This was my eighth visit to Hawaii, and Jeff’s fifth.

On our long weekend there last year, I wasn’t able to dive – so it had been two years since I’d dived around Kona, which is two years too long.  I was SO READY for this visit.  And Jeff was equally excited to dive someplace with clear, warm(ish) water; a nice change from our California diving.

I landed a few days before Jeff (work meeting).  The work part was productive, and the staying-in-Hawaii part was nice as always, but I was counting down the hours until the vacation part began!

Before I picked Jeff up from the airport, I went to settle into our house.  By “our house,” I mean a house belonging to some friends of ours who are getting ready to retire to Hawaii.  I’d hoped we’d be in Kona at the same time as them so we could dive together, but being allowed to stay in their wonderful home while they were back in the mainland was pretty nice too!  It’s just up the hill from the airport, a convenient distance from Kona and Honokohau Harbor, and it’s absolutely gorgeous. Our friends have done a fantastic job with the place – every part of the house is lovely, but homey at the same time.    It helps that they’re divers, so the decorations are sort of “diver chic” – lots of underwater photography on the walls and ocean-related accents, and places to rinse and hang gear after a day of diving.

Best of all, it has a lanai (balcony). This is the view:

We were also excited to discover gekkoes clambering about on the lanai, as well as one in the bathroom.  I was a little less excited to discover the tar-like substance that is gekko poo on the floor the next day, though!  At least they eat bugs (not that we saw any in the house).

I picked Jeff up Hawaii-style, meeting him at the gate with a tacky lei which I neglected to photograph.

That was Tuesday night, and our first dive wasn’t until Wednesday evening – which meant we had a morning to sleep in (unusual on dive trips).  We woke up to the distinctive sounds of morning in Hawaii: wind in the palm trees and the chatter of local birds. And fresh Kona coffee just down the street.  Life was good.

Jack’s Diving Locker has been our dive shop on every other trip to Kona, and we stuck with them this time.  After checking in at the shop, we met the evening boat leaving out of the harbor to go on the manta ray night dive.

Which is where Jeff noticed he was missing his BC.

I found this funny for two reasons.  First, he’d been gloating about how light his dive bag was compared to mine at the airport counters (42 pounds versus my 47).  Second, he’d JUST UNPACKED all his dive gear that afternoon at the house to swap it into the Jack’s mesh bags, and hadn’t noticed then either.

After a few jokes about his brain being left in California, we got him set up with a rental BC; no big deal.  And we were off!

Right outside the harbor we were swarmed by spinner dolphins leaping and twirling around the boat.  I have learned over the years that there’s no point in whipping out the camera – that’s a sure way to get them to stop.  So now I just enjoy the show!

The manta dive this year was a little different from before: we headed down south near Keahou, instead of the usual spot north of the harbor.    Our twilight dive was at a spot called Casa Caves, which does have a nice cave to swim through.  That was pretty much the highlight of the dive, though – if you can call getting wedged in a lava tube on your way out a ‘highlight’.

Luckily, the manta dive totally delivered.

Mantas feed on krill, which is attracted to lights; so a bunch of divers with bright lights make for an excellent manta party.  This was our 5th manta dive, and we only had zero mantas once.  That was last year, so the memory was fresh; I was a little apprehensive as we entered the water.  Would we be skunked again?

But as soon as Jeff and I dropped down, we saw manta rays swooping over the divers already on the bottom.  We took our stations and spent the next 50 minutes watching the rays cruise over and around all the divers.

It’s completely surreal: the lights from divers and cameramen light up the water with yellow and blue spotlights, and through it all are these enormous creatures slowly circling, twirling, and coming really, really close to your head as they scoop up their krill snacks.

Words really can’t do it justice – so how about a quick video clip?

Clip from Manta Ray Dive (0:36; 3.3 MB)

The manta rays seemed especially friendly tonight; I’ve never had to duck so often!  The manta show was going on quite close to our boat, which made for an interesting safety stop on our way back.  Divers are supposed to stay on the bottom when mantas are nearby, so that we don’t bump into them.  But as we hovered at fifteen feet under the boat, a couple of rays came over to check us out, leaving the main circle of light where the other divers were. It’s actually a bit unnerving to have a 500 pound critter playing chicken with your dive lights!

