ALM's pilots made up for the delayed departure by pressing the throttles forward. We zoomed along and got to Bonaire on time after all. Our luggage all arrived with us, which was quite a relief.After clearing customs and picking up our baggage, our friends Jake and Linda met us, along with their kids. We loaded our stuff into their Hilux pickup truck, and headed for the house.
We did the second photo dive on Monday morning, since we were all too tired to do another one on Sunday. We were supposed to have the cameras back by 11AM, but didn't even get in the water for the morning dive until noon. Oh well. We did the second dive using 35mm lenses and trying to get fish pictures. The fish don't like to stand still. It was fun, though.
That afternoon, Jake had something else to do, so we went over to Habitat
and did a photo dive there. We had one camera set up for macro and one
for regular lens, and traded cameras back and forth. The dive site at Captain
Don's Habitat is La Machaca. This is a small shipwreck in 30 to 40 feet
of water. Not knowing exactly where to find it, we were at 50 or 60 feet
swimming along when I noticed the wreck above us. We swam up to it and
got lots of pictures there and on the way back from the wreck to the dock.
After that dive, we returned the cameras and handed in the film for processing.
We swam up the reef, looking at critters, and saw a Hawksbill turtle swimming along. Once we reached 15 feet, we held position for 3 minutes for a safety stop, then continued cruising the reef at about 15 feet of depth and worked our way back to the entry point.
Without taking off our wetsuits, we climbed into the Toyota Hilux and headed a short distance down the road to Tori's Reef. This site has a large sandy area in the shallows, which is what Jake wanted for our navigation dive. As we swam out to the buoy, it started to rain. We'd left the windows down on the truck, and figured we'd come back to a soggy Hilux. We descended, and did the navigation exercises. As ever, I chewed up a lot of air. When I'd finished my exercises, I was quite low, so we all surfaced, and swam to shore. Once I was safely out of the water, Jake and Faith went back out so Faith could do her final navigation exercise. I went up on shore, and noticed all the windows on the truck were up. The fishermen who were working nearby had noticed the rain and the windows on our truck and rolled them up for us. This was an example of the friendly folks on Bonaire. While waiting for Faith and Jake, the fisherman walked by and I thanked him for his kind deed.
Faith and Jake returned to shore, and we loaded up the truck, stayed in our wetsuits and drove to Town Pier. We were supposed to meet Jean, Janet, Andre and Rose-Aline there at 4PM, and it was now about 5:30PM. With permission of the harbormaster, the rest of the folks had entered the water ahead of us. Jake acted as guide for this dive (not an instructional dive) and we enjoyed a nice tour checking out the many and varied types of aquatic life. Since we'd planned to do a night dive at this site the next day, we wanted to be familiar with the layout.
As we were coming back from the outer end of the pier, we discovered a depressing sight, a butchered sea turtle. The breast plate was clearly marked by a knife, and the flippers were severed with a sharp knife. The other marine life was just beginning to discover the remains, so it was clearly fresh. The remains were directly below the stern of a Venezuelan craft tied up to the pier. After we finished the dive and returned to Jake and Linda's house, Jake called the marine park. They asked for the evidence, so later that evening after dinner, Jake made a few surface dives and recovered the parts. By this time, bristle worms were all over the parts. We heard later in the week the ship was searched by the marine park officials, the police, attorney general and others. Nothing was found, but we suspect nobody will butcher a turtle there again for a long time.
On the way into the water, Faith stepped on a rock which was on the steps. This resulted in something of a twisted ankle and a tank going bang on the stairs. No permanent damage to either, and she was able to swim with no trouble (walking on land was more the issue). Faith said as we went in that she wanted to see an octopus more than anything else.
Jean, Janet, Andre, Rose-Aline, and Eric and his friends were still getting their act together when we got in the water. Faith and I had to do some underwater navigation exercises using compasses and such as the skills for our night dive for the Advanced training. We used the open area inside the L of the pier for this, and had no real problems with it, though Jake gave me some grief because Faith got herself back to the starting point a little closer than I did. (Faith does pretty well working off the compass, but generally I navigate when in unfamiliar territory above or below water as I tend to get a better sense for where I am).
Now done with the skills, we set off on our sightseeing adventure. Being a training dive, we had to be sure to get deeper than 20 feet. Most of town pier isn't that deep, so we swam to the end of the pier, and descended down the slope from there. At around 44 feet, I saw something that almost looked like coral, except it was breathing... an octopus! I waved my flashlight under Faith and Jake to get their attention, and they came over. With three lights on the little octopus, it changed color, showing some nice iridescent blue highlights, then began to move. We followed it for a while, and Jake tried to interact with it some. At first it seemed willing, but then decided it didn't want to play, turned red and moved along. We let it go. Faith was really excited, actually we both were.
We looked at all kinds of sponges and cup corals on the pier legs, saw moray eels, lots of balloon fish and too many others to recount. Jake showed us a decorator crab which was only about 3/4 of an inch across. Near the end of the dive we saw a fairly good sized crab near some tires. It tried to run away from our lights, and was a bit annoyed when we followed it.
