Saturday, November 17, 2007
Started the day with malasadas again! Dean snuck out and got two at 6:30 AM. This time they had regular sugar and cinnamon-and-sugar, so he secured one of each. BEST DONUTS EVER.
Posted at 9:02:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
Also scored BIG at the Keauhou Farmers' Market: mangosteens! (!!!) We've never seen them on the Big Island before (or anywhere, for that matter, other than Banana Joe's stand in Kauai). The mangosteen guy said he sells them to resort restaurants for $3 apiece but you don't usually see them at farmers' markets because most people won't pay $3 for one fruit. (I didn't hesitate for one second, obviously.) Bought two, and also got to sample mameyita, aka "lemon drop mangosteen." They're tiny yellow cherry tomato looking relatives of mangosteen, sour lemony flavored. (You eat them whole and spit out the seed). The guy let me try one on the spot, and also take two back with me for photographic purposes, for free. Same deal with yellow momban, which was sort of similar but more oblong shaped, slightly sweeter, less intense, and not lemony. Both have a single large seed inside.
But the mangosteen & friends were near the end; I began my market-ing by SNAGGING the very last lulo popsicle at the lulo stand. It was sort of like an auction where the stand dude called out, "Who wants the last lulo popsicle???" and I raised my hand and it was MINE. Everyone else was too tenative because they didn't know how great lulo is. The popsicle was highly refreshing.
Bought more lulos, a gigantic round Meyer lemon (as large as an organge), limes for future papyas, and more atemoyas. Dean had a lilokoi juice, which was really good, but I only got one sip!!
Oh, I forgot to mention the band (no, not The Band) and all the farmers' trucks and vans with magnetic signs on their sides backed up to the stalls. I love Keauhou Farmers' Market. There are lots of free samples to try, tons of unusual fruit variety, and it's not scary like the Hilo one. The only bad thing today was: NO MORE YELLOW PITAYA! :-( Maybe I got the last of the season last week. I hope not, but they were kind of small ones.
After the market, we were further adventurous and had local food at the International Marketplace for lunch. I tried a Fresh Fish Sandwich from Captain Dano's Hawaiian Grill (which is also the shave ice stand). It was really good! The mystery fish = ahi. Dean had some Mexican thing. First we checked out the very pink Sweet Ohana Candy Factory (it's also a restaurant) but it looked puh. Dean made me buy some li hing mui saltwater taffy (?!) (he loathes taffy!).
It's North time now, so we checked out the new Queens' Shops and they looked nice (bigger and fancier than Kings'!), but only a few of them are open. (NOT including the huge new gourmet market, which is currently just a shell. What a tease!!!) Now there are two Starbucks within walking distance. What the heck. Got welcomed by my dear old fish sheets, and everything feels bigger. (Not sure if it's just a matter of perception.) Also, this place is ideal for whistling the Andy Griffith Show theme song (a la Sherriff Buck).
We didn't want to go anywhere real for dinner so we gave Merriman's Market Cafe a second chance (we dissed them last year) and picked the simplest things that would be hard for them to mess up. I think we pretty much confirmed that the Tahitian limeade is the only thing worth ordering. They don't even have good tomatoes, and Waimea is famous for their great tomatoes! Merriman should feel shame. It's hard to believe they're supposedly associated with his restaurant. If they were just called Some Random Dude Market Cafe, we wouldn't have such high expectations. But with the Merriman name, sub-par food (especially produce) just doesn't make sense. You'd think he'd either disassociate himself with them or whip them into shape.
Couldn't post last night because we went on our BLACK WATER DIVE and didn't get back until 12:15 AM (including the time it took for my nice long hot shower afterwards).
Posted at 8:52:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
I will write a catch-up post about our night dive and the Black Water Dive later, but I want to finish the rest of this now so I don't get 1,000 days behind.
In the morning I went on my last South-of-Kona solo mission, and, while I was driving, Lava 105 kept hyping the exciting announcement they were going to make at noon. It turned out the announcement was that Lava is now all Christmas music all the time (until Christmas). What the heck. Isn't it a bit early?? They are really into Christmas here.
