Citron Butterfly: One More for the 2019 list

   On the eve of New Year's Eve, Sandra and I took what should be our Aloha Swim for 2019.  According to the fellow that does the weather on KHNL, the surf was arising.  With that in mind, we chose the least surfy place we could think of...Kawaihae Harbor.   We had contacted our most excellent friend and critter finder Hai, on the night before, hoping that he and the redoubtable Lottie might join us.  Unfortunately, Hai said he might see us up there, but that he would be surfing.  Bummer.

Citron Butterfly, Kawaihae Harbor, December 30, 2019

   We checked the tide table and arrived at 9:30, thinking that this would be a bit after the high tide. As it turned out, the tide was higher than we expected and we had to drive through a half foot of water to get out to the beach.  At the little park we located Hai's truck, and with a little effort, we were able to spot our friend on his surf board about 100 yards out in the ocean.  A couple guys at the park said that there had been surf fifteen minutes earlier, but while we prepared to go swimming there was no surf at all.

   Soon we were in the harbor, the water was cool and cloudy with lots of plankton.  To make a long story short, there was relatively little in the way of fouling organisms on the pylons and we didn't find any nudibranchs.   By the ramp where we enter,  I got a poor look and a very inferior picture of a banded coral shrimp.

   .On the good side, we did see a pretty uncommon fish.  There was one, or possibly a pair, of citron butterflyfish.  We had two brief encounters during which we had pretty good looks but did not get a great photograph.  However, one photograph does show the key field mark of this fish, the ventral fin

Three Spot Angelfish, Tulamben, Bali Novenber 2014

with the bold black and white stripe.  Without that dramatic flag of a fin, it might be a teensy bit difficult to say if it was a milletseed or a citron. It is very possible that my last sighting of this fish was in 2016, so this really was a great species upon which to end the year.   One thing that struck me, was the similarity of that ventral fin to the one proudly displayed by the three spot angelfish which we have seen in Indonesia.  I get the sense that butterflyfish and angelfish may share more DNA than many fish, but not all that much.  I think it makes for a pretty interesting comparison.

    While Sandra and I were enjoying our our shower, we watched Hai,.  He  was still riding his board 100 yards off shore...still waiting for a wave.  The only thing that had changed was that there was now a ten knot breeze blowing in from the sea., so the shower water was blowing back at an angle and there was a six inch chop on the previously flat ocean.  Sandra commented on how much she had enjoyed our swim, and we left wondering if our friend was ever going to catch a wave. 

Hau'oli makahiki Hou
jeff

A Box Fish on Boxing Day

     At last a quest at which it will be difficult to fail.  The male Pacific boxfish is a handsome devil, in an angular sort of way.   And the female / juvenile boxfish is damn near ubiquitous.  How thoughtful of our friends across the pond to create such a fish friendly holiday.  Which, I suppose, begs the question, "Is Boxing Day really a holiday?"  To which I reply, "Close enough."

An ominous sky sailed over K Bay on Boxing Day

    Maybe you have become tired of every blog beginning with a beautiful day, blue sky, fleecy clouds.  Well, this Boxing Day didn't really dawn, it was more like someone turned up the light slowly on a smudge.  And it was cool and humid, a bad combination that leaves everything just a bit damp.  It started raining an hour or so after dinner and continued sporadically throughout the night.  This meant the coqui frogs, ordinarily crepuscular, kept chirping when the rest of us wished we were fast asleep.  This makes sense if you're a frog and you want nice moist eggs.  It's unfortunate that it comes at the expense of a good night's sleep and truly dry towels.

    On Boxing Day morning Sandra took me swimming at Kahalu'u.  As we said before, the boxfish should be a chip shot, so we could go where ever we wished with a strong hope of success.   I had a

good feeling about K Bay.   We arrived early, with the sky looking like something out of a Stephen King novel.  The shelter was empty except for a brace of young Asian women wearing blue Ts proclaiming someone's 80th birthday.  I only saw seven of these young women. While I was swimming Sandra saw two bus fulls.

