Thursday, March 06, 2008

Wow. I was eating a table-on-the-side-of-Napoopoo Road grapefruit just now, and Dean could smell it all the way upstairs. He stuck his head out and asked me what I was eating. "What does it smell like?" "It smells like a big fat grapefruit!" T.o.t.S.o.NR grapefruit smells good, even before you peel it or anything. So does the guava I got at South Kona Fruit Stand today (it's a special kind of guava, but I can't remember what), and so does the Star-Apple/Cainito. They are all extremely inhalable. I actually got two different kinds of grapefruit on the side of the road. I ate the big fat one first. It was red inside and really juicy. The other one's little, like a small orange, and its skin is a rougher-looking mottled yellow. It doesn't look like a grocery store grapefruit at all. Both types were 50¢ each. I don't know which one is yummier yet. [Edit: The red one was much yummier!]

We ran out of papayas again, but we avoided a crisis (we hope... it may be that none are ripe yet tomorrow morning) by buying six more at Bong and eight more at South Kona Fruit Stand. The SKFS ones are two different varieties--strawberry and solo. Dean labelled them with a Sharpie so we can compare. We don't know which kind the Bong ones are, but they have Xs on the bottom to show they're organic. Strawberry and solo papayas look alike, without the labels. We don't know what the big round side-of-the-road kind is. [Edit: The solo payapas from South Kona Fruit are really good! Better than Bong's papayas. They're a little firmer when ripe, and slightly less sweet, but they have excellent flavor.]

I also got some other good stuff at SKFS today: more loquats (the loquats were good), the aforementioned some-sort-of-quava (smells incredible), and the star-apple, aka cainito. There was only one. Afterwards we stopped at Papa's stand, which we have passed ten zillion times and I've always been curious about. It's also on Highway 11 (right after the tree house, if you're headed south), but it's only a step above a tiny side-of-road style thing, not a big place like South Kona Fruit Stand. It has a real name and sign, and multiple kinds of fruits, but it's just a little stand with a cash box. I'm not sure if a real person sits there sometimes or not. Anyway, they didn't have any papayas left, but they had a whole bunch of some unidentified fruit that I'd never seen before, so I got one. It looks and smells a lot like the star-apple from SKFS, but it's purple and the SKFS fruit is green. I think it's a different variety of the same fruit. Outwardly, at least, it looks like the star-apple picture on wikipedia.

Other non-dive notes from today: I went on an Oshima Mission in the Jeep this morning, to Oshima Surf and Oshima Store. Oshima rules! I bought a bag of Oshima Bros. dark roast Kona coffee, even though I have no idea what it tastes like (no opportunity to sample). It was CHEAP and it's Oshima! It's got to be good.

After our dive we stopped at the Ueshima Coffee Company Factory Outlet (Dean calls it "UGG" because the "c"s on the UCC sign look like "g"s.) Toasted coconut Tropical Dreams ice cream + coffee is better than mac nut + coffee, at UGG!! Why?! It's a mystery. (This is not true at the place in Hawi--only at UGG.)

Our dive was at Ke`ei, and the channel I discovered last time is great. If you swim to the right-hand side of the boat launch, going out to sea (or the left side, coming back in), there's a deeper little channel that's super-easy to glide along through and not have to fight your way over any rocks at all!

I found a weird & cool creature (even Dean called it weird & cool) but I have no idea what it was. I don't see anything like it in my creature book! It was sort of dull green and had lots of curly arms and was about three inches wide. It was radially symmetrical. It reminded me of a basket star, sort of. (But I don't think basket stars live around here.) It was definitely an animal, not a plant, because the arms were wiggling around and then it disappeared down into the coral it was snuggled in, and we couldn't see it anymore.

I also found a two-way radio buried in the sand, way in the deepy-depths. Only the stubby antenna was sticking up... I was curious about the look of it, so I dug it up and there was this totally out of place CB! Dean mimed that maybe it was supposed to be used to talk to fish, so I think it might have belonged to Aquaman. Anyway, it's now in the trash instead of on the bottom of the ocean.