Dean and I went to the Hula Bean in Kealakekua for lunch, and talked to the very enthusiastic owner, who said it only opened three weeks ago. (It's on the site of the former Nasturtium Cafe, and the Nasturtium lady still makes all the food.) They had Big Island Ice Cream, which was inferior to Tropical Dreams, but the food was good! Dean got a Tofu Mexi-Wrap (it was really called a Mexi-Tofu Wrap, but I think my way sounds better) and I had a spinach mushroom quiche. Both were excellent, and the Hula Bean coffee was pretty good, too.
On the way back, Dean turned around on Mamalahoa Highway so I could check out this run-down out-of-business looking store I am obsessed with. I comment about this place every time we drive by, which is pretty much every time we go anywhere in South Kona. I originally thought it had something to do with Oshima Store (like maybe it was the original Oshima) but I finally figured out that the sign doesn't say Oshima, it says Ushijima (you'd think this would be easier to notice, but it's on the side of the highway so I only have a second to try to glimpse it as we zoom past, and it's a very very very faded-out sign, which is part of the reason it intrigues me so much.) Today as we were passing it on the way to Hula Bean I noticed that the front door was open and it looked like there's an actual business there, because I could see stuff inside the place. Keep in mind this building is boarded up, with a rusty old corrugated tin roof, an unreadable sign, and looks like it's been condemned for about 40 years. So of course I massively wanted to stop and see if it really was a real store. Dean refused to get out of the Jeep, and even pulled forward so it wouldn't look like he was really parking there, but I jumped out and bravely ventured inside (snapping a couple of not-too-great Zi photos, because I didn't have my real camera with me). It WAS a real store, with actual goods inside, but there was NO ONE in there (not even a clerk, I mean). It was sort of like a tiny grocery store/convenience store, with staple necessities like soap and ramen. But no people, unless they were hiding (and there wasn't really anywhere to hide), so I couldn't have bought something from the Ushijima Store even if I'd wanted to.
Friday, November 16, 2007
[I'm writing this entry months later (2-20-08) from very sketchy notes but I'll do my best to remember!]
Posted at 11:59:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
First we went on our night dive; by prior agreement with Luke, Dean and I swam off to explore Garden Eel Cove in the dark on our own while the rest of the group joined the "campfire" circle to watch for manta rays. We already went on the manta dive a couple of years ago and didn't want to repeat it, so it was a cool opportunity to be able to go on a night dive by ourselves while still having the convenience and safety of the boat. I love night dives, but only when you can take your time and really look, which isn't always the case with a group. Being on our own was fantastic. It was so nice and slow, my breathing and buoyancy felt perfect, like I could go anywhere.
There wasn't really anything especially weird to see this time (but it was still really nice regardless), just lots of sleepy fish, and echinoderms on the prowl. In the deeper area, we saw cool sea cucumbers actively vacuuming up the sand, and there were cushion stars out marauding, orange on top with yellow bellies, like suns on the bottom of the night sea. I shined my flashlight while Dean took photos. The water was dark but full of life, and we could see the distant glow of all the gathered manta-watchers, if we looked in the right direction.
The fish seemed so tame. Instead of swimming away like in the daytime, they let us go right up to them and stayed there staring confusedly, half asleep. Some fish are more active at night, but we mostly saw sleepy fish, details so close and colors so true in the flashlight-lit dark. We came across a spotted puffer who was so cute that I couldn't resist reaching out and stroking him. I was shocked when he didn't swim away, just wiggled adorably, as if he was ticklish, and puffed up a little. Dean told me later that he was super-jealous that I got to touch a puffer! It was great, but I couldn't remember what it felt like, after. Here he is, a little puffed after petting.
When it was time to go (we had agreed to meet back with the others after a certain amount of time), we swam back over to the manta area, where a pathetic ONE manta ray was swooping around. (We saw six when we did the manta dive!) We found the group from our boat and sat behind them for a short while before ascending, and the manta kept swooping right over us! I don't know why, since we weren't really in the main area.