Jeff and I were the last ones on the boat, cursing the fifty-minute time limit; I would have quite happily stayed down there until my tank was dry!

2009 has gotten off to a rocky start.

I’ve been sick for the last two weeks. A2 left (both the office and the country). And there are some major upheavals happening at work – not the “my job is in peril” kind of upheavals, but definitely the “my job will be stressful for a while” kind.

So it was a welcome bit of good news when I was invited to work on my favorite dive boat again.

I crewed for the first time last December, and I guess I didn’t embarrass myself too badly, because the captain made it sound like he’d ask me back.

And he did! I got to go out last Saturday – ironically, the charter was for Hollywood Divers, the shop I got my DM with and will hopefully get to work for once classes pick up again. We spent a gorgeous day out on the oil rigs. The nice thing about the rigs is that it’s almost as fun to stay topside as to dive, especially when it’s sunny and flat out like it was on Saturday, and the sea lions are all going crazy playing around the rigs.

Keeping an eye on the air fills:

For those of you who ask: “what do you do if you’re not diving?”, I give you a list of boat crew duties:

• Prepare paperwork for the divers, check certification cards and nag them to fill out forms
• Untie the boat (and tie back up at the end of the day). I’m having to learn a few knots, and the particular ways that the existing crew like things to be tied/stowed.
• Keep the snack bowls filled
• Be prepared to unplug the marine head. I haven’t had to do this yet, but I plan on thinking of it as another good learning opportunity when it inevitably happens.
• Fill tanks. This is actually kind of fun. The basic concepts are simple, but the exact details of which knobs to turn in what order and which gauges to watch requires more attention than you’d think.
• Help tech divers gear up – attach stage bottles under their arms if they can’t reach the clips, help them stand up from the bench, etc.
• Deal with anchoring the boat (and sometimes tying off the other end to a rock). This can actually be a workout. When diving at Catalina in Dec, the main crew guy (the poor man who’s stuck teaching me everything) would swim a line out to a rock and tie it off. At the end of the dive, he’d go out and untie it – and then I have to haul him in on that line as quickly as possible, before the boat drifts into anything. Hauling a fully-grown man through the water at high speed really puts your shoulder muscles to the test.
• If diving the oil rigs, throw a line to the divers to haul them away from the rigs for pickup. I sucked at this. So I practiced a bunch. Now I suck slightly less.
• Usher divers off the boat and hand down cameras or scooters as necessary.
• Help divers back ON to the boat (hand up cameras, stage bottles, scooters; pull off fins).
• While divers are under, stare at the surface of the water for a solid hour in case someone surfaces in a panic. I need to remember sunglasses next time.
• At the end of the day, wash the boat. So far I’ve only worked on “rinse days”, when we hose everything down with fresh water and also scrub the deck with dish soap (actually kind of fun in bare feet). Once or twice a month they do a full-scale cleaning, which I imagine is a little less fun.
• Keep an eye on divers in between dives in case anyone starts acting weird. By weird, I mean “having symptoms of decompression sickness.”

If everything goes well (ie, no rescues), it’s actually not that physically demanding a job – I’m getting  to spend a day out on the water, hanging out with a bunch of divers. It can be a little hard to watch them all jump in while I have to stay dry, but it helps to remind myself that what I earn can go towards my next dive!

Hopefully I’m learning fast enough to be useful; I would love to keep working with these guys.  It’s a wonderful boat with a terrific crew, and I’m extremely proud to have the opportunity to be part of it.

Wow, two months without a blog entry.

I have nothing to add at the moment, but if you want to look at pretty photos and video clips, check out:

New photo alums: Catalina in July, Farnsworth in August

Video clips: Baitball at Catalina, Torpedo Ray at Farnsworth Bank

I’ll try to get my brain back into blogging mode.  I don’t know if anyone misses reading it, but I do miss writing it.