My weighting felt fine again with my normal 8 pounds plus the almost-two-pound ankle weight on my tank. Dean wore his new additional small 1 pound ankle weights on his ankles and liked the two extra pounds (12-ish total for him with our new suits, 10-ish for me). I borrowed them to try them out and I liked the feel of the balance too (they keep your feet from floating up), but I don't need any more pounds. Dean suggested I could try having only six pounds in my BCD (3 lbs in each pocket), with the ankle weights and the big fat ankle weight on my tank, and that would also equal ten pounds, but more distributed. That sounds kind of good...

Anyway, I'm still not convinced about my 5mm wetsuit. I think I figured out why it's not warm. Because of the thicker material, it's not as tight/form-fitting as my 3mm one, so there are gaps where water can slosh around and make me cold. Dean says his is lots warmer, but mine feels colder, if anything. It's hard to tell, though, because the depth affects the coldness a lot. It was pretty cold today, period. I love my Oshima Beater! Thumb mode.

[Edit, 12:24 AM: !! Interesting:

Solo: Fruit round and shallowly furrowed in female plants, pear-shaped in bisexual plants [my italics]. Weight 1.1 to 2.2 pounds. Skin smooth, flesh firm, reddish-orange, very sweet, of excellent quality. Produces no male plants, only bisexual and female in a 2 to 1 ratio. Introduced into Hawaii from Barbados in 1911. Named Solo in 1919.

Posted at 10:51:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Weinbros!! Why does Dean call it Weinbros? I do not know. But now I'm doing it too. Weinbros' foam is so amazing.

Yay for Old A! We went diving in our new wetsuits again today and I was fine (although I'm still not convinced it's much warmer, underwater). In fact I was better than fine--my SAC rate (air consumption) was .39!!! (My normal SAC rate is around .47 and I've never had anything near .39!) It's got to be because of the new trim weights we tried. I used my original 8 pounds of weight in my BCD, plus a slightly less than 2 pound ankle weight fastened around my tank (instead of the whump-worthy 12 pounds in my BCD like yesterday) and it felt perfect. Dean gushed afterward, "You're really good with your buoyancy and trim!" :-) :-) :-)

In fact, my breathing was so great that Dean asked to share air with me because his tank was getting really low and I still had tons left!! Dean ended with 100 psi and I ended with 500 psi (which would have been 600 psi for me and nothing for Dean if he hadn't shared 100 off my tank!) !!! I don't know why having different trim/balance makes such a big difference for me, but it's very cool! I also swam way ahead of Dean, surface swimming back in. (He'd switched back to his snorkel, and I was using my air.) The weight on the tank made it feel much easier to move through the choppy surface water, since I was flatter.

It was a nice dive. I found a cushion star and when I picked it up I saw its stomach, just like how I sometimes see a crown-of-thorns' stomach right when I first coax one over! They both evert their stomach through their mouth and use it to directly eat coral. The cushion's stomach looked just like a crown's, transparent and alien and beautiful. They always slurp it back inside almost instantly, so it's rare to see it.

I also saw a cool striped eel, like a blackish brown tiger-tail, and we heard the whales again, pretty faintly this time. Ralph at BID (he was back today!) told us they are leaving now, on their swim to Alaska. He can see their tails waving goodbye from his living room. Sara made Ralph call up the imdb on the Big computer to show us Mathieu Kassovitz, the French actor she always claims Dean looks like. Silly! :-) I had fun chatting with Sara again.

We had a home meal for dinner and I made Redondo's arabiki for myself. The package says "Crunchy! Juicy!" and it was! It was good! It's made out of pig in a natural sheep casing. Wow--I love Redondo's motto: "Redondo's Meat Products are a part of Hawaiian culture. If you still haven't tried it, you're totally missing out."

Posted at 11:45:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

TERRIBLE NEWS!! No more Daylight Donuts!!!! Dean went over bright and early yesterday morning to snag some malasadas, and it was gone! Empty. What happened to Daylight Donuts??! It was an institution!

We tried our new wetsuits at Puako yesterday, and I HATED mine. Wait, I forgot to mention that we bought new wetsuits yesterday. They're the same kind as our other ones, but 5mm thick instead of 3mm. They're really comfortable and snuggly (actually easier to get on and off than our original ones, for some reason) and it was very warm surface-swimming out, but when we descended I didn't feel any warmer than usual and I started freaking out a little because my buoyancy was all messed up and I felt out of control.