Back on the boat, we returned to the harbor and dropped off everyone except for us and two other dudes, plus Luke and the boat captain, then drove straight back out again, due west, for the Black Water Dive, about four miles into the open ocean. The water out there was a mile deep, and pitch black. On each corner of the boat hung a 40-foot rope (one for each diver) with a weight on the bottom to keep it from drifting and to give the diver a reference point so we wouldn't float off into nothingness and disappear forever. Each rope had a second tether rope on it with a metal carbinger clip on its end; you clipped this to your BCD and could then move up and down the long rope at will, without becoming lost. As soon as Dean and I descended and clipped ourselves to our ropes, Dean swam over from his corner and found me in the dark water. I was glad of that. It was lonely in the black nothingness, with no sense of space or time. Together, we joined our flashlights and almost immediately began to attract jelly creatures. Luke, not tethered, swam between the four divers and checked out the action. Later he told us we got all the best stuff! They must have been attracted to our triple bright lights (triple, because Dean had his own dive light with him, in addition to our two provided ones).
I don't know the names of any of the creatures that swam by, except for the lovely long flat ribbon-shaped Venus' Girdle. There were lots of Ctenophores of all shapes and sizes, ranging from tiny gooseberries probably about 1/8", to beautiful and strange forms that looked sort of like this drawing, about 1½ feet including the two long trailing tentacles. The creature that I tried to draw hung around with us for quite a while, dancing in the light of our flashlights, its flexible body layers changing and flowing. I think we both touched it. A lot of the jellies, including that one, looked like they were lit from within with weird electric currents that constantly moved along, changing colors up and down the line (like in this wikipedia photo). Luke told us this was really just light refracting from our own dive lights, but it was totally amazing looking.
I don't know what else to say. The stuff we saw was very, very cool, just weird and varied and beautiful. Sometimes there'd be nothing, and we'd each pan our light for minutes searching, and then one of us would find something again and it would dance for us, drifting in our combined beam.
Here are a couple of links (one, and two) to videos that show it better than I can try to say in words, although the experience of actually being there, floating tethered to a line in the abyss, is hard to capture.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
P.S. A few really quick photos!
Posted at 11:59:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
1) Gecko licking my strawberry lump at the Aloha Angel Cafe.
2) Me diving at Honaunau.
3) What Tango's been up to in Maine, while we're away: getting stripped! (!!!) (Photo sent to us by Oxford Aviation dude, obviously.)
4) Best one last: decapitated chicken head eel!!
(It's way too difficult/time consuming to include photos with my posts while I'm here, using this foreign computer, but I just had to post the chicken head.)
On the recommendation of the Goodies guy, plus glowing reviews elsewhere (including the latest edition of the Hawaii Revealed book, which I nosed through at the bookstore yesterday), we tried U-Top-It for breakfast. Their specialty is taro "pan-crepes" with a gazillion different toppings to mix and match and choose from. Apparently lots of people think they're the greatest thing ever. There's even a sign on the window that says it was "Voted #1 breakfast in West Hawaii."
Posted at 9:46:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
Well... We didn't get it. First of all, the menu was overwhelming, and we had no idea which toppings to pick. There were fruits, vegetables, meats, gravies, cheeses, dessert sauces, salsas... all kinds of vastly different stuff. I wanted to call the Goodies guy at his 1-800 number and ask for advice. I ended up ordering a Kona coffee (which was pretty good, about equal to Roadhouse Cafe) and a taro pan-crepe with a few different kinds of tropical fruit and "vanilla drizzle" on top, while Dean got one with vegetables, cream cheese, and salsa.
It turned out that a taro pan-crepe is like a big flat pancake (the taro element is very subtle) with weird stuff in it (mostly NOT on top of it, but cooked inside, like blueberry pancakes). So Dean had a pancake with olives, red bell peppers and mushrooms cooked inside it, with avocado, salsa and cream cheese on top. Try to imagine that. Are you craving one? I didn't think so.
Mine was less weird, since I got fruit, but most of the choices and specials are pizza-like ingredients, cheese, meat, gravy, and stuff like that. All fine ingredients, but in a pancake??! It seemed like it should have been an omelet or tortilla, not a pancake. Do you put salsa or syrup on top?? We just couldn't wrap our brains around it.
