Bonaire 2024 (page 7 of 9)

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Day 7: Feb 16, 2024

Last day of diving! We had our breakfast at Ingridients, then got back to the room to get our gear and back to the dock by 8 for our boat dives. It's really handy that our room is right next to everything - we are the closest one to the dock/restaurants and it has not been loud at all.

There were supposed to be 7 or 8 people on our morning boat dive today - only 3 of us (Bill who we've dove with twice this week) and the two of us - that's it. No one else showed up. That seems so strange but they said it was typical, especially for a Friday or Saturday. But lucky us - Sarah and Bati were our Divemasters/Captains (we've noticed here the Dive Masters also drive the boats) and we pretty much had a private dive tour!

They always ask where you want to go and we requested to go back to a Klein Bonaire site. Sarah suggested Knife for the dive site, as it was her favorite. The last half of the dive was very shallow - under 10 feet, but there was an amazing number of fish in the reef at this spot. It would be a great snorkeling spot, as so much was near the surface. The 2nd dive was suggested by Bati - it was called Petrie's Pillar and was right between Andrea I & II (we dove II earler in the week) and Small Wall (which we'd dove on Wednesday). In this dive, at the beginning it was just a nice coral tour with the same fish. We got back to the boat area, and had time to explore - almost immediately, Bati rattled his noise maker (to alert the other divers) - we came up and he'd found a Seahorse! They are not common in the Caribbean so it was a great find - Mike got a great picture of it and it was large - about 6 inches. They change color with their surroundings so it was red to match the coral "branch" it was hanging out in. We swam around some more and explored and right as we were ascending to go back to the boat we heard the rattle again and saw a Spotted Eagle Ray cruising through. It even stopped for a bit and attacked something in the sand (or was just showing off for us) but what a way to end the dive!

Once we got back, and everything rinsed, we settled in to wait. We wanted to dive Salt Pier yesterday but there was a ship there, so the Pier was closed to swimming/diving/snorkling; someone told us that the ship should be gone by 2 PM on Friday, so we were waiting for that. Mike checked the shipping websites after 1 PM and saw that the ship had already left, so we packed up and headed off for our final dive. It was very windy - especially down there. But we had a pretty easy entrance at the south end of the site (the North end was still closed, perhaps due to the ship that had been there, but we'd been told the south entrance was the best). We swam part of the way out and then dove for the rest. There are 7 piers under which the Cargill salt operation loads boats (we'd seen the process a bit the day before). We swam under all 7 platforms and back again. It's a bit other-worldly - this massive posts in the water, with massive schools of fish hanging out underneath them, and coral growing on them. There was a massive fish early on under one of the piers - probably a Goliath Grouper. Every pier had schools of fish under it and its own little world. As we circled back (and saw the Goliath Grouper again - he had no problems staying exactly where he was) we got back to the first pier and decided to stay there for a 5 minutes and just "wander" - similarly to what we did on the boat dives if we had the air and time to do so. Fortunately, that worked out as we saw a small green sea turtle and then saw a small southern stingray swim past. We started to swim back to shore, and saw another small green sea turtle. That was an amazing way to end our diving part of the vacation!

We got out and started loading our gear. We had a few moments of panic when we noticed Greta's BCD pocket was unzipped and the dry box that held the truck key and cash we'd brought along was NOT in her BCD. Fortunately, it was in Mike's - it just got put in the wrong person's pocket. That would have been a VERY bad way to end the week to have lost cash and a truck key, and be stranded with no way of contacting our hotel. The wind had picked up, amazingly enough, and the sand was scouring our legs as we stood by the truck.

On our way back, we noticed that the brake light kept going on & dinging, Everything was disengaged, so we weren't sure what was going on. We then stopped at a little "Snack" Restaurant and Mike popped the hood - it turns out the brake fluid was low on the truck. We went into the shop and had kroketten and a couple of beers. We had to toast our good week and also enjoyed watching an old episode of "America's Funniest Home Videos". We stayed inside as it was really hot and we'd had enough sun for a while. After we got back to Buddy, Greta worked on rinsing the gear and Mike asked about brake fluid, and someone supplied him with a jug to top off the truck - apparently, if you are self sufficient, they let you take care of the problem yourself. It's a good thing Mike knew enough to figure it out and not just drive around like that.

Back at the room, we cleaned up and tried ot figure out where to go for dinner. Researching it on your phone is hard, as a lot of places don't have websites, or menus or hours listed, and you want to have a decent idea of where to go before leaving without cell phone service. Fortunately, Mike figured out that there was a string of restaurants that didn't seem too fancy/expensive along the waterfront (a lot of which were missing some of the info noted above) and we figured we'd walk past them all and pick one. That worked out well, and we found Karel's Restaurant was over the water, with a good list of seafood. Mike had the catch of the day (grilled mahi-mahi) with fries & rice. Greta had the red snapper (fried whole fish) with rice & beans. Everything was great. Mike was going to get a strawberry shortcake drink plus a dessert until they brought the drink and he realized it WAS a dessert in itself!

After that we headed back to the resort - it had been a great, but long day!

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