Super Sunday

Let me be quite clear… My idea of Super Sunday does not involve any sort of professional sporting event. This includes no television or funny commercials, no party, piles of chicken wings or large screen displays, and no halftime show.

I joined the guys for some diving instead. My idea of a Super Sunday!

It was a pretty good day to go diving. The surf was a bit high, no problem as we would be diving from the boat. It was Dennis, Sky, Pete and myself, the usual crew. Dennis chose to head south of Kona, a good choice as we found nice conditions… Good vis and little surge. Going south also allowed us to do a little whale watching along the way. We encountered spinner dolphins just outside the marina, and again in front of Kailua Bay on the way back. Two humpbacks caught Dennis by surprise, surfacing right in front of the boat as we cruised south, giving us a great view as we waited for them to move away.

Two sites… The Henry’s dive mooring was the original plan. On the way south we found Henry’s occupied by the Body Glove boat, so we went on to Ridges. The big snorkeling boat was gone after we completed our surface interval, thus we moved to Henry’s for our second dive of the day.

Ridges lives up to it’s name. The site is a maze of small coral canyons and pinnacles with walls about 20ft high. A great place to stalk fish with a camera using the terrain as cover. Henry’s features a large cave with the entrance right under the mooring. I spent the entire dive in the cave and around the entrances looking for nudibranchs and other cave dwellers.

I shot a lot of photos, spending a good deal of both dives stalking fish. The result is a lot of photos of fish butts. There are also quite a few photos of out of focus fish, sideways fish, fish in front of other fish, and a few with no fish at all. In between all of these I did get a few decent shots… Shooting fish is actually quite frustrating. They move. Shooting nudibranchs is so much easier.

What time I did not spend shooting fish I spent looking for smaller critters. I spent a huge amount of time in the cave at Henry’s combing the cave walls for nudibranchs. I found exactly two… Both common species I had found and photographed before, a pustulose and a gold lace nudi. Plus one reef rose, a Spanish Dancer egg mass. Not that I didn’t shoot photos of these fellows, along with a couple shrimp, many colorful sponges, and a few more fish.

The cave also accounted for one of the flattest profiles I have ever dove, I spent over seventy minutes between 45 and 50ft, not too bad for air consumption, but then I didn’t move very far at all, about 40 yards through the entire dive.

A memorable day on the water, one of those days you are just happy to live on the Big Island. Blue water, warm sun, dolphins and whales, and good diving with friends.

Avoiding Super Sunday is a challenge in our sports saturated culture. It is my goal not to learn any detailed knowledge of the event through the day. This particular Sunday I had managed to avoid even knowing which teams were playing. A partial success that failed through the day… An unsolicited comment by the cashier at Costco did inform me as to who had lost. Then I made the mistake of checking Facebook. Try again next year? Maybe a multi-day observing outing with no internet?