After we picked up new tanks at Big, we stopped at Hattie's to buy a giant kanban of Island Essence lotion, and there was a huge tour bus of cruise ship people there--scary!!! The cashier commented to another cashier that they'd been selling lots of Island Essence lately; it's great stuff since Kona is so "hot and dry." What the heck????! Hot and dry??? First of all, the temperature here is pretty much perfect (NOT hot), about 82° every day, and, second of all, one of my very favorite things about it is the IDEAL humidity, which is about 70%. It's not all sticky and thick and horrible like Florida, but it's moist enough to make your skin feel wonderful and all wrinkles to magically disappear from clothes. It's relaxing, easy to breathe, and basically the best air EVER. Not to mention that it's rained a little bit just about every day (or night) since we've been here, so you can't by any stretch of the imagination say it's been dry recently. Maybe that guy was just talking without thinking.
Anyway, after we got back from town we dove Four Mile Marker for the 3rd time (our last shore dive in this area, since we have the Black Water dive scheduled for tomorrow night, and we switch to our new place on Saturday). Surf was up a lot more today, and it was really choppy getting in over the rocks and waves and swimming out with our snorkels. I was not enjoying the surface swim; my dry snorkel kept shutting down with all the surface chop, and it was extra-hard to breathe because we were trying the dive with 2 lbs each of extra weight (to compare at shallow depths near the end of the dive, when it's hard to stay down with a nearly-empty tank of air) (an empty tank is about 5 lbs lighter than a full tank). The two pounds were really noticeable to me; I felt weighed down and had to add a lot of air to my BCD to keep above the chop, so it was hard to take deep enough breaths with the inflated BCD crushing against my chest. (It reminded me a little of asthma, but not quite.) I was really glad when it was time to switch to scuba air and descend.
Unlike usual, it was fairly surgy even under water, too (but lots better than on top, of course), and the dive took a lot more energy than normal just to swim or stay in place. We saw some cool stuff, though, the very best of which was the DECAPITATED CHICKEN HEAD. Okay, it wasn't really a decapitated chicken head, but it LOOKED like one! We were nosing around in the sand a lot because I was looking for those tiny heart urchin shells to collect in my uni case (it worked great, and I got a bunch, even though they were a lot harder to find this time with the sand stirred up), and we both saw this THING sticking out of the sand. It was sand-colored (white) with speckles, and was sticking straight up, about 2½"-3" high. It had a beady little chicken eye, the hint of a comb, a wider ruff-like chicken-shaped neck, and a little chicken beak-ish mouth which it kept opening and closing exactly like it was going "brock, brock, brock." It also let us get really close (~2 feet distant), and didn't run away. We had no idea what it was. (Clearly an eel or other fish of some kind, right...?) It was SO WEIRD. We were flummoxed. I wrote on my slate, "Looks like a chicken head!!" and Dean agreed. He took some photos and, partway though, it withdrew further down into its hole so only its head section was sticking out (not the neck). I was going to poke it with my pencil to see what would happen, but it went down still farther so that only its beak showed, then disappeared underground completely.
When I got back to our place, I looked it up. It was a snake eel, and they are really LONG!! (1 inch in diameter, at least 3 feet long!) We have never ever seen one before, and the book says they are rarely seen because they're so easily overlooked blending in with the sand. It's not even in the normal section of the book--it's one of the extra bonus creatures in the appendix. (If it's three feet long and looks snakeular, I'm glad it didn't swim out, even if it IS an eel!!!)
We also saw two really nice polka-dotted normal eels (morays)--a super-cute small one and a medium-sized one--but Sharky wasn't around today, although there was a turtle and his big orange fish friend hanging out in Sharky's cave. Dean went under Sharky's ledge area (he wasn't there either) to try it out and see what it's like to be Sharky under there. He made a good fake Sharky, and said it was a really nice spot, all snuggly and enclosed, smooth on the bottom and overtop.
The other really cool thing we saw (other than the CHICKEN HEAD, that is) was a beautiful Spanish Dancer nudibranch near the end of the dive. It was deep peach colored with lots of fancy ruffly bits on top, and it was huge! (4 ½"?) I touched it and it felt really soft. Dean got a good photo; I'll post it later. It was by far the most amazing-looking nudibranch we have ever seen! [Edit: Here's the photo!]
