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.