   Having been dragged kicking and screaming to my senses, I donned two layers of neoprene, a weight belt (yes, the ocean is cold in the winter) and hit the surf.  The first thing I noticed was that the
water was startlingly clear.  Just as I was clearing the narrow, rocky passage into the outer entrance, I came face to face with a nice big juvenile surge wrasse.  I turned in the passage and fumbled for my camera, but the brute was gone.

   As I exited into the bay, I nabbed a fine male boxfish.  If you have to tilt at windmills, this may be

A Hebrew Cone on sand, Kahalu'u.  Boxing Day 2019

the one you want to contest.  But let's not be hasty.  There was a time not so long ago when scribbled filefish was common at Kahalu'u, Achilles tang was seen here regularly and milletseed butterflies swarmed.  So I am going to treasure this boxfish.

    As I was readjusting my flippers I saw a Hebrew cone half buried in the sand.  In the past, I have made the mistake of pulling such a cone out to get a better picture.  This was the wrong thing to do.  Most salt water snails share a dietary preference not unlike the slugs and snails we enjoy in our garden, and brought to song by Donovan back in the Summer of Love; they are herbivores.  Cones, on the other hand, are carnivorous snails.  When one sees a cone half buried, it is likely that the snail is mostly out of his shell, hunting for his dinner in the sand.  If one plucks him out, he risks harming the soft body of the cone shell snail.  Bad Jeffrey.  I left this Hasidic cone alone and luckily got a picture of one sitting proudly on the sandy surface a bit later in the swim.

Juvenile Hawaiian Dascyllus, Kahalu', boxing Day 2019

    Just a few strokes further out into the bay, I came upon an infant Hawaiian Dascyllus.  It had been a good long time since I had seen a baby dascyllus at Kahalu'u and this little fellow made my heart soar.

   As you can see, this guy was harboring around rocks and rubble.  He may not quite meet the criteria for a waif, but darn close.  We'll let you know how he does in the ensuing months.

    Prior to 2014, there were clouds of bay dascyllus surrounding cauliflower corals in the shallows all up and down the Kona coast.  Hot water killed all the cauliflower coral.  It is recovering slowly, but the dascyllus is not.  The only place I know of where you can see this super cool baby dependably is around the pillars at Kawaihae harbor.  There it is found around relatively small pocillopora corals.  I can't tell you why these baby dascyllus are there and not around similar small branching corals at the pier.  Sadly, there is precious little branching coral at Kahalu'u. 

Reticulated Dascyllus Lipah Bay, Bali  November 2014

    As you can see, the juvenile Hawaiian dascyllus is a pretty little fish.  In Bali, we have found the reticulated dascyllus.  This is a pretty little fish.  It raises its babies on coral that rise in the shallows like a cake stand, a horizontal plate with innumerable little spikes sit just below the surface.  A myriad of babies lived between these small coral spikes.  I can think of no sadder sight than returning to Lipah Bay in 2017 and finding  this coral deteriorated to the point where only a few of these little spikes remained, along with one or two baby reticulated dascyllus.  This happened over the same time frame as in Hawaii, which is to say, very rapidly starting in 2015.

    Beside a small coral head just a meter away from the baby dascyllus, I found a red labrid wrasse.  This is the baby of the yellow tailed coris that we talked about recently.  These are sweet little fish

and we enjoyed this guy.














     
    About ten yards seaward and I happened upon a very special cone shell sitting in a depression of coral rocks and rubble.  This is  a leopard cone.  John Hoover tells us that this is the largest cone found in Hawaii.  This shell was probably four inches long, although the shell can grow to 9 inches.  That would be a big cone shell, indeed.  The larger shells are covered with a thick, fuzzy coating.

Leopard Cone,  Boxing Day 2019

smaller shells, like this one, show the striking spotted pattern.  The leopard cone usually lives at depth, but is rarely found in the shallows.  As I looked at this picture, it occurred to me that that this shell might contain a large hermit crab.  I didn't handle the shell and we'll never know who was living inside.