Saturday was our last day in Bonaire. Scuba divers call this the “surface interval day,” as you need to allow at least 24 hours between your last dive and flying – so, you have to come up with something other to do than dive!

We piled into one of the trucks and began a day-long loop around the island to see some of the topside sights. It was sunny and gorgeous as usual, with just enough wind to keep it comfortable.

Our first stops were at some dive sites along the coast north of town, just to get some photos of the sites with our cameras outside of their clunky underwater housings. We checked out 1000 Steps (there aren’t actually a thousand, but I’m sure it feels like it when you’re in full gear), and then went back to Karpata. Karpata has a nifty little snack shack right at the top of the stairs now, though it was never open while we were there.

Next we headed east along the southern edge of Washington Slagbaii Park. You drive past a lake which is home to most of the island’s resident flamingos, but there were only a few in evidence today. The big excitement came just past the park, where a few little farms were set up. A sow and her furry little piglets went dashing by the truck, and then we spotted a donkey in the road just up ahead. Naturally, we insisted that Jeff stop the car and roll down the window so we could photograph it.

He came a little closer than we expected!

We followed the road back through Rincon to Kralendijk, and then headed east to Lac Bay, a big windsurfing spot. It’s a huge shallow area, only a few feet deep, protected by a large sandbar. We could see enormous waves crashing at the edge of the bay, but inside the water was flat and calm – except, of course, for all the windsurfers swirling around on it.

There’s a terrific little beachside bar there, so we grabbed lunch and enjoyed the view. And by “the view,” I don’t just mean the gorgeous beach and the windsurfers – I’m also referring to all the European guests in various states of undress. There’s a popular nudist resort at Lac Bay, and although it’s shut off from public view, the laid-back attitude towards clothing doesn’t stop at the borders of the resort! (No pictures of naked, sunburned people – sorry.)

As we drove south along the eastern coastline, we were absolutely amazed at the size of the surf pounding on the shore. On the west (diveable) side, you might occasionally see a wave up to your knees. Over here, with the full brunt of winds slamming into the island, the waves were constant and powerful, sending enormous sprays thirty feet hight.

There were also lots of these driftwood piles – I guess you could call them art. People had stacked up wood in different formations, with various bits of trash attached as decorations.

At the southern tip of Bonaire, we stopped to look at the lighthouse. Sadly, you’re no longer allowed to climb up inside.

There was a neat little crumbling building there which we were able to clamber around in, though. I think my favorite part was this “shoe room”:

On the southwest part of the island are several clusters of old slave huts. They’re exactly what they sound like: huts that were used to house slaves brought here for the salt trade. Even I had to crouch down to get inside these tiny concrete structures, and I couldn’t stand upright once I was in. I’d like to say we pondered the bleak history of these places and took a moment to reflect on all the suffering that people had experienced there… but frankly, they’re gorgeous photo opportunities, so we were mostly thinking about that!

Up next was one of our favorite Bonaire sights: enormous piles of salt! We’d gotten a pretty good glimpse already on our southern dives, but now we were here to photograph. There are some really amazing color contrasts by the salt piles: brilliant white salt, crystal blue water, and bright pink salt pans in between.

Sadly, there are big signs warning you that it’s a crime to crawl up the salt piles, or we’d have even cooler photos.

By this time we were all pretty tired and sweaty, so we decided to stop in town for some ice cream and shopping. The ice cream was better than the shopping. But, we all found the various knick-knacks we needed for ourselves and friends back home, so we were happy enough.

More topside photos from Jeff here.

Back at the condo, we all retreated into our rooms to get started packing. No small chore when everyone has camera gear and all the associated trinkets to keep track of! Carol officially wins the prize for slowest packer, though; the rest of us were all packed up and lazing around (or napping) while she was still laying things out into neat piles. And I thought I went crazy organizing while on travel!

We polished off our day with dinner at La Guernica, a tapas restaurant, where we consumed a frightening amount of food and booze. Then it was time for bed… in preparation for a painfully early rising the next day: 3am in order to get to our 6am flight.

