Overcast sky didn't dim today's diving enthusiasm

Yep, overcast and some rain around Honokohau Harbor didn't diminish my hopes for a great diving day. After all, you are underwater so why worry about rain? I'd snagged a spot on Aquatic Life Divers charter today, which is cool because it's my birthday, and Tara P, one of the instructors aboard, and I have somehow managed to dive together on multiples of both of our birthdays.

On our way out of the harbor I could see dolphins ahead just cruising, half sleeping, after a night of feeding in deep water. A few of them surfed our bow wake as we powered up to head south to a spot where Tara and I have had many memorable dives, and one in particular years ago on my 70th birthday. It's on an exposed part of the coast, and as we approached it looked like the lingering swell might make it a challenging dive. On closer inspection, the site looked ok for diving, and we geared up and went in the water.

One of the features of this site is that, among the giant boulders north of the mooring, both Hawaiian and Indo-pacific Sergeant Majors, a kind of damsel fish, lay their purple egg masses on the broad rock faces. The males stand (swim?) guard around the eggs because the Butterfly fish that populate the spot love to eat them. Any time a butterfly gets too close the Sergeant flys out at them aggressively and scares them off. But it's a constant battle. The clever butterflies have figured out that divers scare the sergeants away from their guard posts, leaving the eggs unprotected. Lightbulb moment for the Butterflies was that if they lured divers over to where the eggs are the divers would scare away the sergeants and the Butterflies would have an easy meal. Smart huh? Anyway, this behavior is so common that it can't be chance.

Interesting was it, then, to find no butterflies around the boulders today. Only Sergeants of both types flitting nervously around their egg masses. Here are a couple of shots to show you the difference beetween Hawaiian Sergeants and the Indo Pacific ones. See how the Hawaiian sergeant's strips don't go all the way to the fish's abdomen, while the stripes on the Indo Pacific sergeants do? Otherwise they behave the same.

The boulders are like fish nurseries and they are always very fishy. Here's an Orangespine Unicorn fish and a White Mouth Eel I found as I was running away from the Sergents.

I was diving with Anna L because Tara had students. Anna is fun and curious underwater; she is good at finding hidden things, like this cowrie shell. She found two of them, but one still had an animal in it so she threw it back in the water. She makes jewelry out of the things she finds. Cool.

Another common fish at this mooring is the Bullethead Parrot. They are so vibrantly colored, like this male. Out of the boulders and back on the rubbly reef Anna found this cool assembly of the two most common nudibranchs we have in kona waters, the Strawberry and scrambled egg nudis. You can guess which is which.

We drove out to sea on surface interval looking for pilot whales, or any whales, since we'd seen humpbacks just a few days earlier. No luck with that, so we headed back to the coastline looking for an unoccupied mooring. We found one on the Pine Trees section of coast and jumped in.

Here is a Four Spot butterfly on his or her own today. Usually they are in pairs. We spent much of the dive exploring caves, which you'll see in the video below, looking in vain for nudibranchs, but out on the reef there were plenty of fish. This Peacock Grouper was just making a U turn when my strobes went off, and upon that flash of light he darted away. In a crack Anna found this Spiny Lobster who couldn't dart away, so I got a nice shot of him.

Here's the video.