 


  One of my favorite fish is the juvenile blackside hawkfish.  You have seen this little guy several times in the blog, but since I never get tired of it, I'm going to share this pretty picture of a

Juvenile Blackside Hawkfish, Boxing Day2019

cooperative juvenile freckleface hawkfish..

















   
      Well, this was the day for juvenile fish.  As I made my way towards the exit, I happened upon this attractive little flounder.  Don't you love those brilliant blue and whitespots.  Being trained as a birdwatcher, I really wanted this to be a new species, but  research confirms that it is the juvenile of

Juvenile Peacock Flounder, Boxing Day 2019

the peacock flounder.

   Back on the beach, Sandra had made friends with the party of Korean ladies wearing the blue Ts. Although Sandra has not a word of Korean to her name, she got a hug from the 80 year old birthday girl.

Is this how we look to the Almighty?

    When their buses arrived, the Koreans left in a flash.  Had they been North Koreans, it might have
been the flash of an atomic bomb.

    After the Koreans left, she watched (and photographed) a young man flipper walk from his picnic table all the way into the bay.  While she was waiting for me, she shared her pictures with Bob Hillis, 3000 miles away. Bob said that no matter how silly that young gentleman looks to us, in the eyes of God we all look just as goofy.  So we leave you with a little humility courtesy of the man from St. George, Utah.

May all your boxes be full of goodies,
jeff

A Christmas Wrasse on Christmas Eve

    Before you begin reading, I have to tell you that blogger is not working very well
this morning.  The line break is down and my drivel is dribbling off into the sunset.
The pictures won't wrap around.  It being Christmas, whoever is supposed to care
about these things is out drinking egg nog.  In spite of all this, if you bear with me,
you still might enjoy the story.

This year we decided to move the designated hunt for the Christmas wrasse up a day, 
to Christmas Eve. Although this may seem as if we abandoned the raison d'etre of the
occasion, we had a very good excuse. Obligations for Christmas Day were mounting 
up. and with the general absence of adult Christmas wrasses in the immediate vicinity, 
we felt that to be successful, we needed to go somewhere else. We chose Mahukona, 
the place we are familiar with, that seems to have the best fish, as the location for our 
hunt. Initially thought that we could make it to Mahu and back, shower, change and 

Mahukona, the Accord and Maui rising out of the cloud bank

get to a Christmas potluck by 12:30. My own little Magus (the singular, I believe, of magi) 
pointed out that this was idiocy. And so, with due respect to the calendar and St. 
Nicholas, we moved the official day of the search to Christmas Eve.

It always strikes me as a little crazy to designate the morning of the 24th as eve. 
Shouldn't eve refer to evening? Like the sun is going down, Mary and Joseph are looking 
for a place to stay for the night, the sleigh is packed and the Grinch is strapping the fake 
antlers onto his unwitting accomplice, Max.

The Ornate Wrasse as interpreted by Phillip Weisgerber

Anyway, Christmas eve was a beautiful morning. We had packed the sleigh the night
 before, and were passing Waikoloa about 9 AM. It was a little hazy in the valley that faces 
Kohala Mountain and it wasn't until we were almost to Kawaihae that we could make out 
the summit of Haleakalā poking his head above a bank of clouds. We were parked at 
Mahukona before 9:30. Haleakalā was clearly visible and the waves were crashing against 
the pier, flicking foam in the general direction of our aging Accord.

Phillip Weisgerber, Artist.  With his pet falcon, Max.

Sandra and checked out the ladder entry and decided that things were no worse than when
we had entered with the Kathy et al a week or so ago, and the water was definitely less cloudy. 
As we entered, I immediately spotted a juvenile Christmas wrasse. This is a small fish that
looks like a trout that you would throw in the creel only if you were desperate. If one wanted 
to be technical, I suppose one could say we had completed the quest. Of course, to us the 
Christmas wrasse is the adult with the bright red and green markings. A big, fat St.Nick of a 
fish. And so, full of Christmas cheer, we pressed on.