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Woke up this morning to malasadas! (They look like this.) I could smell them right through the bag. Dean went over to Daylight Donuts at 6:15 in the morning (it opens at 6:00) to snag some. He thought they'd be all gone (?!) since he was fifteen minutes late, but they weren't even out of the oven yet. They brought out the newly-baked tray, and he bought three and gobbled one down on the spot. When I got up at 8:00 the bag of two heavy, fluffy, heavenly puffers was waiting, and we heated them in the microwave for 20 seconds, then devoured them. (Dean said they were just as good reheated, and I'll try to believe him.) They were SO GOOD.
Posted at 11:29:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
After breakfast (which was mainly malasadas, plus some fruit) I went on another solo drive, this time up to a cool used bookstore in Kealakekua (got a book with mean and unfair Crown-of-Thorns mudslinging, which I will have to remember to quote later), then also checked out a new bookstore a little farther along the road. I talked a bit with the shop guy at the used place, and when I was in the parking lot afterwards a UPS man asked me about the Jeep. We ran into each other again a minute later at the new book store's parking lot and smiled. I love how my Guy pronounces Kamehameha III Road. I think it's mostly that he puts the emphasis on all the wrong syllables... so it's KA-may-HA-may-HAmee (not sure where the m sound at the end comes from).
Dean was working later today, so we didn't get to Honaunau until 2 o'clock-ish. (Stopped at the Roadhouse Cafe for a quick mini-lunch on the way since we were getting hungry, and Dean in particular was glad we did! He was originally scared to go there, but now he's a big fan. We shared a vegetable-stuffed phyllo packet and I had their Kona coffee, King K, which was good. We also talked to the owner, and asked her about the place. It's only been open for four months.) Honaunau is nice in the later afternoon... quieter, with lots more parking. (We didn't even have to park in the hui lot!) It was a really fun, lighthearted dive.
I used a new dive pencil because the eraser fell out of my last one when we were down deep at Ke`ei (my theory is that it compressed, which made it loose). The new one is a dull orange on land, but at depth it looks super-bright fluorescent orange!! I have no idea why. It is so weird! It completely glows, and I love it. We had fun looking at the deep stuff again, but ran out of no decompression time before we got to 130, so I had Dean photograph my dive watch at 113 instead. (I wanted a photo of it in action for my Watch Photo Project.) It got down to 1 minute of no decompression time before we started to ascend and headed into the lush coral zone. I pointed out to Dean that there were three different kinds of seaweed there (we don't usually see any seaweed) and he mimed that he could eat it, since I'd mentioned earlier that I was hungry and joked that I'd want to eat all the fish and unis and stuff while we were diving (everything except the sea cucumbers).
There were some cool unis in the shallower water, including a collector urchin using the empty shell of another (dead) collector urchin to hide under!! Silly! There were also brittle stars hiding in the grooves of a lot of the cauliflower coral... if you looked really close, you could see the spiny legs, all twisted and tangled. And we found a really pretty white pebble collector urchin (it looked furry) that was waving its spines around a lot. I pulled off the coral fragments it had collected to hide under so that Dean could photograph its pretty spines, and afterwards it picked them back up again and put them back! It was REALLY neat watching it pass the pieces along using its spines and maneuver them into place. It was actually quite speedy.
I also found a rock-boring urchin shell with all the spines intact, but the bottom and insides completely missing. I saved it to bring home! The weirdest (x 1,000!) thing is that even though it was just an empty shell, the spines were still moving around. They kept moving even after I took it out of the water, until around the time we got to South Kona Fruit Stand in the car. (I kept talking to it, telling it to stand them up so its "hair" would dry nicely, not all flattened down.) Echinoderms are weird/great!
(It's now 1:13 and I'm never going to be able to fall asleep... aaagh.)
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
[Catch-up posting again, because I didn't feel like writing last night (long hours of typing on the computer + achy shoulders do not get along). I goodly jotted notes and saved them in draft mode, though.]
