Saturday, November 26, 2005
I'm back! It's really cold here. There's snow on the ground. I didn't type in any of my blog notebook entries while in Hawaii, so just hold your horses and I'll try to do them as soon as possible. But not right now, since I've been up for nearly two days. We had a red-eye flight last night at 10:49 pm (Hawaii time), but sleeping on a plane is impossible.
Posted at 10:16:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
Friday, November 25, 2005
Wow. Pahu's coconut tapioca dessert is really good. We both think so, and hope they keep it on the menu. The chef wrote "Bon Voyage" on my warm Valhrona chocolate cake. :-) It's very still and dark here tonight. I can see the white waves curling over the black.
Posted at 7:40:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
I'm trying a crispy kalua pork special classic Hawaiian thing. But I have my poke trio to cancel out its meaty meatness. Virgin mojitos make a good pre-plane drink. Dean loved his beet salad and wants to order it again. Hm... the kalua pork (cooked for hours & hours like a buried pig in a luau) reminds me of that canned deviled ham stuff.
Posted at 6:29:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
I found a new kind of cuke, on our last day! He was under a rock at the Hilton super-shallow ocean area. At first he seemed really boring and sluggish (but cool because he's new) but I think I just woke him up, because then he transformed magnificently and got covered with cool-looking fleshy spikes and extended tube feet and a great set of yellow flower-like tentacles to reach and explore around with. He's shorter than Loli Longs and is perfectly camouflaged to match where he lies--tannish with light black spots, patterned like salt-and pepper sand. I like him. I found him under a rock.
Posted at 3:17:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
[Edit: I think he's another rare & uncommon cuke not in the book, because he looks just like Holothuria hawaiiensis, the the one on the top of the "lesser-known sea cucumbers" page! Either that or he's a Holothuria hilla. I think Loli Longs is a Holothuria dificilis ("difficult sea cucumber.")]
We hid the weights! (And special rock.) I wrote "Loli" in the spot with a slate pencil urchin spine. And I got a dark roast Kona coffee and newspaper at the grocery store for only $1.40, total.
Posted at 1:26:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
Thursday, November 24, 2005
Things we decided not to put in the box to mail home, because they're irreplacable: my fuzzy seed necklace Dean gave me, our dive logs, and the bag I made.
Posted at 10:12:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
Perfect Thanksgiving. Shooting stars, excellent feast, glowing lightstick bracelets (orange, yellow, pink), soaked huaraches, lovely warm still night. For our feast we had: sandwiches on croissants (turkey for me, egg for Dean), taro and local purple sweet potato chips (Kilauea fire flav) with guacamole dip, grapes, sparkling Martinelli's, and pumpkin and orange-cranberry scones from SBUX.
Posted at 8:37:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
I used the super-bright UW flashlight to look for night creatures in the tidepools, but all I saw were the usual little eel-ular fish (who went nuts when I shined the light on them), black crabs, and tiny hermit crabs and snails. I did see one pool with a whole bunch of long-spined back unis in it, sort of gathered up in a conference (I don't see big/long-spined ones like that in pools), but they weren't crawling all around or anything. No scuttling, marauding brittles and cukes. Maybe they were out deeper. My huaraches got soaked because a sandy-bottomed pool of clear water looks exactly like a sandy-bottomed pool without water in the light of a flashlight. Now they'll be molded to exactly fit my feet. It was really nice walking back in the dark after.
Oh, we snorkeled sans gear in the Unitown Massacre section of 'Iki as our last snorkel, this afternoon. The bottom was covered with unis. And the water was really cold on top, but warm down on uni-level. Lucky unis. Wow!! It just started pouring out! It was fun, even though there wasn't that much to see. Coming in reminded me of Denis.
Whale! We both saw it! It's big and close and has a mermaid's tail and floppy side fins. And blows water out of its hole.
Posted at 3:25:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
(!!) Dean saw a [real] whale! I saw its splash.