The Ornate Wrasse, Halichoeres ornatissimus, Mahukona, December 24th, 2019

Although the water was a bit cloudy, it did not prevent us from enjoying a fine variety of
fish. Our friend Peter will tell you that the variety at Mahukona ain't what it used to be, 
just five years ago, but it is still dramatically better than the Kailua pier. Early on, I spotted 
a nice mature Ornate wrasse. He patiently allowed me to take the picture you see here. 

The Checkerboard Wrsse, H. hortulanus, Bali 2017  Crown me!

The male ornate wrasse holds a special spot in the evolution of my fish watching. I saw 
my first reef fish at Hanuma Bay in 1979. Six short years before, Gar Goodson authored the
first guide to reef fish aimed at hobbyists, The Many Splendored Fishes of Hawaii. The 
book was relatively small, as opposed to the dictionary sized book by Dr. Tinker, and 
contained beautiful colored pictures. These watercolors were created by Phillip Weisgerber. 
It is strange that in an extensive search of the internet, in addition to scouring his books, I can
find virtually nothing about Gar, where he lived and worked.  We now know that Mr. 
Weisberger was a renowned artist and lived in Redondo Beach, California. He looked like a 
hippie with wild hair and bushy muttonchops. I suppose he rode a Harley. 

Pinstriped Wrasse, H. melanurus, Bali, 2017

You may be puzzling as to why I am obsessed by these guys. Well, here's the thing, Gar 
included 25 species of wrasses in his seminal work, several of which are accidental in 
Hawaii. That's bird watching speak "for don't actually exist under normal circumstances." But 
much worse, he omitted the Christmas wrasse. If you are not a birdwatcher, you may not 
realize that a bird watcher goes through his book at the end of each day and checks off the 
ones he has seen. It is axiomatic that the birds in the book are what is possible. I bestowed 
on Gar Goodson the same trust that I gave the sainted Roger Tory Peterson, he of the first 
useful field guides for North American birds. If it wasn't in Gar's book, as far as I was 

Juvenile Ornate Butterflyfish on Christmas Eve

concerned, it didn't exist. For at least a couple years, as I embarked on fish watching in Hawaii, 
the fish included in his book constituted what was possible. To add insult to injury, the only 
picture I had of the Ornate wrasse was the one in Many Splendored Fishes. I can not believe 
that Phillip Weisgerber ever saw that fish alive, even in an aquarium. So unlike the real 
animal is this picture, that I wonder if someone described the fish to him in a letter and he 
made up the rest. I saw a Christmas wrasse the very first time I snorkeled, at Hanuma Bay 
near Honolulu. More than any other fish I saw that day, the Christmas wrasse turned me 
into a fishwatcher. Of course, with Many Splendored Fishes in hand, I identified it as an 
Ornate wrasse. Curiously, Gar Goodson , in his forward written in in 1972, tells us that his 
first snorkeling experience was at Hanuma Bay. Is it possible that he didn't see a Christmas 
wrasse? Go figure. 

A large school of Convict Tangs on Christmas Eve.

   The ornate wrasse is a member of the genus Halichoeres. It is the only member of that 
genus to occur in Hawaii. When we went to Bali a couple years ago, we saw eight species 
of Halichoeres!   The ornatewrasse may be found in Bali, but we didn't see it there.  As a 
Christmas treat I'm including a couple of the Halichores from Bali that I was able to catch 
on film, as it were.

We were expecting to see the Christmas wrasse out on the wave washed north cusp. On 
the way out we saw a juvenile ornate butterflyfish. A Christmas treat in a small package.

Spectacled Parrotfish Female, photo courtesy of Botany Hawaii

As one approaches the north point at Mahukona, he swims over a deeper patch leading to 
a tall lava wall that becomes the reef. In the deeper area we saw large schools of convict 
tangs and whitebar surgeons. We also saw female forms of the large spectacled parrotfish 
and the smaller regal parrot fish. Neither of these fish are very attractive, but for those of
us who live in the south, they are quite special. 