Posted at 10:25:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
Went on a solo Longs outing in the morning (I love solo outings, and Lava 105 was playing "Fun, Fun, Fun"), then Ke`ei part two. Ke`ei is so beautiful. It was a really nice dive. First we swam out and dropped down deep, looking for the garden eels, but they weren't around this time. (I wrote to Dean on my slate, "Eels are at an eel party.") I went down to 133 feet (naughty! max is supposed to be 130) but only for a second. Being down deep is really neat... it looks and feels different. I could feel how compressed my wetsuit was from all the pressure (my watch was loose, spinning on my arm), and the landscape was much more barren, with no coral or fish but lots of extra-long sea cucumbers, actively crawling, vacuuming up the sand. Everything looks overcast with blue and it feels peaceful and still, like you should creep along slowly and talk in a whisper. (But you can't talk with a regulator in your mouth, obviously.) When I'm down deep I check my dive watch often, to make sure I don't go too far or stay down too long, and I like watching the depth numbers increase... 90 feet... 102 feet... 113... 120... 129... as the number of minutes I can safely stay at that depth decreases... 5... 3... 1. Time to go, slowly upward. And the depth numbers get smaller and colors are brighter and there's more sealife and the no decompression limit time leaps upward 'til it's so high you could stay down indefinitely if only you didn't get too cold or run out of air.
As we swam upward along the hill of old coral, Dean wrote on my slate, "Old. Looks like an underwater forest." It did. And like a forest, teeming with more life than you can take in, much of it tiny, secret, hidden, in crevices, underground, camouflaged. I wrote on my slate, a note to myself: "I like it here." Later I wrote to Dean, "It's like a treasure hunt, looking."
Found a few more green linckia stars, including a six-legged one in a convoluted position between rocks. When I pulled him out, he remained in the same weird position, then very slowly, almost imperceptibly slowly, gradually flattened himself out. It's so weird how some sea stars are speedy and active and flexible, while others are so stiff and static. When I poked one of the linckias quickly with one finger, it felt squishy for a second, then it instantly hardened and got stony. Cukes often stiffen up like that, too, but with linckias it's really extreme. They feel like a piece of chalk you could snap in half, not a creature that's so flexible it can bend its body to fit into all sorts of bizarre little corners and crevices. Dean also found a lost (or cast-off) leg from a linckia for me! Later I read that linckias can form comets from a single leg and reproduce themselves, even if the leg doesn't have part of the central disc with the mouth on it. Echinoderms are so wonderfully bizarre.
After Ke`ei, we stopped nearby at Ueshima Coffee Company Factory Outlet in Captain Cook, on Napoopoo Road. It was a nice little shop!! They had all kinds of good goods (coffee products, mac nuts, chocolate-covered things, kukui things, etc.) and Tropical Dreams ice cream (in lots of flavors, too!); plus, their Kona coffee was really good, especially w/stolen nips of Dean's toasted coconut ice cream between sips! (Coffee and ice cream consumed at the same time is the best.) We were glad we stopped! They even had an espresso bar, but I didn't get a cappuccino, since that would be cheating. I talked a little to the young Japanese guy who worked there... I like talking to local shop people; it's interesting.
Speaking of talking to local shop owners, we went back to the Goodies stand at the International Marketplace again, after we exchanged our tanks at Big. The Goodies guy was really nice again, and even gave me a free pikake soap ball as we were leaving! (He asked me what my favorite scent was, first.) Also I got a magic skirt at the International Marketplace. I'm going to try to make my own when I get home.
We had a Kenichi part two for dinner, and it was perfect again, except for the fact that they were out of uni!!! :-( I kept whimpering while eating my miso'ed cod (because it was so good, not because I missed the uni). The opakapaka special entree was also really good, and so was the Momokawa Pearl unfiltered sake. I wish there was a Kenichi in Connecticut! Except, it wouldn't be good if it was in CT, because it's all the local seafood and vegetables that make it so amazing. I guess local farmers' CT vegetables could compete okay, but local uni...? No. Just, no.
Monday, November 12, 2007
I really like diving (yes, I admit it) but my back's not cut out for it. I guess it does pretty well considering, though.