We used four extra pounds each (which is what the experts recommended, because a thicker wetsuit is much more buoyant and needs more weight to compensate) and it felt way too heavy. It was hard to surface-swim out because I felt really weighed down and had trouble keeping up with Dean (the fact that there were lots of waves to struggle though also played a part, I'm sure); even though it was only four more pounds, with all the rest of the weight and the big tank it felt like a lot, like I was this small person trapped inside a much bigger person and I didn't have the strength to carry that big person around.

Once we descended, I kept WHUMPing to the bottom of the ocean and couldn't stay neutrally buoyant. We saw some nice tall and wavy garden eels and lay on the sand, lurking over their holes to see if they'd re-emerge, but they never did. The eels come back out again, all around you, but only the ones about 10 feet way, not close enough to see details. (It's still cool being surrounded by garden eels, though!) We could also hear distant whale groaning sounds, like ghostly moans.

Once we started to swim upward and were over coral again (the really deep area is just sandy--there's not enough sunlight down there for coral) and I still kept whumping down to the ground, I added a little air to my BCD (I normally never add air) so I wouldn't crash into the coral, but I forgot to let the air out as we ascended (air expands as you ascend), so I felt even less able to control my buoyancy, and my mask started constantly flooding. To top it off, the shallower area (20-ish feet) was currenty, and I couldn't tell if I felt out of control because of the currents or what. Dean started experimenting with our weights, taking some out to see how different weightings would feel, but nothing made a difference to me at that point, I was just all screwed up and mask-floody and Bob-ish, like when we first started scuba. :-( :-( :-( Not that bad, but the same feelings. After being so in synch with my gear lately, it was really frustrating. Grrr! I hated my new suit! I didn't even feel warm--I was cold! Real cold. Blah! The viz wasn't very good at Puako either. The good news is, even though we went in at Puako Whale (Puako Church was rougher!), I didn't get whaled at all!

On the way back we stopped at Dara's at the Shops at Mauna Lani, and Dean had a repeat of his fav three-out-of-four level hot meal. I was cold and thirsty from the dry scuba air so I got a wonton soup, which was quite good and had a fire in the middle! I also had an apple-duck salad, which was kind of weird. The duck was really crispy, salty, and chewy, exactly like bacon!

When we left, Dara's owner (the guy who called Dean a "tough guy" for his hotness endurance last time) was sitting outside in the courtyard and we chatted with him for a while. Dara is his wife, and he's the only non-Thai person involved in the whole enterprise. He told us all about how Dara's mother grows chillies and limes and herbs and super long and stretchy special Thai papayas for the restaurant and everything possible is made from local produce and fish, and all the teak wood and furniture and every single thing inside the place was specially picked out and brought in from Thailand. He asked us if we'd been to any of the other Thai restaurants (we mentioned Royal Thai Cafe, of course) and he said all the Thai people around here know each other and are pals.

Afterwards, we walked down to the new Foodland Farms gourmet market and checked it out. It was nice!! Total tease that it wasn't open yet when we were staying in that area.

This morning I had a weird tsunami-esque nightmare. It was pretty cool and movie-lian.

Four GREAT things: 1) Sara's maps (& cute drawings), 2) Kona Mountain Coffee, 3) my snuggly Oshima Beater, especially in thumb mode (love LOVE thumb mode)--I slept in it last night! 4) no more vog headaches!

Posted at 11:48:00 AM by Laura W. Petix.

Monday, March 03, 2008

I don't see why Dean laughed when I said, "I'm having a fun supper!" I made two sandwiches out of brick bread (aka Regalo Tasty Bread.) They both had: apple bananas (sliced the long way, which fit exactly on the bread, since apple bananas are little), peanut butter, strawberry-quava jelly, and a little stripe of meyer lemon butter on top. Superb combo! I also tried my pamplemousse (not on the sandwiches). It's pretty good, but not that memorable. Pink grapefruits are lots better.

We tried Ke`ei again this afternoon, and it was nice and calm today, so we got in our first Ke`ei dive of the trip. Ke`ei is the best! The beautiful location, the picnic table for setting up your gear, the ridiculously easy sandy old boat launch to enter, and then all that depth, and the hill of amazing old coral, like a mossy forest.

The viz was excellent, and the free fall down so blue. Today my dive watch said it was 73° for the whole dive, but Dean's still said 75. I think it's because he's warm-blooded and I'm not. His blood adds a couple of degrees to the watch, but my lizard blood adds zilch.