What we did not see was the Christmas wrasse. The wave washed point is often a good 
spot for this fish, but no matter how long we looked, we could not find one. The other fish
we did not see was the Achilles Tang. This was one of the first fish my boys learned to identify
30 plus years ago. Once common, like the Christmas wrasse it is now a rare treat.

Bluestripe Butterfly at the pier in Kailua, January 2014

As we began our swim across the bay, Sandra said we should check the old pier on the
 north shore of the inner bay for the wrasse. Obviously she had no hope for the southern shore.
And she was right. Aside from a nice blue stripe butterflyfish, we saw nothing of interest on 
that side.

Finally we were back at the foot of the bay. As Sandra had suggested, we worked the area by 
the old landing. There was a juvenile Big eye emperor, the third one we had seen that day. 
And he was very cooperative. We were both in our neoprene, so we weren't getting cold, but 
we had been at it for over an hour. It seemed like it was about time to go. We decided that we 
would swim out a bit and then head in.  As we hit the end of the old landing, we suddenly came
across our Christmas wrasse. He was a nice adult, not as big as some, but full of color. We both 
got a good look as he swam rapidly away. Luckily I had the camera in my hand and I snapped
three quick ones. 
 

Our Christmas wrasse swims rapidly away,  Mahukona, Christmas Eve, 2019

We surface, exchanged high fives and Sandra said, "Now we'll have good luck all year." 
Sandra and I wish that for you, as well. 

 Mele Kalikimaka, jeff

By popular demand:  A trio of Christmas Tree Worms at Kawaihae Harbor,  April 2019

O Little Town Kailuaville

O little town Kailuaville, how still we see thee rise,

Upon thy deep and dreamless reef, the silent fish swim by.

Yet in the dark depths shineth, the phosphorescent light.

The sharks and rays who sleep by day will swim with us tonight.

The Keiki dream of sugar cane, while Maui seeks the sun.

Please save the fish and grant this wish:

God bless us everyone.

O little town Kailuaville, how brave on Christmas Day.

While pilgrims pray and palm trees sway, the dolphins swim the bay.

Yet ‘neath your shining waters, the Christmas wrasse doth dwell.

His brilliant colors herald in Our Lord, Emmanuel.

The Girls of the Waimea Canoe! or Christmas is coming and the wrasse is getting fat.

    Christmas Day is just around the corner.  With that in mind, I've been scouting the local venues for a Christmas wrasse to stake out for our annual hunt.  As you loyal readers of the blog will recall, "A Christmas Wrasse on Christmas Day!" is, after all, a major holiday tradition.  Like mistletoe and Easter eggs.

Dragon Boat races are a Christmastime staple in the orient.

    It has now been three successive outings at Kahalu'u without a sighting of our target fish.  Not infrequently at K Bay, we find a Christmas wrasse swimming over the wave washed boulders where the decrepit seawall  meets the Rescue shelter.  And sometimes one is patrolling with the submarine-sized Ember Parrotfish.  This has not been the case of late. Bummer.

    Hoping to find one somewhere else, this week I explored both sides of the pier.  Two days ago I went to the Paul Allen side.  Kona is less interesting at Christmas time without Paul, his beautiful ship the Octopus, and especially, his helicopter flights from the Octopus (who wants a boat that isn't big enough to launch a whirlybird?) to the Thurston estate.  That latter property, which sits majestically on the north shore of Kailua Bay has been unoccupied since the great man died.

    My first, perhaps my best hope, was to see a Christmas wrasse around the small jetty that protects the ancient heiau.  Just inside the jetty there is substantial turbulence as the waves swirl over and around a collection of boulders.  This has been a pretty good spot for Christmas wrasse.  It is the only place that I have seen the rare male surge wrasse ( the big first cousin to the Christmas wrasse) with any regularity.  Juvenile surge wrasse is fairly common, the adult is a rare treat.  Outside the jetty the
boulders that form the shoreline are wave washed and provide another good habitat for Christmas wrasse.  Suffice it to say there was not a hint of St. Nicholas or his favorite fish on either side of the small jetty.  Grinch 1, Nick 0.

