28 Jan 2021
Last day of diving 🙁 Today I joined KHD’s long range trip aboard the Honu Lele to sites further south of Kona, as well as Jack’s blackwater dive at night. We were greeted by dolphins as we left the harbor:
They swam in the wake of the boat, but seemed kind of sleepy- no jumping or playing
Farewell, dophins!
On our way south, we stopped at an off-shore fish farm:
The fish live under the buoys on the left, the platform on the right is tethered to the ocean floor, and the whole system can drift up to a mile around.
Those anti-bird spikes sure are effective 🙂
Dive #20 – Black Castle
Down around 100′ is a black coral bush growing on the roof of a swim-through:
Lots of critters make their home here, but you burn through air pretty quickly at this depth, so I didn’t investigate too thoroughly.
A school of Pyramid butterflyfish:
Pair of Blacklip butterflyfish:
Ewa fang blenny!
strange to see one swimming around, usually they hide in their hole and just peek their heads out:
These guys will sometime nip at divers, but they’re mostly harmless 🙂
Leaf scorpionfish!
and another!
Redbarred hawkfish:
Look at that beautiful shoreline!
I could get used to living here…
Dive #21 – The Dome
Started off this dive by spotting the tiniest little scorpionfish! He was about 4-5″ long!
Porcupinefish!!!
Gold-lace nudibranch:
We spent a lot of time exploring a cave, looking for nudibranchs. I found this Blue dragon:
Somebody found this lobster to be quite tasty:
Dive #22 – Stardust
Last dive of the trip 🙁 But this blackwater dive went much better than the first- no camera alarms and WE SAW A THRESHER SHARK!!! He cruised through right at the end of the dive, but I couldn’t get my camera to focus on him (he was maybe 30′ away? but there was a lot of debris in the water) so unfortunately, no pictures.
I did find this colony of Collozoum (a collection of individual cells contained within a gel matrix):
These guys can form lots of shapes like balls:
and Pringles:
A long salp chain:
Short salp chain:
Salps with hitchhikers:
A couple of net casters:
I think this is two ctenophores tangled up (or going after the same food):
Venus girdle:
Again, not a spider (I think it’s a type of Narcomedusa):
another with a hitchhiker:
A comb jelly:
Acorn worm (not very worm-like, I know):
Found a bunch of heteropods again!
I think this one is hunting?
Another hunter?
Such strange creatures!
So this is a Rhabdosoma and the best way I can describe him is as a long, angry pine needle. He kept jabbing at my camera so I grabbed him. I know you’re not supposed to touch the things, but I figured he started it 🙂
He’s also really hard to photograph!
and he’s going off-frame
I want this to be a tiny long-armed squid, but had no idea, so I posted it to the dive shop’s Facebook group and Sarah, one of the blackwater gurus (and my guide on an earlier trip), identified him as a tube worm larva!
A crown jelly (with a tiny fish friend that I totally didn’t see when I snapped this picture!):
What I did notice though, was that there is a fish trapped inside the jelly:
my fish book tells me that young drift fish often take shelter and live inside jellies
strange relationship
This poor fish injured fish stuck around for most of our dive- I wonder if he helped attract the thrasher shark?
