Bonaire Day 4 (Now with pictures)

Day 4 began as usual about 7am. I had been borrowing an underwater camera for the first couple dives I decided to rent a camera and underwater strobe and am hoping to get some gre3at shots on the rest of our dives. After tank analyzing, getting our gear ready, picking up the new camera and breakfast we boarded the Sport Diver II and headed to the northern part of the island. Our first stop was "Country Garden".

This spot is on the main island but not accessible from shore. The water was fairly choppy and made our giant stride into the water a little challenging. Once in the water we descended to about 60' and the group headed north along the drop off. Shannon tried to show me a little worm like creature that had what can only be described as rows of wavy tissue paper along the top. As she moved out of the way for me to take a picture, her fin kicks dislodged the creature. Being the animal lover she is she tried to put the little guy back where he was. Danielo quickly moved in and let her know this was not allowed. We continued on and didn't see a whole lot more...although the rest of the group saw a barracuda, a turtle and a Wahoo (yes like the fish taco joint). This happens a lot on dives actually. Even thought we were in a group of 10 not everyone sees everything. If you aren't looking in the right place at the right time it's not like someone can just yell over to you "hey check this out", although that's not entirely true.

Yesterday one of the guys in our group brought a tiny shark hand puppet. HE came along side of one of the female divers in our group and set the puppet right next to her hand. Although I didn't see what happened I definitely heard the screams and the profanities that followed. I was able to clearly make out the word "Bastard". But I digress...

After a 1 hour and 20 minute surface interval we moored the boat at a spot called 1,000 steps. This site is accessible from land but as the name implies it's not the easiest to get to. When you have close to 50lbs of gear 100 steps seems like 500 on the way down and 1,000 on the way up.

For this dive my sister and I decided to go the opposite way of the group (unkown to ourselves and the group). We decided to stay around 30' for this dive and we were not disappointed with TONS of schooling fish. Although they were mostly the fish we have been seeing they were in some cases 2 to 3 times larger and in groups of up to 15 or 20. This was our longest dive at 45 mins and we still got back to the boat about 10 minutes before everyone else.

When we got back to the boat Scott the dive master said we had just missed a baby turtle. When the group got back we heard about one of the divers playing with an eel and some squids they had seen just prior to boarding the boat. We stowed our gear and headed back to the resort for so me pool time and and a nap before our planned night dive.

The night dive was amazing. There was about 8 of us and we stayed above 30 feet the whole time. The Tarpon were back and happy to use our lights to hunt. This time however there was a feeding frenzy as at time there were up to 6 of the large fish darting this way and that eating the small bait fish that were all around us. We also saw some crab and what appeared to be an octopus although we could only see one tentacle. Another cool part of the dive was the bio luminescents. If you shut off your lights and waved your hands around it looked as if sparks were flying around in the water. The dive lasted about 45 minutes.

After the dive we all headed to a restaurant called the blue cactus. I ordered the seared ahi tuna which was AMAZING. Shannon had the jerk chicken which was also very good. I topped off my meal with a piece of key lime pie and the night was complete.

A bit of bad news however. During the night dive I noticed a tingle in my ear. That tingle has turned into full blown pain in my right ear. I'm hoping and praying I don't have an infection. Luckily one of the divers in our group in a physician so I will have him take a look in the morning. Either way it looks like I won't be diving tomorrow. Hopefully I will be ready to go for our final day of diving on Thursday (as you cannot dive 24 hours prior to flying). I will keep you posted...