    To get to the next Christmas wrasse habitat required a swim across the small bay between the jetty and the entry into Paul's lagoon.  As I made the swim, I spied a dragon wrasse in about fifteen feet.  This is an uncommon sighting for this location.  Of the places we snorkel, only the friendly confines of Kahalu'u bay seems to have a resident population of rockmovers and their progeny, the dragon wrasse.

Teardrops were common on both sides of the pier.

    Did you know that an important dragon boat regatta takes place in Bancock in the weeks leading up to Christmas?  With the paucity of Christmas wrasses, we are forced to look for whatever weak holiday analogies we can drum up.   Rum-a-tum-tum.

    True to his word, our coral croucher was still holding the fort out by the entrance to Paul's lagoon.  While I was checking up on the croucher, a fellow snorkeler swam by.  This would not be worth mentioning except this guy was towing a a buoy with a flag post. He was flying a tiny nautical orange with white slash divers flag.  If he had cared about the blog, he would have topped his buoy with a Christmas tree.  As it was, he was just a geeky curiosity.

    On the very outside, on the coast fronting the Thurston estate, there was a bit of slosh but no Christmas wrasses.  Having exhausted the likely habitat wrasse habitats,  I swam out to the patch of dead coral about twenty yards off shore and was rewarded with a pair of Potter's angelfish.  It's a quixotic mission, but I always try to take a picture of Potter's angel.  So there I was, ten feet down

Lagoonn Triggerfish  Kailua Bay December 2019

holding on to a knob of coral, looking through a coral fenestration at an angelfish about ten feet away, when all of a sudden I heard a loud buzzing.

    Like your life passing before your eyes in one of those 1950s cartoons, this thought raced through my mind: What is the most dangerous thing in the ocean...sharks,no...panicked swimmers, maybe...speeding boats..Yes!

     Well, if I was some kind of sea going mammal like a walrus or a manatee, I could have hung on to that coral for another minute or so, but Mrs. Hill didn't birth no seal pup.  So up I swam to meet my fate.  As I hit the surface one of those UFO parasailing boats went whizzing a scant twenty yards away, bow pointing skyward and making at least twentyfive knots..  That may not seem all that close to you, but to me it was way too

Mele Kalikamaka.  A Christams kiss from Forcipiger flavissimus.

close.  That I am here writing this blog, as opposed to a variety of fragments feeding the crabs, is truly a Christmas miracle.

    Two days later, I returned to the pier to see if Father Christmas was plying his trade on the Ironman side.  After dropping me off, Sandra headed headed up to Macy's to participate in the biggest sale of the year.  Immediately I realized that a high school regatta was in full swing.  Young men and women in colorful T shirts were all over the place.  Snorkeling during a regatta is so much fun and so photogenic, the boats, the paddlers, the flags.

     This was lucky because the fish were not exactly spectacular.  As two days earlier, there were a few teardrop butterflies, which have been dropping off in numbers over  the last few months.  I got a serendipitous picture of a lagoon triggerfish that cruised close by while I was hanging on working on the teardrop.  And a small longnose butterfly gave me a couple close looks, swimming right up and looking me in the eye.

    But the most unusual fish was a black (Friday) morph of the longnose butterfly.  He was in about eight feet about by the third swim buoy.  I had the camera in hand, and nabbed two inferior shots before he raced away, never to be seen again. 

Practicing for the Regatta

    The Black Friday butterflyfish was the closest we came to a Christmas themed fish on our exploration of the waters around the pier.  I got a picture of the Kealakehe crew (our home high school) lounging on the pier.  And, while I was taking my shower, I had a quick chat with the girl's crew from Waimea.

     Waimea sits at almost 3000 feet, so even though it was a cool day in Kona, I asked them if the weather here seemed really warm, to which they readily agreed.

   The lady's crew wandered off before I could ask if I could take their collective picture, posed provocatively with paddles in front of the King Kam

The Keaakehe Crew lounges before the race.

lagoon.  It could have been a great shot.  And think how many people would have read the blog if the title was, "The Girls of the Waimea Canoe!"  If I had worked it just right, I could be writing this blog from a detention cell at the spanking new Kona courthouse.  That I am writing from the comfort of Casa Ono is yet another Christmas miracle.