Posted at 3:00:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
Mm. The cinnamon graham flav is really good, too. We walked all the way down to the Klaus' Crypt of 'Iki. The waves are curly here today. 'Iki's the best. The hat on the whale reminds me of Jeff's hat. It even has a hole in the top, for the whale to spout through.
Posted at 2:30:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
I got all eXhausted trying on wetsuits at Jack's! It's more difficult and tiring than a hundred surgy snorkels!! I barely survived. But, I got a super-cool ScubaPro suit!! Dean said "that fits you really well" when he first saw me in it. Dean got a matching one. It's a special ultra-stretchy kind that molds to your body, sort of like in The Incredibles. And it's all black. With cool rubber shoulder pieces and knees.
Posted at 5:13:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
Write more about dive.
- mask leak theory [I think my mask leaks when I scuba dive because having the regulator in my mouth changes the shape of my face and messes up the seal. It never ever leaks when I snorkel, but it leaks constantly when I dive. (Fortunately, I'm good at clearing it.)]
- boat feeling at night when I close my eyes
- necess. piece of dive gear = SUN
- dive boat = best place for hair (solar shower, sunny deck, just the right amount of wind)
I shocked the annoying combative salespitch guy (the owner?) at BID, according to Dean. "You gotta stop feeding her sushi and get her on burritos." (Why he said "sushi," Dean has no idea.) "She eats, but it just doesn't stick."
Posted at 2:08:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
He said he'd "eat his shorts without ketchup" if I could fit into a size large children's wetsuit. I knew I could, because I wear one every day! He just wouldn't believe me. Groan.
Tank #1 - Shark Fin Rock (aka Hangman's Rock). Time in: 9:55 am. Time out: 10:35. Depth: 130' (me) / 108' (Dean).
Posted at 10:52:00 AM by Laura W. Petix.
Saw:
- wire coral - lots! orange! [I liked them. I wrote on the crazy fish tattoo divemaster's slate, "Wire coral?" to ask him if that's what they were, since I've never seen them before. They were really cool looking.]
- more cushion stars! - 5? one had an indented bottom; they were various colors [the divemaster called them "pincushion stars"]
- Tinker's butterflyfish (divemaster herded it from the depths so we could see it; I saw it but Dean didn't, because he had to go up to equalize) [they are rare and prefer depths of 150 feet or more] [I waited at 130 feet because that's greatest depth allowed for recreational divers] [!!! I didn't realise it at the time, but plenty of divers who have been diving for years and years have never gone to 130 feet!]
- whitetip reef shark (Dean spotted it and signaled to me by doing the shark symbol. I told the divemaster by doing the shark symbol, and then the whole group looked and saw it and thought it was the coolest. Dean was a hero!)
- whip coral goby - 2 (divemaster showed us)
- I saw a big eel swimming inside coral when I first went down
Tank #2 - Devil's Doorway. Time in: 11:50. Time out: 12:44. Depth: 72'.
Saw:
- a million fish (multiple kinds) feeding on fish eggs (can't remember what kind) on a flat vertical rock where we could hold on and watch them from two inches away.
I really like Jim, the non-Hawaiian Hawaiian skipper guy (he's actually Canadian but looks Hawaiian) (Hawaiian and Canadian are practically identical, anyway). And, we finally found out what growlers are!
I must have nitrogen narcosis. I keep laughing uncontrollably (painfully) about Big Island Gland. (How my phone wanted to spell Big Island Divers because I messed up typing it in.) I can't even talk. I am really losing it.
Posted at 7:57:00 AM by Laura W. Petix.
[Edit, 12/21: Couldn't resist taking a photo of Dean while we were waiting outside Big Island Divers for the boat to be loaded. It was the last day we visited Big Island Divers! Sniff! Sniff! No more stopping by practically every day! No more boat sandwiches! No more me getting endlessly ribbed by Jeff! Until next year, at least.]
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
[No time listed on entry.]
Posted at 11:59:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
I officially like scuba-ing now. Not because of the mantas. Because of Dive 1. I was too cold on the second dive (shaking, teeth chattering) and watching manta swoop over your head gets boring after about 20 minutes no matter how huge and majestic they are. (I think so, at least.) But I loved the first dive! I am so good at buoyancy now!!!