On descent, when Dean neared the bottom, I saw a flat, drab, white, pale yellow and black hacket-nosed fish [a blackside razor wrasse; its Hawaiian name means "sharp forehead," which is extremely apt] hovering above the sandy ocean floor right near where he was about to come down. When he landed a couple feet away from it, instead of swimming off it dove into the sand and disappeared, burying itself in the blink of an eye. When the small stirred-up cloud of sand settled, seconds later, no trace of the fish remained. Later I spotted another fish with the same shape and pointed it out to Dean, signaling for him to watch. I swam toward it, and, sure enough, it did the exact same thing when I got close enough, vanishing into the sand. As I expected, Dean thought it was really cool, and he found and stalked several more of them, each one responding the same way. It was so neat, and the weird thing is, I don't remember ever seeing a fish like that before! They have a very distinctive profile, so they were easy to recognise even though they're not that exciting looking. What a weird fish.

Speaking of things that disappear, we also saw the garden eels, but couldn't get a good look at them because they were too far away. But the coral was full of life, and Dean found a giant scribbled filefish in a little cave-ish area amongst the towering coral boulders. It looked about three feet long, although it was probably closer to two. Scribbled filefish are really cool looking, covered with weirdly beautiful scribbly blue markings, with super-long tails that are almost as long as the rest of their bodies! It was so surprisingly big.

I also had a great crown-of-thorns encounter with a lovely green COT. He was extremely easy to pick up--eager to come--like he wasn't grabbing onto anything with his feet at all, and then once I had him in my hands he didn't want to let go!! I had to pull as hard as I could to detach my hands, and even then a bunch of the yellow suckers on the ends of his tube feet popped off and stayed grabbing onto my gloves! (I'm sure they'll grow back... starfish are good at that.) One of them is still there now. Unlike usual when I find a crown, we were right near some nice flat white sand, and I was able to put him down on the ground and watch him crawl. Crown-of-thorns crawl really fast! I pointed out to Dean how the tips of their arms have special "feeler" feet that don't have the suction cups on the ends. They're clear/white instead of yellow, and have pointy tips. It seems like they use them to feel around and "see" where they're going, or look for stuff. It's just my theory, but it makes sense. (Since I can't find descriptions of COT physiology anywhere, grrrr.) It was a really, really nice dive. I feel so comfortable with my gear now. I like scuba.

On the way back, we stopped at the Namaste Tea House, which is right next to the Ueshima Coffee Company Factory Outlet (we went there on our last trip) on Napoopoo Road. It was run by an Indian lady (!) and Dean got a homemade chai and an Indian curry! It had a weird (but good) chutney on the side, and I asked her what kind it was. She said it was made out of local lemons, since citrus is in season now and mangoes aren't! Cool. I got a Kona coffee and we also tried their coconut gelato, but I didn't like it (too sweet and too icy). It was a neat little place, sort of like the Ueshima place. We've never seen any other Indian restaurants/people in Hawaii!

On the drive to Ke`ei, we looked for fruit tables along Napoopoo Road again, but this time the fruit was ALL GONE! Someone ate it. (Er, bought it.)

In the morning, I went on my first solo Jeep mission (I was such a slack last week!), two inches away to KTA for groceries. It was real fun snailishly walking the aisles. I brought three of my reusable bags, and they refunded money off the bill! I also finally found whaples whales postcards. I haven't written any postcards yet.

Check out this news story (and video) about what Kilauea's up to right now. Pretty cool.

Posted at 7:56:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

Sunday, March 02, 2008

I made a lulo juice this morning! Three lulos, blendered to within an inch of their lives (we have a blender here, so that's pretty handy! I don't at home) + an approximately equal amount of water (blendered again) + a little sugar (I made mine tons more tart than the Farmers' Market guy's), blendered once more and poured into a glass. It filled the entire glass, and self-divided into latte-esque sections (not cappuccino-esque, because the proportions were wrong): seedy part settled to bottom, liquidy part in the middle, and foam on top! I drank the whole glass!

We're having a feety Sunday. We drove up to Captain Cook this afternoon, and checked out the new Keoki Cafe (Surfin' Hilary, part two). It was not very food-ish, so I just got a cappuccino, but it was horrible (bitter, with collapsy foam). It did take a bite out of my vog headache, though.