Posted at 9:07:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
I drove to Oshima Surf all by myself this morning! I had my Guy for backup and company (the way he pronounces Kamehameha is highly endearing) but I knew how to go. It was really fun driving the Jeep up to Kealakekua and looking at everything in the store reeeeally slowly without worrying about Dean being bored. I even bought something, too!
Afterwards, we stopped over at Bottom Time to harass Jeff since the normal shop lady is on vacation and he's stuck behind the counter all week so we figured he'd be bored. Dean walked in and pretended we were newbies who wanted to take a Discover Scuba class. Groan!!! :-)
Went diving at Four Mile again, and this time I found a million teeny-tiny heart urchin shells in the sandy areas! Amazingly small. Like 1/8" - 1/4"! I collected a bunch and put them in the pencil slot of my dive slate, but I checked just now and NONE of them survived!! What the heck! Why not?? There was nothing in there but a couple fragments. If we go to 4 Mile again, I'm bringing my little uni container in my BCD pocket, because they were great.
Things I wrote on my slate:
Big uni battle!!!
no survivors!
[there were spines covering the ocean floor in one area, from all different kinds of urchins]
he doesn't want to play
[Re: an octopus that I tried to make friends with, but he was too shy... Dean was trying to get a good photo, but I didn't want to bug the poor octy anymore and decided to leave him in peace. Even though I didn't get to shake hands with him, it was still really neat to see him super close up and watch him move. Octopuses just sort of flow. It's so amazing.] [Note -- I used my tank banger to get Dean's attention so he could come see the octy without me having to leave the spot and lose sight of it! I had to bang about ten times, but I just kept doing it until Dean heard and turned around. It worked great!!]
it's doing that eel thing Luke told us about
[Re: the baby shark! We looked for the sharks in their cave, and they weren't there, but later Dean found the baby underneath a ledge! I don't know how he spotted him, since it was really shadowy under there. He did the shark symbol to me, and I looked where he pointed, and at first I couldn't see anything, but then I spotted the white tips. They really stand out! We went pretty close and were able to watch him really well, once our eyes adjusted to looking under there. He was opening and closing his mouth to breathe, like eels do, because of that thing where they have to keep water circulating over their gills. (At first I wondered how he was hovering under there and not swimming in circles like before; then I looked closer and saw him doing the mouth thing.) He was really cute and sharky.
I also teased a cool big uni that had lots of really long white spines, mixed with black spines and thin black stinger-spines. I petted it lots and made it wave its spines around. (No, I didn't get pricked or stung. I am an echinoderm tamer!)
While we were doing our 3 minute safety stop at 15 feet, Dean pointed out a weird thing down in a crevice, and I immediately fetched it because it was a JELLYFISH!!! In fact, I immediately recognised it because I was flipping through my creature book a couple nights ago, thinking how cool it would be to see a jelly like that one (I'm almost positive it was a Crowned Jellyfish). Dean claims it was an "egg pod" but NO WAY! It was definitely a jelly--it had the jelly structure with the bell and oral arms. It was much thicker and more substantial feeling than other jellies I've touched--very silicone-like, especially the base of the oral arms where they connected to the bell, which was whitish and had knobby bumps on it (the bell and the rest of the jelly was clear). I don't blame Dean for not knowing it was a jelly, though, because it didn't seem to be alive. It didn't pulse or swim or move on its own or anything, and it was just lying on the bottom when we found it. The book says Crowned Jellies are a pelagic species that occasionally drift inshore, so it must have died for some reason. :-( It was really weird and cool feeling to handle, but not nearly as cool as a live jelly.
After we got tank refills at Big, we had an O's part two in town at about 3 in the afternoon, which was great because we were hungry and now we don't have to go out at night for supper! Best things at O's, definitely absolutely: spinach-tofu pot stickers, ginger lemonade, and coconut cream cake. (Their Kona coffee press is a little bitter.) My pear-pecan-gorgonzola salad was also really good, with extra-good gorg! I wish the jelly was alive. It doesn't feel the same to find a dead jelly.