[Edit: I was so cold that when we got back to our place, Dean took me to Whaler's to buy hot chocolate. I couldn't warm up for a long time. But we stopped at Big Island Divers first, to sign up for another dive tomorrow!]
[No time listed on entry.]
Posted at 11:58:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
First Tank - Garden Eel Cove. Time in: 4:20pm. Time out: 5:00. Depth: 66'.
Saw:
- a field of garden eels [Very cool! I've always wanted to see garden eels!! They looked like asparagus. We didn't get to go really close, though, I guess because they would have all immediately slurped back down into their holes.] [What we saw looked a lot like this.] [Cute!!! Look how insanely cute they are up close!]
- an uni with really stripey light-colored bands
- lots of crown-of-thorns (including some with feet out) including a small young one that was a pretty color (pink? orange?)
- 2 sputnik urchins (picked one up) (big ones!)
- a divided flatworm (looked like a flat monarch butterfly caterpillar)
- a free-living mushroom coral [Dean pointed it out to me, and I picked it up to look at; I didn't know what it was, but I recognised it as something from my creatures book; looked it up later]
- a cushion star! (yellow on bottom with 5-pointed star pattern) [Dean pointed it out to me, with a "What the heck is that?" kind of gesture, and I was immediately really excited, because I have always wanted to see a cushion star!!! He had no idea it was a starfish. I picked it up, and there was a brittle star underneath the rock I moved to get to it! I tried to tell what it was by doing a starfish gesture with my hand, but he didn't understand because it didn't look anything like a starfish to him. Ha! I'm pretty sure he could tell how much I loved whatever it was, though. I told him what it was after we made our ascent, and I think he said something like, "That was a starfish?!" It didn't have arms at all--it was just sort of a puffy pentagonal shape and stiff like a rock (kind of like this and this).
- a small free-swimming eel
- a big eel head with a sticking-out tongue! [The crazy fish tattoo divemaster dude showed it to us]
Second Tank - Manta Heaven. Time in: 6:50pm. Time Out: ~7:20. Depth: 36'.
Night dive with manta rays. Saw six manta, swimming within inches of our dive lights (held above heads). Got really cold and came up early (alone). Blue Big Island Divers glow lights. Blue. Mouths. Cold. [I wish we'd been able to do a real night dive in addition to seeing the mantas. It was neat swimming down in the dark, toward the circle of lights below...]
I got hugged by Jeff. A sideways shoulder hug. :-) "Remember, diving at night is just like diving in the daytime. Except it's dark."
Posted at 3:09:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
O's ginger lemonade is really good. Dean keeps trying to steal mine, but I won't let him. [Afterwards: new Kona SBUX. Now I've visited every branch!]
Posted at 1:10:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
I found Loli Longs!!!!! And he clearly wanted to be found by me (he's my pal) because there's no way I would've seen him otherwise. The tide is nice and low here today, and I was exploring the lava near the splashy edge (where the seaweed grows), and I bent down to look at an uni, and in the crack/fissure between the lava, I saw a tiny sea cucumber the size of Loli Longs. Keep in mind that Loli is dark purply brown (nearly black) and the lava is black, and this was down in a crack only slightly wider than Loli, so it's only because of my echinoderm sixth sense that I saw him at all. I reached my fingers down in the crack and tried to gently work his slimy body out of the hole. I couldn't grab on or anything--the crack was only wide enough for one set of fingers, unbent. I expected him to cling onto the lava with his tube feet, in which case I never would've been able to extract him, but he didn't--he knew me, and allowed me to get him out. This was only minutes after I started walking the lava looking, too!
Posted at 11:40:00 AM by Laura W. Petix.
I brought him back to show Dean but admitted that I didn't think it was the real Loli Longs, even though he was the exact same size, because L.L. is a special fancy sea cucumber with ruffly tentacles. Then I went to put him back in cool water, and I was holding him in my hand under water in one of the cool shallow tide pools and all the sudden he started reaching out his beautiful tentacles!!! It WAS the Loli Longs! I ran back to Dean all excited to tell him.
