Bonaire and on
Wow what a great time we had in Bonaire. We arrived on Saturday after 12h of travelling (only 3 flights, but plenty of lay over time) to a very hot and humid place. Thankfully after that it was hot and had a warm breeze/wind the rest of the time. The first day we went to the dive shop and signed up for the tank plan, did our first dive and after that we were diving fiends. 33 dives in 8 days of diving! We did 5 dives one day as well! By the second day I had forgotten what day of the week it was. We just got up, packed our gear and drove to a dive site and dived. Then went elsewhere and dived again, then went home, switched our tanks, had lunch and then dived again and dived again. I think our shortest dives were 45 minutes and our longest close to 100 minutes (lots of time spent playing in the shallows). Over 5 gigs of pictures, I picked out some favourites and got about 600 Megs, Karen hasn't picked her's yet. Sweet!
We saw some great life (see Karen's page for one of her best pictures) including Spotted Eagle Rays, Southern Sting Rays, a sea turtle, lots of scorpion fish (which although ugly, have the most colourful and beautiful pectoral fins when they do swim), parrot fish galore, a few puffer fish, plenty of grunts, creole wrasse, angel fish (only the queen and french variety), coneys, trunk fish (we were lucky enough to see 2 post larval trunk fish which look like black peas with yellow spots and are about 1cm across), cow fish, dunkey dung and chocolate chip sea cucumbers (and yes their names are very descriptive of their appearance) and some rather large and scary looking tarpon (they got me edgy which is weird as sharks don't bother me). It was great, absolutely awesome, no stress, no phone, about 5 mins of TV the day we arrived, just living to dive. In fact we didn't even go into town until the day before we left and it took us all of 30 minutes to see everything the town had to offer.
Bonaire is a pretty desolate place, an island next to Aruba and Curacao that is 26 miles long and only has 13k inhabitants. There's no major tourist industry and the only way to get there is direct form Amsterdam or via puddle jumper. The food when we ate out was incredibly good. The place we stayed out was more budget, and if we go back we won't stay there again. Just wow!
Last weekend we dove the Triangle Wrecks at Nags Head. Visiblity was 1 foot. But it was still a great dive.
We saw some great life (see Karen's page for one of her best pictures) including Spotted Eagle Rays, Southern Sting Rays, a sea turtle, lots of scorpion fish (which although ugly, have the most colourful and beautiful pectoral fins when they do swim), parrot fish galore, a few puffer fish, plenty of grunts, creole wrasse, angel fish (only the queen and french variety), coneys, trunk fish (we were lucky enough to see 2 post larval trunk fish which look like black peas with yellow spots and are about 1cm across), cow fish, dunkey dung and chocolate chip sea cucumbers (and yes their names are very descriptive of their appearance) and some rather large and scary looking tarpon (they got me edgy which is weird as sharks don't bother me). It was great, absolutely awesome, no stress, no phone, about 5 mins of TV the day we arrived, just living to dive. In fact we didn't even go into town until the day before we left and it took us all of 30 minutes to see everything the town had to offer.
Bonaire is a pretty desolate place, an island next to Aruba and Curacao that is 26 miles long and only has 13k inhabitants. There's no major tourist industry and the only way to get there is direct form Amsterdam or via puddle jumper. The food when we ate out was incredibly good. The place we stayed out was more budget, and if we go back we won't stay there again. Just wow!
Last weekend we dove the Triangle Wrecks at Nags Head. Visiblity was 1 foot. But it was still a great dive.