.
White mouth Eels are very common here, so I wasn't surprised to see this little guy poking out of a hole. Probably my favorite fish of the dive was this beautiful Devil Scorpion. They usually just sit there so everyone can have a turn flashing their strobes in their eyes. Sometimes they;ll become annoyed and move, and then you get to see the colorful red and yellow hues of their pectoral fins as they extend them to swim, or rather lumber to another spot a few feet away. This Lei Trigger, another common fish, turned right into me before realizing I might be a thing that wants to eat it. I didn't and had a chance to get this frontal view, much different from the view we usually get of fish butts swimming away. More paired butterflies presented under a ledge, this time Raccoon Butterflies.
This striped fish is a Hawaiian Sergent Major. It's different in subtle wasy from the Indo-Pacific Sergent which has thicker vertical stripes. He was warding off butterflies from trying to eat his egges, which were plastered on a verticsl wall of a rock.
At out second site there is a very large arch which usually houses lots of bluestripe snappers, all kinds of nudibranchs and often, Moorish Idols. I was 0-fer on the nudis despite scouring all the walls and ceiling and getting stuck very far behind our group, which had moved on from the arch. So I got this shot of a Moorish Idol diving upside down on one of the walls before sprinting out and after the group, whose bubbles I could still see as they headed off to view the drop off.
One of the most beautiful fish on our reefs is the Orange Band Surgeon. It's called a surgeon fish because it has theses viscious barbs on its tail that it uses for defense. You can't see them in the shot, but you can see the side view which features the distinctive orange band. Another diver waved at me to come over. He saw something he wanted me to see. It was this fairly large, for a nudibranch, Strawberry Nudi.
On the way back from the abyss I saw my friend Laura peering with her camera into a coral head. This could mean a few things, and in this case it meant she'd found a tiny Leaf Scorpionfish. They are about four centimeters long on average and they have little feet kind of like frogfish which they use to steady themselves on their perch in the surge. That also makes them mostly stationary, good for photos, and this one was posing nicely for Laura and then for me.
Suddenly I saw Laura and everyone else swimming off to my left at a high pace; not usual for diving where you want to work very little to conserve breathing gas. Something was up. Indeed it was, and I saw that it was a good sized Spotted Eagle Ray, swimming so languidly that I was able to catch up and get a shot and some video.
After the excitement of this encounter drained off we went back to our normal snail pace headed roughly back toward the mooring. On the way there is a lot of rubble where reef fish pick around to find little morsels. I often will turn over rocks for the Yellow Tail Corises to feast on whatever's underneath. They've become fairly friendly because of divers doing this over the years, and this one came right up to me. Yes, I turned over a few rocks for her.
One of the most fun fish we have are the little immature Rockmover Wrasses that we call Dragon Wrasses. They are very small, and they just flit and drift around on the sand patches apparently at random, only sometimes to hide under rocks when you get too close. This one I chased around a sand patch and took ab out half a dozen shots hoping that at least one would be in focus and show more than it's cute little butt. This is what I got. Finally, another very common fish that I didn't have to work too hard to get: an Orangespine Unicorn. Like the Orange band Surgeon, its cousin, it is everywhere on the reefs and I got this shot as it swam by.
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