I get up pretty early for diving sometimes – 5am is not uncommon, and 4:30 has been known to happen. But anything before 4am just feels like the middle of the night to me. 3am? That was just ridiculous. We all trudged down to the trucks with our bags, and managed not to drive off the road on the way to the airport.

Carol and I were dropped off with our bags while the menfolk went to return the cars to the rental agency – which had mysteriously moved from its on-airport location in the previous week, and was now across the street.

When Jeff finally showed up, he was in a foul mood – apparently, the rental folks wouldn’t check in his car until 4am. They were checking in cars for another, earlier flight, but not our flight. Jeff grumpily left the keys on the counter, said maybe he’d come back later, and joined me for the airline check-in.

So, after the painfully slow crawl through the line to get our boarding passes and pay our departure tax, Michael and I went back to the car place to check in. We got there around 3:55, and our counter wasn’t open. But there was a crowd of employees who’d just gotten off a shift, sitting around drinking beer and smoking. They waved us over and offered us drinks from the (closed) bar, on the house. We thought this was a fine way to start the morning: free beer at 4am on a Caribbean island.

Pleasantly buzzed, we finished off the check-in process that Jeff had aborted with no further problems. (In fact, they waived a fee for our returning a truck with a half-empty gas tank, because of the issues we’d had with the battery.) We rejoined Carol and Jeff at the airport, who seemed pretty bemused at our tipsiness.

So that was how we finished off our trip – sleepy and slightly drunk. The ride home was long but uneventful; I’m officially a fan of Continental’s new Bonaire schedule. Hopefully I’ll have the chance to take advantage of it again soon!

Naturally, 8am the next day rolled around and there was no sign of anyone by the truck. I started calling the rental place around 8:30, and was told someone was on the way. By 8:45, I tracked down a cell phone for that person and called them directly – turns out they were looking for the car over by the Sand Dollar office, even though I’d clearly stated several times the night before that it was parked by the dive shop. He came and gave the battery a jump; I left it running for a while and then parked it back by our condo while we went off to do a dive.

Just to be on the safe side, we piled into the other truck to get to the dive site. Our destination was the wreck of a sailboat named Our Confidence, located somewhere south of Eden Beach and possibly near Harbor Beach Resort. (We found conflicting information in the books on the best entry site, and none of the Sand Dollar DMs could give us any useful tips on finding the wreck).

At Eden Beach we got decent directions from their dive shop: enter off the dock and head south past a couple of buoys, and we should be right on top of it. We discovered a pretty strong current pushing us back the way we came. Luckily, that’s the way you want the current to be running, so we forged ahead.

Eden Beach is on a very rubbly area of reef, so there wasn’t much to see on the way besides sand and occasional piles of rock. As we were cruising along, I noticed a funny-looking object sticking out of the sand; I thought it was an old styrofoam cup or something. Jeff was on the other side of it, and started taking pictures so I went in for a closer look. Turns out it was a big snake eel sticking his head out of the sand!

Snake eel in the sand:

We pushed on over several ridges, every time thinking the wreck must be just out of sight. After about 15 minutes of swimming, we finally saw the hazy outline of a sailboat.

Wreck of the Our Confidence (photo by Carol Yin):

I have to say, I’m astounded that this wreck isn’t more popular and that more divemasters didn’t know how to get there. The current was a bit annoying, but not frightneningly so, and it was definitely worth the effort. The wreck sits in about 50 feet of water, which gives you plenty of time to hang out, and also means decent lighting for photography. It’s a wooden boat, so it’s rotting away in interesting ways. There were a lot of old ropes and cables strung around, so perhaps it isn’t very publicized because it would be an entanglement hazard for new divers. But we all loved it!

It was especially good for video because of the current. While the photographerss struggled constantly to maintain their positions, I would just swim against the current to the bow of the boat, hit “record,” and let the current take me from bow to stern in a long, smooth pan.

On the way back to shore, we stopped under the Eden Beach pier to wave hello to the ReefCam:

Being upstaged by a fish at the ReefCam:

Then it was back to the condo… where of course, we discovered that the battery in our other truck was dead again. Argh.