After 59 minutes, we surfaced. Some of the other folks had already left the water. We'd enjoyed a very nice, and very relaxing first night dive. Since we're used to low vis, night diving was not bad at all.
At Nukove, we decided the entry looked OK except for the initial getting down to the beach. Again it looked like it'd be a bit much for Faith's ankle, so we decided to enjoy more driving around the island and head over to Habitat where we knew the dive entry was easy. The drive back to civilization took a while, and took us through Rincon, the first settlement on the island. We eventually got to Kralendijk and got some lunch before going to Habitat.
We got geared up, jumped in the water, and Faith found she could not keep any air in her BC. I instructed her to get her reg in her mouth, and helped her over to the ladder back out. Once back on the dock, I noticed parts missing from her BC inflator airway. All the driving on bumpy roads must have loosened these threaded-on parts. The next morning the folks in the Habitat dive shop found some parts that more or less worked. A little air leaked, but enough stayed in to make it workable. The backup plan was for Faith to use Linda's old BC, so we'd be able to dive on Friday either way.
Since we were going to make several more dives that day, we needed to get some depth. After waving to Jean and Janet, we swam over the dropoff and down to 65 feet or so, looking at the corals and sponges. After a few minutes, we worked our way up toward the shallows and played around along with Jean and crew looking at critters and such. We exited about the same time they did. Our dive was only about 20 minutes, but it was a good checkout of Faith's repaired BC and mask. Jean and Janet were flying the next afternoon, so this was their last dive for the trip. We left our wetsuits on, and drove north a bit.
Our next stop was Windsock. This site is so named because it's right at the end of the airport runway. The reef here is quite nice, and there was no current at all to fight against. We kept this one a little short as well, but really enjoyed it. We'll have to go there again. At this point all of the tanks in the Toyota Hilux were empty. We drove up to Jake and Linda's house, collected some lights for night diving and asked if they'd like to go out to dinner late in the evening.
After that, we headed to Habitat, dropped off the tanks, took our gear down to the locker area and geared up. We jumped in the water and had a nice dive around the small wreck La Machaca. This reef is a favorite, as there's a ton of life on it. The folks at Habitat have a rope running from the swim dock (baby dock) straight out to the reef, and down the reef. It's impossible to lose track of where you are for the return. The previous dive we'd done here was with cameras in hand, so this time we got to look around more. Cameras keep you focused on subjects and close-ups, and sometimes you miss the grand picture. We ended this dive after about 35 minutes so we could watch the sunset.
We swapped tanks and got our gear ready for the night dive, but held off for a while waiting for it to get darker. Finally we jumped in, and had a great night dive swimming around the wreck and looking at all kinds of nighttime critters, including a very large spotted spiny lobster right off the end of the dock in about 7 feet of water. The dive was quite pretty, and was a perfect ending to a week of diving. We gathered our gear, headed back to the house, gave everything a good cleaning, including us.
That night we had dinner at an Indonesian place, and then headed back to the house to crash.
When we were around the other side, we headed out to the Lac Bay windsurfing area to take a look, then drove around to Cai, on the far side of Lac Bay. This was a long, bumpy dirt road. At the end were huge piles of conch shells, some fishermen, and a few bars. It was quite pretty and it'd be interesting to dive at that spot (it is a marked site).
On the way back from Lac Bay, we saw a plane take off, and by our watches, it was the one Jean and Janet were on. We eventually worked our way back to Kralendijk and then back to the house. We started packing gear, and I started mounting some of the slides we'd taken underwater.
Homeward Bound
While we'd have been quite happy to stay longer, we did have to leave. On Saturday night we went out to the movies, and then stopped by the airport to check in for our morning flight. We got our seat assignments and paid our airport tax, then headed back to the house to do the final packing.
Sunday morning, Jake took us to the airport. We checked our baggage, cleared security, and got on an MD-82 bound for Curacao. We'd expected a Dash-8 turboprop, but the MD-82 promised to be nice and fast. The safety briefing didn't cover oxygen use, and we later realized why... the plane never made it over about 5,000 feet before descending in to Curacao. I think the entire ALM fleet had just arrived when we got there (3 MD-82's, 4 Dash-8's that I saw). We got off the plane, went into the terminal, had someone insist on looking at our boarding passes (no clue why) and scribble something on them, then went through security (again) and into the waiting area.
A short while later we were back on a different MD-82 headed for Atlanta. The ride was nice with the exception of a brief zero-g incident when the pilot was trying to find a way through some storms. All of our luggage was at customs for us in Atlanta. We were asked by several customs agents what was in the rubbermaid tub. They thought it was a cooler and were probably thinking there was food in it. We told them it was scuba gear, and they waived us along. I guess we don't look too suspicious. Then it was off to recheck the baggage for the last leg of the flight. Delta had booked a full flight on the L1011 to Boston (and they've got a lot of extra rows in these planes as it is). We arrived back in Boston and our luggage again had arrived with us.
We had determined that for two of us it'd be cheaper to park the van at the airport rather than taking a limo service. So, we wheeled our gear out to the van, loaded up and headed for home. By far this was one of our best vacations ever, and we're looking forward to going to Bonaire again sometime.