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Jan. 12th, 2020 05:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dchenesBonaire was amazing.
On Friday night I went and stayed in the Hyatt at the airport, so I wouldn't have to think about getting to the airport from home with three bags (the third bag was freaking me out quite a bit). I had dinner at the hotel (scallops, very good but overpriced) and tried to go to bed at a reasonable hour because I knew I was waking up at 5:00. My brain promptly refused to let me sleep for quite a while.
On Saturday morning I did in fact get up at 5:00, and took the hotel shuttle to the airport, and got on a plane for Miami. I had indulged in first class for this flight just to keep people from kicking me in the ankle quite so much, and ended up in the bulkhead row. The space was nice to have and the breakfast was pretty good for airplane food. I spent about ten minutes in Miami, just long enough to find the gate for the flight to Bonaire and go to the bathroom, and off I went again.
It was hot in Bonaire, and it's a tiny little three-gate airport and you get on and off planes via staircases. And the control tower is pink, which amuses me for some reason. Anyway, standing in line to get my passport stamped made me really regret the wool socks. But I did eventually get stamped and collected my gear bag and went off to the resort via shuttle. Turns out the resort is three minutes driving from the airport; I could have walked if I had to. But I didn't have to.
Got to the resort, met up with the group leaders, checked in, got sorted out, and we all went out for a short walking tour of Kralendijk and dinner. Bobbejan's is a pretty good hole-in-the-wall barbecue place that isn't actually pronounced "Bobby John's". They're only open on weekends and were slightly taken aback when 22 of us showed up, but 15 minutes later we were all sitting down, out back. Unfortunately I forgot the bug spray, so I got eaten while I was eating. More on that in a bit.
Sunday was checkout dive day. We started in the morning with a short lecture from the resort divemaster and a dive on the "home reef", which is actually Calabas Reef (which I am completely incapable of remembering; I keep calling it Casaba or Cabasas or something) and is pretty easy going if you start from the resort. You walk off the end of the dock and there's the reef 15 feet down (or 14 feet at low tide). It was raining, but nobody cared because we were all going to be wetter in a minute anyway. This was a "make sure all your gear works" dive, and got me used to salt water I can see through. It's easy to go deep when you can see, and I didn't really mean to get down to 54 feet, but I did it anyway. Highlights included parrotfish playing tag.
In the afternoon we did a single-tank boat dive at Lighthouse Point, to get used to how boat diving works; highlights included a flounder just sitting there chilling out on top of a large brain coral. After that my roommate and I and one other woman went to the grocery store and I stocked up on granola bars and yogurt and seltzer and bug spray. Unfortunately the terrestrial ankle brace and the Teva straps took a chunk out of my big toe, and I got eaten by bugs some more on the way.
Having been checked out, all the rest of the mornings started with two-tank boat dives. I bailed on that because I wasn't awake enough to go diving when the boat left at 8:30. I went snorkeling on the home reef instead and spent quite a while watching fish, including a 1" juvenile French angelfish that had set up a cleaning station and was cleaning goatfish. And a golden moray eel with black spots. And parrotfish, which make me happy. I know I saw at least two kinds (stoplight and queen).
The afternoon shore dive was Salt Pier, and that's my favorite spot so far. Bonaire does have a salt industry, and the pier is where the cargo gets loaded. When there's no ship there, you can dive it. There's a bit of a swim out to it, but it's easy. You do that with a snorkel and watch the bottom and you get turtles and eagle rays. And then you get to the pier and go under, and you get things like a great big barrel sponge with a school of fish hanging out in it, and enormous fan coral, and a huge green moray eel (at least one; either I saw two of them, or I saw the same eel twice. They don't wear name tags, though.). I love that dive.
Tuesday morning I went on the boat dives, which went to Klein Bonaire: Munk's Haven and Keepsake. Keepsake was my best dive in terms of technique and air use, and the guide found us a frogfish, which (in this case) is bright orange and looks like a fungus so is hard to spot, so that made everybody happy. At Munk's Haven it was determined that I needed 14 lb of weight (I was using 12) and I had to borrow another trim pocket.
Tuesday afternoon's shore dive was Bari Reef, which was promising me angelfish, but there weren't any. I partnered with a woman who usually dives with her husband, but he was off taking pictures at a different site and she wanted to see how diving with somebody else was. It was fine until my ear said it was done, which was before I really wanted to be done, but if I blew my ear out, I'd be done diving for the rest of the week.