Carol and Michael opted to have a relaxing lunchtime before our afternoon dive, so we left them to deal with pestering the rental agency again. Jeff and I hopped back in the water for one last dive at Bari Reef. I was tired of dealing with my camera, so I went video-free on this dive – and thoroughly enjoyed it!

We puttered around mostly in the shallows, heading north in search of the “Reef Balls,” big cement spheres used as artificial reefs. On the way we passed several moored boats, which provided shade for huge schools of jacks swirling around in tornado-like formations.

At one point, Jeff suddenly started pointing his camera at me and taking pictures, which seemed odd since he had the macro lens on. It finally occurred to me to glance behind me – where a big snaggletoothed barracuda was hovering just outside of my peripheral vision!

After the dive, Jeff dunked all his gear in the Sand Dollar rinse tank. Almost instantly, his hands began to itch and burn. We think someone rubbed up against fire coral on their dive and then rinsed their gear in the dunk tank, leaving little fire coral bits behind for the next innocent bystander. Ouch! I made an emergency stop for some vinegar so Jeff could finish out his diving day.

Our afternoon dive was next door with Buddy Dive, on a boat trip arranged by Bruce (who just bought a house in Bonaire with his wife) for all the digitaldiver.net folks. We liked the boat operation there much better. No doubt we were influenced by the fact that the Buddy Dive divemaster was an ace at finding little things, including multiple frogfish:

We briefly considered squeezing in one last night dive, but decided to quit while we were ahead and call it a day. There was a digitaldiver.net evening get-together at Bruce’s – they have the most gorgeous house, with the perfect patio for hosting parties. Funny how everyone we know with vacation homes seems to not have kids!

Afterwards, Jeff and I sneaked off for a ‘date night’ dinner at an Italian restaurant, then joined Carol and Michael back at the condo to make plans for our topside adventures the following day…

Jeff and I got an early start Thursday morning and drove south past Salt Pier. I’d seen the dive site ‘Tori’s Reef’ named on many people’s “must dive” lists, so we decided to check it out. The entry was similar to all the southern dive sites, a rocky ledge, but at this site you actually enter down the sides of a channel cut through to the salt pools. When the gates are closed and water isn’t being sucked in, it’s a little easier to climb down the edge there and walk out through the sandy channel, rather than having to deal with the slippery rocks and urchins along the usual beach.

The dive here started in about 8 feet of water. As soon as we dropped down, we found clumps of coral that were home to all kinds of interesting little fish. They swarmed with juvenile damselfish and bright orange and blue cherubfish, and occasionally with jacks cruising overhead in search of a snack.

We finally tore ourselves away from the super-shallows and headed across the sand towards the real reef, but again I found myself constantly distracted! I spotted half a dozen yellowhead jawfish in their burrows, and even saw my first sailfin blenny giving his signature display off in the distance! (Of course, he hid back in his little hole as soon as I went close.)

Yellowhead Jawfish sneaks out of his burrow:

By the time we reached the slope, we’d already been down 40 minutes just tooling around in the shallows. Here we saw more nesting butterflyfish, a barred hamlet, and of course I found lots of slender filefish.

Slender filefish hides in a gorgonian:

Our next dive of the day was also our first boat dive on this trip; we’d signed up for a boat and picked Klein Bonaire as the dive spot (the only area you can’t get to from shore). I think we were all a little underwhelmed by Sand Dollar’s boat operation. The boat itself was extremely cramped. I don’t expect luxury, but a little room to move is nice – and we didn’t even have a full load of divers, so I can’t even imagine how awkward that would have been.

But more importantly, we didn’t feel like the divemaster was particularly useful. He only “led” the dive insofar as he cruised a little ahead of the divers. We signed up for a boat dive mainly so a local guide could point out cool stuff, but we did a better job of that on our own.  In fact, the divemaster was the first person out of the water – something I’ve never seen before!

We finished off the day with a dusk dive back at the house reef. Carol and Jeff had done a night dive several days before, and followed a DM’s instructions to find a little frogfish. Jeff was able to retrace their steps and find froggie again, though he wasn’t in a very photogenic spot.

