A couple of urchins here. A familiar and quite common Red Pencil Urchin, and a Diadema Savignyi Urchin. The latter one is rare in Hawaii and looks a lot like the Long-spined Urchin, but is distinguished by the striking blue lines on its test.
I saw this man, down on the rocks below Upolu Airport, collecting Opihi. Opihi is the Hawaiian word for limpets, and they are a prized food for the locals. Gathering them though is not an easy task. For one thing, it takes place at the water line. Opihi pickers are guaranteed to get wet and have to take great care not to get washed out to sea. One or two seem to disappear every year.
The Opihi also have to be taken while they are feeding and relaxed. Otherwise they will be so firmly adhered to the rocks that no amount of prying will loosen them.
The utility pipes and boxes in one of the waiting areas at Kailua Kona airport are covered in stickers. I don’t know why people started putting them there, but the authorities haven’t removed them so it continues to be a little guerrilla art show.
No prizes for guessing how this fish got its name.
The idea of The Numbers Game is to enter a number into the search bar of your computer and then post a selection of the photos that turn up. This week’s number is 235. Captions are on the photos. You can see more responses here.
I saw this little turtle on consecutive days last weekend. Both times, it had three remoras on its shell. Two are definitely Slender Remoras, and the third is probably the same, though less easily identified in the photos I took. The remoras don’t harm the turtle, except for possibly slowing it down a bit, though this turtle looked pretty speedy regardless.
The idea of The Numbers Game is to enter a number into the search bar of your computer and then post a selection of the photos that turn up. This week’s number is 234. Captions are on the photos. You can see more responses here.
Recently, one of our local bakeries shut its doors taking with it our source of sticky buns. They were a favorite treat of ours, so my wife looked into making our own. She’s had good luck with recipes at onceuponachef.com and found a promising option there. Yesterday, I got to try it out. Actually, I started on Saturday as the dough needs a while to rise, but can be refrigerated overnight.
We immediately made a change to the recipe, subbing macadamia nuts for pecans. It is Hawaii after all. But the whole process went fairly well. I only had an 8-inch square Pyrex pan rather than the 9-inch square cake pan called for, and I think that’s why the buns were climbing the pan’s side when I removed it from the oven!
I was also not prepared for the enthusiasm with which the buns shot from the pan when I inverted it onto a parchment covered tray. It got a bit messy, but the crucial question is, were they any good?
They were indeed. Soft and chewy, but crunchy with nuts. A sticky bun crisis has been averted and all is well, at least in this little corner of the world.
Posted for this week’s Sunday Stills challenge theme, which is ‘Sweet.’ See more responses here. You can find the recipe here.
Graham's Island 