We drove back northward and stopped at the Aloha Angel, which was great. I wrote down the hours in my blog notebook for future reference: Br 7:30-1:30; L 11-8:30; D 5-8:30; Tu & Wed, close at 2:30. They had ten zillion bront-bra-bront vegetarian choices with an trumpet-blowing aloha angel next to them. About half the menu!! We should come back for dinner. (And breakfast!) Dean got an aloha bean & cheese burrito with tofu (he said it was "Thumbs up!"), and I got a fresh fish sandwich (Dano's competition!). It was PREMIUM, too! Dano's level good! I'm not sure which one wins. I decided fish sandwich is the best use of fish. Components of an ideal fish sandwich: hamburger bun (grilled crispy on inside, soft on outside), good leafy lettuce, tomato, sauce on the bottom bun (tartar?), and grilled fish. The Aloha fish was ahi, and I think Dano's was too. Aloha's fish was slightly superior, but Dano's secret sauce was better.

Afterwards we drove back down south and visited the A La Scoop ice cream & espresso bar. I got a replacement Kona coffee (much better than the undrinkable one), some-random-lady-estate brand, and Dean got a tiny scoop of mint chip ice cream. They serve Big Island ice cream, which isn't as good as Tropical Dreams, but it's still pretty good. We talked to the store guy, which was fun, and he gave us a free sample slice of very yummy mac nut banana bread. There was a sign out by the road saying they buy RIPE bananas ("ripe" was underlined), 55¢/pound for peeled, 40¢/pound for unpeeled. A big bucket of peeled bananas sounds pretty slimy!

Posted at 6:07:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

Yesterday's dive, as per my notes on my super-fancy new dive slate! Once again, we checked out Four Mile (we're not obsessed with Four Mile, honestly... it's just that it's close by, and we drive right by it on the way to Big Island Divers, so it's very convenient). Finally, it looked okay! The waves were much, much smaller, and there was no one else there, either. We parked on the side of the road and geared up, then climbed down over the lava rocks and coral. It wasn't bad at all, with our Crocs on! (It's treacherous without and I don't think I could do it while wearing my tank if not for the Crocs.) It was a little hard getting past the waves and rocks, but I chose my moments and slithered through, then looked back when I was safely out past the crashy section to see Dean a zillion miles behind me! I got a few new bruises, but that's par for the course. (I don't understand why Dean never does! I must get wacked around a lot more.) The water was really warm on top--my dive watch read 79°!--but it reverted back to 75° by the time we reached depth. Brrrrr.

Shortly after we descended, Dean signed, "Listen!" and we both quieted our breathing. Whales again!! We weren't expecting them at all, here. They were LOUD this time--much louder than at Sug, and we could even hear them while swimming along.

Dean wrote on my slate, "Groaning sound, here," and I wrote back, "That's exactly what I was thinking!"

We kept writing down what the song sounded like:
Dean: "Woo woo woo woo" -- I added, "echoey."
Laura: "Blip!"
Dean: "Dog yelp! Step on tail." I nodded vigorously in agreement.
Laura: "Car alarm." Dean agreed, laughing.
Laura: "Groan = bullfrog-like!"
Dean: "Sounds so close..."

It was so easy to hear this time. VERY cool.

We went in Sharkey's cave (or, rather, Dean did... I stayed out because I am not a total fan of caves) but he wasn't home so Dean pretended to be a sharkey in his place, and went in his little ledge spot, too. I would HATE to go in Sharkey's ledge spot (claustrophobic!) but Dean loves it. It's open on the side, but the rest of it (ceiling-top, wall-side, and sandy-bottom) are just big enough for a person wearing a scuba tank (or a shark). Ak!

While looking at a yellow cushion star on a wall-ish area, I spotted a teeny-tiny little yellow eel (width of a finger) hiding in the shadow of the star, in a skinny hole next to it. It was super cute. Dean tried to take a picture, but it was too dark there and the eel was too shy.

It was really calm again, combined with currenty sections. Not surgy or bubbly at all, just drifty. Nice. It's weird how things are stirred up at the surface, but they're not at all down below. All the dives we've been on on this trip have seemed extra calm at depth. My right knee started to hurt from swimming against all the currents, and I started getting cold, too, but it was a nice dive. I like my new scrolly slate!! The coolest thing is that the trim glows orange at depth.

Posted at 5:09:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.