The day after Christmas our cruise stopped in Bonaire, on of the best places in the Caribbean to dive. Heather, again, had her own tour booked, so once I’d seen her off, I waited for mine to begin. We had a short walk from the pier where the ship had docked to the dive shop, where we paid our fee to the marine park and did our pre-dive orientation. We then walked back across the street, got on the boat, and headed for our first dive site.
The boat was a little smaller than the one in Dominica, so we felt the waves a little more. Once there, we got our gear on and got in the water to do a buoyancy check before descending. The divemasters did a buoyancy check and told me to add two pounds to my weighting, which I think was too much based on needing to add air to my BC, but I’ll review that with the local dive shop later. We went down and were treated to some amazing corals and fish. Where Dominica had some here, and a little more there, Bonaire was just a continuous scene of coral, plant, and animal life. Unfortunately, my dive was cut short because my buddy had some equipment problems that caused her to go through most of her air in about 20 minutes. So we surfaced and did a surface swim back to the boat.
On the way to the next site, we stopped and got some replacement gear, and then got the rest of the way over to site two. Back in the water and down the wall, swimming in to the current on the way out, and seeing some really amazing coral. There is a little bit of bleaching, but very little, with the vast majority of the reef looking extremely healthy. I saw lots of parrot fish, urchins, and other small reef fishes. But the treat of the dive was after we’d turned and were actually under the boat, using up some air before surfacing. We ran in to a Hawksbill sea turtle just swimming along. So, of course we followed it, taking pictures and video at a respectful distance.
After surfacing, we went back to the shop, rinsed our gear, updated the log books, and returned to the ship. Somewhere along the line, my fins got misplaced and didn’t make it back to the ship with me. Everything else is accounted for, but they’re gone.