Mele Kalikimaka,
jeff

Christmas is coming, the wrasse is getting fat.

Won’t you please but a blenny in a lobster trap.

If you haven’t got a blenny, a cuttlefish will do.

If you haven’t got a cuttlefishlfish, then God bless you!

God bless you, snorkelers, God bless you!

If you haven’t got a cuttlefish then God bless you.

      For those of you who are unfamiliar, here is a picture of the much sought after Christmas wrasse hunting with the immensely larger ember parrotfish.  The parrotfish eats coral polyps and the wrasse eats a variety of mobile invertebrates, so it isn't at all clear how this relationship works.  This picture was taken in June of 2016 at Kahalu'u.

    

Mahu-Kathy

    Two days before their departure, we had dinner down at Sea Village with Kathy and her family.If things had worked out well, we would have been dining upon marlin caught earlier in the day by our hosts aboard the Bite Me II.  As it was, we had ono and mahi mahi caught at Safeway.  It was

Sandra and Hai... Kibitzing at Kawaihae

delicious and a wonderful time was had by all.

     The following morning the group was supposed to convene at Casa Ono for breakfast.  However, I had noticed that their time was running short and the surf was coming up.   My go to web based predictors,  Stormsurf Hawaii and Tides4fishing, had convinced me that the following day should still be good on the beaches of the Great Kohala Bight.  And so, exercising the willfulness of my personality, I convinced one and all that we feed them in the little park at Kawaihaie harbor and then head north to Mahukona.

    The morning in Kona was magnificent and Sandra and I, with a hamper full of bagels, cheeses and fruit, headed north brimming with optimism.  At Kawaihae we met our friend Hai, who I had thought would join us for breakfast and then go swimming with us.  Sadly, he had different plans...to go south to the Mauan Kea Beach Hotel.  This required him to head out without a bagel.  (I suppose we should have fixed him one to go.)

    Following breakfast we all headed out for the last short leg up to Mahukona.  The surf looked very mild, as predicted, and I was brimming with optimism.  On arrival, we headed on down to the ladder entry where we discovered two things.  First, there was a two foot swell that was barrelling up the

A nice milletseed despite the cloudy water. Mahukona, December 2019

outflow of the bay, turning the water by the ladder bouncy and muddy.  The second was our good friend Marla, swimming to the ladder, timing the sets and pulling herself up.

    Kathy, being a reader of the blog, recognized Marla for the celebrity that she is and introduced her to her family.  Then it was time for decisions.  I suppose that it came down to it being a long way to come to turn back empty handed.  In any event,  as the waves swished back and forth around the ladder we got in and headed out through the murk. It cleared a little as we rounded the southern edge of the bay, where we saw a small school of milletseed butterflyfish.  The objective was to swim another hundred yards and see the pyramid butterflies.  However, the water was choppy and we were swimming into a current, all of which combined to make slow going.  Sandra and I had a pow wow, following which our small group turned back.

Juvenile mū in the muck,  Mahukona, December 2019

     On the way back in, I spotted the juvenile mū that you see here.  This is a really neat fish, rarely seen except at Mahukona.  This guy was young enough to show exactly the fancy barred pattern with yellow tail flares that you will find in a field guide and he was remarkably tolerant of my approach.

     Ashore, I had a nice chat with Kent who actually enjoyed the challenges that the surf posed. 

   The following day, with the surf up everywhere,  Kathy and friends  went swimming at White Sands Beach.  Kent had a blast body surfing and took a couple tumbles.  He allowed that while he was driving his head into the sandy bottom the lifeguard was making announcements about neck injuries.  Being a stout fellow, he didn't let that spoil his fun *  Which I suppose is the sort of attitude you need when its a rough day at Mahukona.

jeff

*I can remember not so many years back when I enjoyed the same activity with the same neck wrenching result.  That's the trouble with getting old...you stop body surfing.