On Wednesday I decided three dives in a day was one too many, and skipped the boat dives again. One of the group leaders was taking somebody else out to do some skills practice, and I tagged along with them and stayed down and got chased in circles by an angelfish because I was trying to chase it, while the skills practice went on, and then we went for a dive for the rest of the tank. It turned into a two-tank dive when the skills student decided not to go back out again, but K and I went back and merfed around at about 20 feet for a while. Highlight of that dive was a brain coral head that five or six big parrotfish were chewing on at the same time. I don't know what it was about that particular head, but whatever it was, I guess it was tasty. And I also loved the juvenile midnight damselfish, which are very dark navy blue with electric blue spots.
On Thursday I went for the boat dives. On the way out, we came upon a largish pod of common dolphins, which were having fun with the boat for a while. We went to No Name and I went down to 61 feet, having said I was staying at 40, but my (new to me) partner was no help because he was about 20 feet off the reef flailing around doing who knows what. Anyway, going that deep without meaning to put me off coping with depth for the second dive, which was called Cliffs, and I snorkeled it instead and saw a green turtle about two feet across, merfing around doing whatever it is turtles do when they aren't eating or sleeping.
I went as shore support for the afternoon dives, which were White Slave and Salt Pier. I really wanted to dive Salt Pier again, but there were people who hadn't done it yet and they deserved to do it once more than I deserved to do it twice. White Slave is apparently the home of a lot of garden eels, but getting in is tricky because the beach is steep and it's all coral rubble, which is hard to walk in. And since I had, by that point, sanded the skin off both my big toes and was working on sanding off the outside of my left ankle, I was barefoot, and that didn't help at all. For some reason, the raw spots only hurt in the air. Submerged in salt water, they were just fine. Also by this time my legs were covered in red welts (bug bites and/or ex bug bites) and black bruises, because every dive gives me at least one bruise somehow or other.
Anyway, at White Slave it absolutely poured buckets for about ten minutes, so the shore support went and hid in the trucks until it stopped. It's more fun getting rained on that hard when you're either about to be underwater, or have just been underwater and want to rinse the salt off.
Friday could have been a morning dive day, but I decided against it because my ear had started being clogged until I threw Advil at it. (I was taking Advil also for the sprained ankle, the bug bites, the inflamed ex-blisters and the chafed other ankle.) So I went snorkeling at home again just to say I'd gotten wet. I could watch parrotfish and goatfish all day. Then I went off on an expedition with four other ECD people looking for the lionfish burger truck. We found it (and Harry, who is just about Bonaire personified), and got lionfish burgers, and had to eat them in the truck on the way back lest we miss the boat.
I'd signed up for snorkeling with turtles off a catamaran in the afternoon, and I went for the boat ride, but the lionfish burgers made us too late for me to grab my own gear. Also, by the time we got to the snorkeling site we'd gone through a rain and wind squall and I wasn't really inclined to go snorkeling in the rain (diving is different that way). So I stayed on the boat, and we merfed around following the snorkelers in the current across No Name and three other dive sites on Klein. I rode back on the bow netting, and dried off from the squall thus, and we got back just after the sun had set and were watching the moon rise. And then lots of us went to Bobbejan's again.
Saturday was travel day, and we had to check out of the resort by 11:00, so there was a lot of sorting out gear and shuttle schedules and such, and a lot of hanging around waiting for shuttles. Apparently there were at least three flights in and/or out on Saturday, because the airport waiting area was jammed.
Got to Miami 20 minutes early, and did the customs shuffle (I bet they do it on purpose so people can't hide things, but the fact that there are no bathrooms until after customs is massively inconvenient) and one of my colleagues spotted my gear bag before I did. It had come open and I lost a bathing suit, but it was the bathing suit that reeked and was falling apart anyway, and I'd packed it on top on purpose in case the bag came open so I wouldn't lose anything really important.
I'm annoyed at the Miami airport, because we came in through terminal D, which has all sorts of food options. We went out through terminal E, which has snack bars, and is too far from terminal D to find and backtrack and go eat when your feet are sore on account of needing bandaids in three or four places. Had I known that my best option in terminal E was going to be a combination Pizza Hut and Sam Adams beer outpost, I would have had a burger in terminal D.
We got into Boston about 25 minutes early too, which meant it was only 12:45 by the time I got my gear bag, and I promptly fell into a cab and came home. The HBs weren't going to believe it was me until I took a shower and stopped smelling like airports, so I did that, and went to bed at 2:30.
Today has been laundry and grocery shopping, and I really ought to at least open my gear bag and get the boots out of it even if I don't wash them. They're about the only things that really need washing anyway. I'm glad I got outdoors because it was 68 degrees here today, and I was out of bandaids and that just won't do at all, but I think I'm probably going to bed at 8:30 tonight because I am officially frapped out.