Here's what we did yesterday: SNOOZED ON THE COUCH ALL AFTERNOON!!! What the heck! I blame Dean (I was only following his example, and never would have done such a thing on my own... normally I am not even capable of napping!) and he blames me (not sure what his supposed reasons are...) and we both blame the Bong Brothers. Actually, Bong Brothers was much better than it looks from the road (it looks like a run-down shack, pretty much) and in fact had lots of good local fruit out in front (we bought some great tangerines, a fantastic-looking Meyer lemon, and a Cherimoya to compare with the Atemoya) and a little grocery store inside with all kinds of organic groceries, their own Kona coffee, smoothies, and vegetarian lunch items. Dean thought there were a suspicious number of different kinds of organic brownie mix, but actually it wasn't that bong-ish, other than all the Zen words of wisdom posted on the walls. Oh, and they also had a stuffed elephant hanging from a noose in a tree out front.
Posted at 8:12:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
I tried a tiny sample of their coffee and was going to stop again after our dive for a real cup with cream, but we didn't go diving because Honaunau was packed! (On the drive there, Dean kept saying/groaning over and over, "Uuhhhhhhhhhhh. I can't believe we went to Bong's!") There was NO parking, so we decided to just be Zen and pretend we only drove up to Captain Cook to visit Bong Bros. and South Kona Fruit Stand, and that we'd go diving somewhere else unrelated afterwards. (Which we did not end up doing, since we snoozed all afternoon instead!) South Kona Fruit Stand was also packed (!) but that was good because we want Beth to get lots of business! She was there today and acted like we were her old pals. :-) We tried the Dragon Smooch smoothie this time (= dragonfruit and some other stuff; it was good, as ever) and had wraps at the nice new outdoor eating area. Dean wanted another puh-paya and I noticed the sign that said to try it with lime, so I got a nice juicy one (not a brain lime this time) to go with it. We tried it at breakfast today (Monday) and it really is a great combo. (Not that I am a huge papaya fan, but they do go well together and it's a big improvement.)
After SNOOZING ALL AFTERNOON (which, I have to admit, was really nice, and fixed the very achy back and gigantic headache that attacked me in the car after we left SKFS), we stopped snoozing when it was DARK out, and didn't want to go out for dinner, so we ran over to KTA to get ingredients for my peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich craving. (I didn't have any home food left.) Dean picked out this weird bread that looks like a brick (Regalo Tasty Bread) and I took a chance and bought it. It was really good! Perfect for my sandwiches. It's from Honolulu and has no preservatives. (Along with fruits, I think Hawaiian breads are extra-good. The bread section at KTA is quite impressive and lots of them are freshly baked local kinds.)
[Edit: Also, Hawaiian bath products are equally extra-good! The Goodies pikake noni soap is wonderful, as are my old favs, Island Soap & Candle Works' body washes and Oils of Aloha's kukui lotion. I also newly tried Island Essence's "silky smooth lotion" (very accurate name) tonight and I love it! I was reading the ingredients list to Dean in disbelief in the car... it's like they took every good thing in Hawaii and blendered them all together.]
Anyway, I had 1) peanut butter/quava-strawberry jelly with slices of apple-banana, 2) pb/apple-banana/Kona honey, 3) pb/quava-pineapple jelly, and they were ALL fantastic.
I failed to eat my fish-of-the-day, though. :-(
I'm so excited about Oshima!!
Posted at 9:30:00 AM by Laura W. Petix.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Dean said we could go to Bong Brothers today!! Just my luck & it'll be closed on Sundays.
Posted at 11:00:00 AM by Laura W. Petix.
We had all our new fruit for breakfast (I mean, we didn't eat it all up, but we tried at least one of each) and they were all good, with the exception of the abiu which Dean made me get at South Kona Fruit Stand (I'd had one before and knew it does not taste like vanilla puddin', like the sign claims). Dean's fav was the atemoya (it was really creamy and tasted of coconut and pineapple... it reminds us of haupia!) and we ate both of them since they were really ripe. My fav was the yellow pitaya (dragonfruit), I think... but the lulo and SKFS starfruit were just as great! Dean even liked the lulo, although I didn't expect him to since it's tart. It's really intense and good! We also had great-as-usual apple bananas and super sweet juicy oranges from South Kona Fruit stand. Fruit is so good here.