When I was walking back again with Loli, this middle-aged couple asked me, "Find something exciting?" (I think they observed me when I realized it was Loli.) I said, "Exciting to me." I showed them and explained why it was so exciting and that he is a special sea cucumber that I found last year. (I told them that sea cucumbers are related to starfish and sea urchins--until that, I could tell they were thinking, "Ew. That is a creature??") The man said, "Well, if you named him, that makes him special," and I proudly said, "His name is Loli Longs!" Then they said something about how he was "interesting" and thanked me for showing them. Laugh LAUGH!
I tried to take photos of Loli with his tentacles out, but I don't know if they came out--he's hard to photograph because he's so dark, and he only reaches out the tentacles under water. I held him a lot, though, marvelling at his tentacles, and he clung onto me with his tiny tube feet. Loli Longs!
[Edit, 12/21: Okay, I had to include this photo because it's the only one I have of my new bathing suit (the whole thing). I took this while glowing with love for my dear one and only Loli Longs. But Loli's not in it.]
Monday, November 21, 2005
I love driving the Jeep! Lava 105 is playing lots of Elvis today. And "Little Deuce Coupe." I just ate my taro masalada with the remains of my coffee, and it was good x 100. Light and fluffy and delicious. The grocery store has really good dark roast Kona coffee. It's a pretty wimpy grocery store, though. I wish I could drive to KTA or Longs. I bought some locally grown non-apple banana bananas (normal-sized ones) to compare to home bananas. The market doesn't have a very good selection of li hing mui products. But they do have Hawaiian animal crackers! At first I thought they didn't, but they were on display near the checkout. It's so fun driving places by myself! The grocery store person asked if I "would like any assistance today," (carrying my bags to the car) just like they used to back in the olden days when I was little girl!
Posted at 11:44:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
Aaagh. I am obsessed with that sea cucumber. It had to be a sea cucumber, but it's not in my book. I thought it was one of those weird serpentine sea cukes in my book but I can't find anything that resembles it anywhere (books or online). Obsessed obsessed. It had slightly bumpy skin like a Loli Longs type cuke (Dean thinks it was smooth, but he can't see details like I can) and a lamprey-ish (around-the-corner vacuum) looking mouth that was clung onto the cave wall. No tentacles that I saw. It was medium grey (slight bluish tinge) with not-very-conspicuous yellow bumps. And it was long and skinny (1 to 1 ½" wide), and very round shaped, like a vacuum tube. Dean thinks it was about 8" long and I think it was about 14" long. What was it??? It does say "many of Hawaii's sea cucumbers are poorly-known and some are undescribed" on the book dude's website. Wait! Wait! Maybe it's the Holothuria flavomaculata?? [Fourth one down on the page.] A rare and uncommon sea cuke!
Posted at 9:37:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
How to find a good new snorkeling spot that's not in the book: send me on a tidepooling mission, then snorkel in the spot I find! I found two underwater fancy sea cucumbers and one really weird scary-looking sea cuke (I'm pretty sure it's a strange type of cuke that's in my book). [Edit: Nope! See followup entry.] It was tube shaped with a lamprey-like mouth on one end, and was really long and skinny. (14"? Dean says 8".) It was bluish grey with yellow bumps. I'm not sure I would want to be pals with it! I found it by diving down and looking in a little cave, like Dean always does but I used to be really bad at (staying under). There were a lot of big brittles whose spiny legs I could see between the crevices in ledges (not hiding under rocks like usual brittles). Black and pied. The water is very calm today so it was easy to get up close to edges and look at things.
Posted at 5:26:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
The Tree Beach is a really interesting place to go tidepooling. There's a system of pools and caves and arches and steps and ledges and drains, a long ways down along the left end of the beach. They're really fun to walk on and peer into. It didn't really look like brittle territory, but there are tons of different crabs; baby fish; helmet, rock-boring, and black oblong urchins; and I saw two of those fancy sea cucumbers with the ruffly tentacles sticking out. I tried to pry one up, but his tube feet were really strong, so I gave up (I didn't want to hurt him). The waves are very small here today and the water is super clear. They're like Caribbean waves. Huge contrast from a few days ago!