Other things to write about sometime, though:
- Cruise ships and night dives
- The stairs to the dock and the fish thereof
- A tuxedo rash guard
- The room air conditioner
- Drying things on the porch
- Lockers and what happened when it rained
- Cantina
- Eels on Wheels
On Friday night I went and stayed in the Hyatt at the airport, so I wouldn't have to think about getting to the airport from home with three bags (the third bag was freaking me out quite a bit). I had dinner at the hotel (scallops, very good but overpriced) and tried to go to bed at a reasonable hour because I knew I was waking up at 5:00. My brain promptly refused to let me sleep for quite a while.
On Saturday morning I did in fact get up at 5:00, and took the hotel shuttle to the airport, and got on a plane for Miami. I had indulged in first class for this flight just to keep people from kicking me in the ankle quite so much, and ended up in the bulkhead row. The space was nice to have and the breakfast was pretty good for airplane food. I spent about ten minutes in Miami, just long enough to find the gate for the flight to Bonaire and go to the bathroom, and off I went again.
It was hot in Bonaire, and it's a tiny little three-gate airport and you get on and off planes via staircases. And the control tower is pink, which amuses me for some reason. Anyway, standing in line to get my passport stamped made me really regret the wool socks. But I did eventually get stamped and collected my gear bag and went off to the resort via shuttle. Turns out the resort is three minutes driving from the airport; I could have walked if I had to. But I didn't have to.
Got to the resort, met up with the group leaders, checked in, got sorted out, and we all went out for a short walking tour of Kralendijk and dinner. Bobbejan's is a pretty good hole-in-the-wall barbecue place that isn't actually pronounced "Bobby John's". They're only open on weekends and were slightly taken aback when 22 of us showed up, but 15 minutes later we were all sitting down, out back. Unfortunately I forgot the bug spray, so I got eaten while I was eating. More on that in a bit.
Sunday was checkout dive day. We started in the morning with a short lecture from the resort divemaster and a dive on the "home reef", which is actually Calabas Reef (which I am completely incapable of remembering; I keep calling it Casaba or Cabasas or something) and is pretty easy going if you start from the resort. You walk off the end of the dock and there's the reef 15 feet down (or 14 feet at low tide). It was raining, but nobody cared because we were all going to be wetter in a minute anyway. This was a "make sure all your gear works" dive, and got me used to salt water I can see through. It's easy to go deep when you can see, and I didn't really mean to get down to 54 feet, but I did it anyway. Highlights included parrotfish playing tag.
In the afternoon we did a single-tank boat dive at Lighthouse Point, to get used to how boat diving works; highlights included a flounder just sitting there chilling out on top of a large brain coral. After that my roommate and I and one other woman went to the grocery store and I stocked up on granola bars and yogurt and seltzer and bug spray. Unfortunately the terrestrial ankle brace and the Teva straps took a chunk out of my big toe, and I got eaten by bugs some more on the way.
Having been checked out, all the rest of the mornings started with two-tank boat dives. I bailed on that because I wasn't awake enough to go diving when the boat left at 8:30. I went snorkeling on the home reef instead and spent quite a while watching fish, including a 1" juvenile French angelfish that had set up a cleaning station and was cleaning goatfish. And a golden moray eel with black spots. And parrotfish, which make me happy. I know I saw at least two kinds (stoplight and queen).
The afternoon shore dive was Salt Pier, and that's my favorite spot so far. Bonaire does have a salt industry, and the pier is where the cargo gets loaded. When there's no ship there, you can dive it. There's a bit of a swim out to it, but it's easy. You do that with a snorkel and watch the bottom and you get turtles and eagle rays. And then you get to the pier and go under, and you get things like a great big barrel sponge with a school of fish hanging out in it, and enormous fan coral, and a huge green moray eel (at least one; either I saw two of them, or I saw the same eel twice. They don't wear name tags, though.). I love that dive.
Tuesday morning I went on the boat dives, which went to Klein Bonaire: Munk's Haven and Keepsake. Keepsake was my best dive in terms of technique and air use, and the guide found us a frogfish, which (in this case) is bright orange and looks like a fungus so is hard to spot, so that made everybody happy. At Munk's Haven it was determined that I needed 14 lb of weight (I was using 12) and I had to borrow another trim pocket.
Tuesday afternoon's shore dive was Bari Reef, which was promising me angelfish, but there weren't any. I partnered with a woman who usually dives with her husband, but he was off taking pictures at a different site and she wanted to see how diving with somebody else was. It was fine until my ear said it was done, which was before I really wanted to be done, but if I blew my ear out, I'd be done diving for the rest of the week.
On Wednesday I decided three dives in a day was one too many, and skipped the boat dives again. One of the group leaders was taking somebody else out to do some skills practice, and I tagged along with them and stayed down and got chased in circles by an angelfish because I was trying to chase it, while the skills practice went on, and then we went for a dive for the rest of the tank. It turned into a two-tank dive when the skills student decided not to go back out again, but K and I went back and merfed around at about 20 feet for a while. Highlight of that dive was a brain coral head that five or six big parrotfish were chewing on at the same time. I don't know what it was about that particular head, but whatever it was, I guess it was tasty. And I also loved the juvenile midnight damselfish, which are very dark navy blue with electric blue spots.
