We all got up early and drove to the airport, yet in more rain! We had a fairly uneventful ride to Houston (except for the bad breakfast), a couple hours on the ground before our flight home. A great trip!
I got up early to take Neal and Anneke to the airport, then afterward decided since it would probably be a couple hours before anyone else got up, I took a drive around the south part of the island. It was pouring rain again, but I got to see some nice rainbows as I made my way up the far side of the island watching the big waves and whitecaps all over. I stopped for a quick look at Lac Bay before heading back. Later in the day, I went to Washington Slagbaai National Park with Erik and did the 2 hour hike. It was beautiful out there and who would guess you'd see so many cactii out right by the water. The blowhole was fun, as was seeing all the flamingos. Later we picked Shauna and Jeff at Lac Bay where Chris and Roee went windsurfing. We went into town where I had ice cream, then Shauna and I went for a drink on the pier while Erik and Jeff shopped. Later everyone met up and we had dinner at Casablanca before seeing some of the locals enjoy life in town. We had some more ice cream before heading back to pack up for the trip home.
This was our last day of diving - Neal and Anneke were kind enough to come along with us to snorkel as it was their non-diving day since they flew home on Saturday instead of Sunday. We started out at WitchesHut. Roee and I discovered some big pipe that was out there in deep water - the top of it was at almost 100 feet down and we both thought the water seemed warmer around it...hmm...it had a sign on it saying it was part of the marine park. At Andrea I we were treated to watching a baby turtle follow a larger turtle way up above us in the water column. Very cool. The last dive we did was at Alice in Wonderland. Again, we were attacked by mosquitoes - they were getting me 100 ft out off the beach in the water, so Roee and I dropped and started our dive. This dive wasn't particularly fun for me as I had all sorts of ear issues at 80 ft and it hurt to go up or down, but I managed after dealing with some pain to slowly make my way up. We saw some basket stars which are weird looking things.
We started this day out diving Cliff, a nice wall that ran south for awhile before turning into a nice slope with a lot of corals and life on it. Fairly early in the dive Jeff and Erik headed back at us and they were following a turtle - soon we were ALL following that turtle. It was pretty cool to watch as it kept on going before surfacing. At the end of the dive we found another turtle as we were getting ready to exit. We tried to find another unmarked site near Karpata, but couldn't figure out the entry point and it didn't look right, so we just went back to Karpata. It was raining and quite windy as we were getting ready. We could see the rain hitting the surface of the water from 70 feet down. We could easily see the surface from 105 feet, but it was raining when we looked up from down there. It made enough noise that at first I thought a boat was going overhead. We saw a lot of cool filefish on this dive. We had arranged for a guided tour of the Town Pier. It's quite a zoo down there - divers headed in every which direction - and this is a guided tour! We saw lots of colors - anenomes and sponges, fireworms, a soapfish fighting with a chain eel, but the highlight for us was 2 seahorses! It was a first for us, and it looked so unreal. And we all commented on how BIG they were - we were expecting these tiny fingernail sized things, but they were several inches tall.
We started down at Red Slave, the southernmost dive site we did. We had read there was a chance of seeing some big things down at this less frequently visited site. Shauna spotted an eagle ray on the swim out, and we followed it on the surface for a little bit and then just dropped and started diving with it. It was a nice dive site, but we all noticed it had a lot of trash that had washed up onto the reefs also. When we got out of the water, it rained...poured actually. Soon after, we were back in the water at Angel City. Roee and I spent a lot of this dive just hanging out in the water column watching the fish swim all around us. Some of the fish were actually pretty big. We saw a lot of the black durgons, which was cool. Also there were a fair number of angelfish, as you'd expect from a site called Angel City. Ol' Blue was a beautiful site above and below water. Here we chased a scrawled filefish from a distance and got up close to it. It was Jeff's birthday, so we went out to dinner to celebrate. Happy birthday Jeff!
We did a fun dive at Oil Slick Leap, where we got to giant stride off the rocks a few feet into the water and after the dive climb back up a ladder, just like a boat dive! Roee and I went the opposite direction that everyone else went and everyone had a nice dive. We did a dive at Karpata, which was the northernmost dive site we went to. Here I found a turtle resting on the corals. It got up and gracefully swam out in front of us - such a cool creature! We did a night dive at Windsock, very close to home. It was a nice dive, but not as much stuff out at Buddy's the previous night. For some reason we remember it most for the attack of the mosquitoes that we were hit with upon exiting the water.
We did a dive on the Hilma Hooker where we saw a couple French angelfish, a queen angelfish, and the highlight of the dive which was a free swimming green moray eel that we estimated to be at least 6 feet long and about a foot wide. We followed it for quite awhile but it just kept on going. We did a nice dive at 1000 Steps and a night dive at Buddy's Reef where we were entertained by huge tarpon swimming by the whole dive, and we saw a caribbean reef octopus out feeding, which was pretty cool to see. Actually, there were a lot of cool things to see - I don't get to night dive in the tropics often, so it was a treat.
We left San Diego on Saturday the 15th, and after a really short overnight flight from Houston to Bonaire, we arrived at about 6am. After getting the rental trucks, checking in to home for the next week, doing some shopping and getting checked out with the dive shop, we hit a dive site called The Lake and as exhausted as everyone was, we all came out smiling after a fabulous dive. We saw a couple big groupers, a big tarpon, and several eels amongst many other things.