We also saw the usual suspects: peacock flounder, filefish. But as evening dives go, this was one of the least impressive I’ve had for some reason.

There was a little bit of adventure at the end of the dive. We bumped back into Carol and Michael as we did our safety stop under the pier. Jeff signed to me that he wanted to go look for the frogfish again, but I was feeling pretty much done (it had already been over an hour, and I was getting chilly), so I waved goodbye to him and surfaced. I put away all my gear and waited. And waited.

Eventually they all surfaced; apparently Jeff had convinced Carol and Michael to go after the frogfish. Except, Carol had thought from all his signing (“frogfish? 40 feet?”) that he meant he needed her to show him where it was, when in fact he was asking if she wanted him to show her. So she reluctantly trudged back to the frogfish, which she actually wasn’t interested in pursuing (end of dive, and she’d already seen it).

Once they were all back on the surface, I went to move the truck closer so we could back in our gear – and it wouldn’t start. Completely dead battery. In the meantime, apparently I missed a rather spectacular fall when Jeff slipped on the dock and landed smack on his back. So we were all in an excellent mood by the time everyone had their gear piled up in our other truck (thank goodness we had two), and I put in a call to the rental agency.

Which went something like this:

Me: “Hi, we’re renting a truck from you guys, and the battery seems to be dead. What should we do?”

Her: “You need to bring the truck in.”

Me: “I can’t bring it in – the battery is dead, we can’t even start it.”

Her: “I’m sorry; what’s wrong with the car?”

… ad infinitum. I finally got the cell number of a manager, who said he’d come first thing in the morning (8am) to replace the battery…

Tuesday morning we headed north to Karpata. We’d been warned that the wind kicked up and made it harder to dive after 10am, so we wanted to get started early.

At the top of the stairs to Karpata:

Things didn’t get off to a very good start. As soon as we descended I turned my video camera on – and the external monitor stayed blank. Then I realized it wasn’t exactly blank. It had water in it.

Alas.

Luckily, the external monitor is the one part of my rig with some redundancy; I can use the tiny viewfinder on the back of the housing instead. Not optimal, but usable. And the flooded monitor provided its own entertainment, filling up with funny little crystals of god-knows-what, and spitting bubbles out the back as the electricity/saltwater combo oxidized.

And aside from my flood, it was a gorgeous dive. We swam south from the entry, which we’d never done on our last trip. The visibility was wonderful, and the dive site was more pristine than some of the busier dives down south.

We all decided to skip a stop at the condo, and head straight down to Invisibles, a little south of the Hilma Hooker. I’d read in the guidebook that garden eels could be found here on the swim out to the dropoff, which I assumed must be some sort of typo as we’ve never seen garden eels in shallow water. So I was thrilled to discover that there really were patches of garden eels in 15 feet of water!

Me shooting some garden eels:

Carol was the only one shooting macro on this dive, so of course I spotted more juvenile filefish than on any other dive. We also found lots of nesting banded butterflyfish hanging out in sponges, and had a spotted eagle ray fly-by.

Nesting butterflyfish:

Jeff and I squeezed in a quick dive back at Bari, where we saw lots of little filefish and yellowhead jawfish. At about 50 feet, we noticed a huge cloud of something around a pile of sponges. I didn’t see any divers or large fish in the area that could have kicked up sand, and it didn’t dissipate, so I suspected some sort of sponge spawning. I’ll never know for sure!

In the evening, we had our next guided dive: a night tour of Kralendijk’s Town Pier. The pier pilings are absolutely covered with an amazing variety of colored sponges, making this a world-famous dive. Only four groups of four divers each are allowed at any given time to keep damage to a minimum. Michael decided to sit this one out, so it was just three of us and our guide.

I wasn’t too impressed by our first visit here. The pilings were beautiful, but got old fast – and even with only sixteen divers in the water, it felt insanely crowded when most of those were inexperienced divers bumping into each other and confusing who’s with who. It also didn’t do wonders for the visibility.

So I was thrilled to discover clear water as soon as we descended, and not another diver anywhere in sight! In fact, on the whole dive we only encountered one other group, even though we overstayed our one-hour slot and were under for nearly 90 minutes.