On Thursday I went for the boat dives. On the way out, we came upon a largish pod of common dolphins, which were having fun with the boat for a while. We went to No Name and I went down to 61 feet, having said I was staying at 40, but my (new to me) partner was no help because he was about 20 feet off the reef flailing around doing who knows what. Anyway, going that deep without meaning to put me off coping with depth for the second dive, which was called Cliffs, and I snorkeled it instead and saw a green turtle about two feet across, merfing around doing whatever it is turtles do when they aren't eating or sleeping.
I went as shore support for the afternoon dives, which were White Slave and Salt Pier. I really wanted to dive Salt Pier again, but there were people who hadn't done it yet and they deserved to do it once more than I deserved to do it twice. White Slave is apparently the home of a lot of garden eels, but getting in is tricky because the beach is steep and it's all coral rubble, which is hard to walk in. And since I had, by that point, sanded the skin off both my big toes and was working on sanding off the outside of my left ankle, I was barefoot, and that didn't help at all. For some reason, the raw spots only hurt in the air. Submerged in salt water, they were just fine. Also by this time my legs were covered in red welts (bug bites and/or ex bug bites) and black bruises, because every dive gives me at least one bruise somehow or other.
Anyway, at White Slave it absolutely poured buckets for about ten minutes, so the shore support went and hid in the trucks until it stopped. It's more fun getting rained on that hard when you're either about to be underwater, or have just been underwater and want to rinse the salt off.
Friday could have been a morning dive day, but I decided against it because my ear had started being clogged until I threw Advil at it. (I was taking Advil also for the sprained ankle, the bug bites, the inflamed ex-blisters and the chafed other ankle.) So I went snorkeling at home again just to say I'd gotten wet. I could watch parrotfish and goatfish all day. Then I went off on an expedition with four other ECD people looking for the lionfish burger truck. We found it (and Harry, who is just about Bonaire personified), and got lionfish burgers, and had to eat them in the truck on the way back lest we miss the boat.
I'd signed up for snorkeling with turtles off a catamaran in the afternoon, and I went for the boat ride, but the lionfish burgers made us too late for me to grab my own gear. Also, by the time we got to the snorkeling site we'd gone through a rain and wind squall and I wasn't really inclined to go snorkeling in the rain (diving is different that way). So I stayed on the boat, and we merfed around following the snorkelers in the current across No Name and three other dive sites on Klein. I rode back on the bow netting, and dried off from the squall thus, and we got back just after the sun had set and were watching the moon rise. And then lots of us went to Bobbejan's again.
Saturday was travel day, and we had to check out of the resort by 11:00, so there was a lot of sorting out gear and shuttle schedules and such, and a lot of hanging around waiting for shuttles. Apparently there were at least three flights in and/or out on Saturday, because the airport waiting area was jammed.
Got to Miami 20 minutes early, and did the customs shuffle (I bet they do it on purpose so people can't hide things, but the fact that there are no bathrooms until after customs is massively inconvenient) and one of my colleagues spotted my gear bag before I did. It had come open and I lost a bathing suit, but it was the bathing suit that reeked and was falling apart anyway, and I'd packed it on top on purpose in case the bag came open so I wouldn't lose anything really important.
I'm annoyed at the Miami airport, because we came in through terminal D, which has all sorts of food options. We went out through terminal E, which has snack bars, and is too far from terminal D to find and backtrack and go eat when your feet are sore on account of needing bandaids in three or four places. Had I known that my best option in terminal E was going to be a combination Pizza Hut and Sam Adams beer outpost, I would have had a burger in terminal D.
We got into Boston about 25 minutes early too, which meant it was only 12:45 by the time I got my gear bag, and I promptly fell into a cab and came home. The HBs weren't going to believe it was me until I took a shower and stopped smelling like airports, so I did that, and went to bed at 2:30.
Today has been laundry and grocery shopping, and I really ought to at least open my gear bag and get the boots out of it even if I don't wash them. They're about the only things that really need washing anyway. I'm glad I got outdoors because it was 68 degrees here today, and I was out of bandaids and that just won't do at all, but I think I'm probably going to bed at 8:30 tonight because I am officially frapped out.
Other things to write about sometime, though:
- Cruise ships and night dives
- The stairs to the dock and the fish thereof
- A tuxedo rash guard
- The room air conditioner
- Drying things on the porch
- Lockers and what happened when it rained
- Cantina
- Eels on Wheels