Posted at 3:50:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
Sunday, November 20, 2005
I ate my whole beast! (I got the small size.) It had wasabi butter and mean watercress and Waimea tomato and a nasturtium. Dean can't finish his huge thing. Oh and mine has special ultra-sweet ultra-crispy ultra-good local corn. I forgot because I devoured it all. The corn was the best thing here.
Posted at 7:10:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
Big Island beef! (grass fed strip loin) Maui Oma coffee. Hearts of palm salad. Mauna Kea goat cheese salad. Waimea tomatoes salad (anchovies on the side). Vegetarian entree.
Posted at 6:17:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
So far, this is way better than Roy's. It fits Waimea perfectly.
[Edit, 6:45:] All the salads were good! My coffee is good, too. Rich and slightly smoky. We need some Cowboy Bob music.
Typical A Bay snorkel. Cloudy and a little cold, but still fun. My core is great! And I'm getting good at finding brittles.
Posted at 4:30:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
Posted at 2:15:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
I think "Maui Sugar" is my fav flav of the Hawaiian animal crackers. They're like normal animal crackers (but with Hawaiian shapes, natch), but with big pretzel-salt sized pieces of Maui sugar on them (sparsely).
I checked out the tide pools at A Bay with my mask and snorkel, and they are the home of brittles!! Perfect spot for our night investigation, since they aren't hard to get to at all. They're in the outcropping of black lava that's lined up with the dead tree, right past the first non-palm tree tree.
First I found one guy, and brought him back to show Dean. When I let him go, I watched (mask about 2" away) until he hid himself back in a crevice. He didn't go underneath a rock, but, rather, crunched himself up into a crack, so he had to dig out the sand using his tube feet. I could see him moving individual grains of sand and tiny pebbles with the tubes. It took him a while.
Then I gathered as many as I could hold in one hand, including one little white-and-tan striped guy (the others were all black), and asked Dean to give me my mask case. I dumped them all in and went back to find more. I ended up with a big scaly pile, several stars deep (I forgot to count before I let them go), including my white banded one and one black-and-gold banded. (One of his legs broke off, and I saved the piece. It kept moving around all by itself, twisting and reaching, for long after I'd released the guy to go rest and regenerate).
The best place to find brittles is under big (8-12") flat rocks--there are usually at least 3-5 together. Just about every time I captured some, there were several that got away. If they started to bury themselves under a rock too far, I let them go, because I didn't want to break off legs if I could help it. They're so fast, in the time it takes to grab one, the others all scatter and immediately start burying themselves. Brittles like to feel safe, like enclosed in your hand, or piled up in a big mass together--then they don't writhe around so much.
I also found unis, a million tiny snails, crabs, one sea slug (not a very pretty one--more like a normal slug), a cute little fat fish with puffy cheeks (I picked up a rock, saw him, and in the next instant he'd disappeared), and this weird snakey thing (all hidden under rocks).
The snakey thing was long--about 10"--and looked sort of scaly like a brittle's leg, and was about the width of one of Dean's fingers (½"? ¾"?). It was flat like a brittle's leg, not rounded like an eel. But I only saw it for two seconds--I picked up a rock and it SHOT out at me (I was scared, and leapt back) and swam away really fast in a serpentine fashion. It didn't crawl on the bottom like a brittle or a fireworm, it swam. I can't remember what color it was--not black... maybe sort of tannish. It must have been some kind of worm thing, kind of like a fireworm, but it swam and was super fast and long and skinny like a snake. I didn't like it! But I went right back to picking up rocks looking for brittles.
It's really nice here today. Salt-and-pepper sand clinging to my legs, soft breeze, zero clouds, small waves swishing. Hardly any people. As always.
![[Powered by Blogger]](http://dpcc.com/lpetix/brain/bloggerbutton59.gif)