This Week on the Beach...April 2015

  Over the last week, Sandra and I enjoyed three nice snorkeling trips made possible by cooperative weather and relatively mild seas.  We went to the old standby, Kahalu'u, where we saw the first immature Hawaiian

Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny  Ooom.

Cleaner Wrasse for 2015.  Looking so much like the bluestreak cleaner wrasse of the Western Pacific, one finds himself muttering ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny into his snorkel.  We also saw a sweet baby stripe belly puffer.  Ashore, we had an extremely pleasant chat with a young Indian family.  Originally from somewhere near Goa, they were very pleased with our hot, humid climate.  If only Kona offered the same tech type jobs as San Jose...  Well, I don't even want to consider the ramifications of that.  Sorry honey, I guess we gotta find a different island that we can afford. 

    Yesterday we went to City of Refuge.  Mercifully, the crowd we encountered a month ago had thinned out significantly.  (Perhaps they all went back to San Jose.)  Way out on the north cusp we saw some nice fish, including a dozen pyramid butterflies, a pair of gilded triggerfish and a single immature mu.  Everybody was deep, deep, deep. That morning my sinuses had joined the other side,

Gilded Triggerfish, Hookena August 2013

preventing me from diving deep enough for a reasonable photograph.   I must note that the Gilded Trigger has never been sufficiently shallow for me to obtain a reasonable photo at City of Refuge.  Or, for that matter, anywhere besides Ho'okena, where deeper water fish seem to thrive at snorkeling depths.

    Sandra and I ate our lunch with a young German couple from Frankfurt.  Daniel showed us the newest bit of tourist tech: a 4 x 6 dry bag that suspends from your neck with an adjustable cord.  You put your $500 cell phone in the bag and it works almost as well as a $200 underwater camera.  Ausgezeichnet!

    I had fun trotting out a few fragments of German.  Herr Weinberger  (my German professor back at Fort Vancouver High School ca. 1969)  would be so proud.  All too soon it was time to say auf wiedersehen. 

Blacktail Snapper,  Beach 69,  April 2015

 As we schlepped our kram back to the car, I was only mildly surprised to meet a petite 20 something heading for the beach with her cell phone tucked into one of those  dry bags.  They appear to have replaced those damnable Go Pro sticks as the must have seaside accessory for the year of the sheep.  And not a moment too soon.   Baaa!

    Leaving the United Nations in the capable hands of Claire Underwood, what I really want to tell you about is our trip five or six days ago to Beach 69.  It was a perfect day up north, light breezes and not a trace of vog.  We were accompanied by our friends the Hillises, who are soon returning to Sand Diego.   Bob is a superb fish finder and we will miss him almost as much as his charming bride.

    Our target species was the Hawaiian Seahorse, rumored to live on the southern cusp of this small bay.   We did not find the seahorse, but we did discover that the southern end of Waialea Bay has vastly better

Big Bad Bluefin Trevally, Beach 69, April 2015

coral than the north cusp, where we had snorkeled before.  We saw five really large bluefin trevally.  .  These brutes were around four and a half feet in length, probably the largest ulua I have seen. One permitted me to swim close enough for a fine portrait.  By the small, rocky island we saw large examples of both high fin and bicolor chubs.  This is one of the few bays where spear and net fishing are prohibited and you can see the difference in the size and behavior of these fishes.  Both Bluestripe and Blacktail Snappers were abundant, as well.

    We have adopted Beach 69 as our favorite place to hang out up on the Kohala coast.  The combination of seaside shade and sugary soft sand is a rare commodity on the Big Island.  Now that we have discovered a large expanse of coral with a fine variety of large fish, we will be going there more often.  

jeff

Bluestripe Snapper at Beach 69