Colorful pier piling (photo by Carol Yin):

Besides the beauty of the pilings themselves, we were treated to constant visits by the resident tarpons, lots of juvenile drums hiding near bits of trash, two frogfish doing their best to blend into the sponges, and a chain moray out on the prowl. It was my longest dive to date, and I could have done with another 30 minutes to explore!

A tiny yellow frogfish hiding on a pier piling:

You can see the rest of Jeff’s Town Pier photos here.

After dumping all our camera gear back at the condo, we treated ourselves to Pasa Bon Pizza (even more delicious than I remembered), and crashed into sleepy piles back at the condo.

Jeff and I finally managed a four-dive day on Monday – but only by squeezing one in before breakfast.

Since the gear room didn’t open until 8:30, we hauled all our scuba stuff up to the balcony the night before, and plopped into the water at 7:30am to do a pre-breakfast dive. I had the macro lens on, which actually winds up taking a lot of the enjoyment out of the dive for me because I spend so much mental effort stressing over focus issues. There’s certainly no shortage of macro critters in Bonaire, though; I spotted dozens of little secretary blennies peeking out of holes, and even saw some of my local favorite, yellow-headed jawfish, popping up and down in the coral rubble.

Carol and Michael met us for breakfast, and then we drove north to a favorite site of ours from last time: Oil Slick Leap. We thought it might be a little more camera-friendly, since there’s a ladder down into the water. Since it’s the windy season, the chop was picking up quite a bit already by 10am, making the camera hand-offs at the ladder bottom a bit of a pain.

It was just as pretty a dive as I remembered, once we got underwater and away from the wind. There’s a large shallow area near the entry that’s great to poke around in looking for little stuff, but also a beautiful drop-off covered with gorgonians and all kinds of interesting fish. I spent some time filming a barracuda who wasn’t very shy, and finding little blennies for the macro photographers to play with.

Back in the shallows, we were entertained by an enormous swarm of blue tangs that descended on the area like locusts to eat algae off the coral, darting en masse from one coral head to the next.

We spent the rest of the day back at Bari Reef for an afternoon and a night dive. The afternoon dive was nothing special (I was on macro again – argh), but night dives are always fun. In Bonaire, you usually wind up being followed by tarpon, huge silvery fish that hunt for dinner by your dive light. There was also some sort of enormous snapper trying to get in on the action.

I was especially entranced by basket stars. During the day, they just look like strange lumps inside gorgonians. But at night, they unfold in these amazing fractal patterns, and feed off tiny plankton in the water.

After our dive, Jeff and I raced over to Papaya Moon, a mexican restaurant in Kralendijk where Carol and Michael were having dinner with a bunch of folks from digitaldiver.net. Based on our food experiences last time, I wasn’t expecting too much, but we were in for a surprise. Everything was amazing – I can’t recommend this restaurant enough to anyone visiting Bonaire. The entire DDN crowd ordered the dessert special: apple pie. (I know – weird at a mexican place, right?) Although not normally a pie person, Jeff and I caved to peer pressure, and were glad we did. They make the most amazing pie, loaded up with thin-sliced apples and caramel, and served on a hot fajita platter with ice cream. Definitely perfect after-diving food!

Tuesday morning, Jeff and I headed back to the Hilma Hooker by ourselves while Carol and Michael went to Windsock. We didn’t get that much of an early start, but we still managed to do our dive and meet them at Windsock before they got in the water. We finished off our surface interval there and then followed them in. Windsock is just next to the airport runway, and I think it’s hands-down the easiest beach entry ever. It’s a very sandy beach, with only a few dead coral bits to get around in the shallows, so you just walk right in without worrying about tripping or slipping on anything.

Best of all, it’s a pretty great dive site, too! The slope is full of beautiful coral formations, and I also found the world’s stupidest fish at this dive site. I have lots of video of a lizardfish who kept getting scared and would dart away – about two feet, an then let me settle back in for some more video. But my favorite was the bright yellow trumpetfish who was “hiding” in a purple gorgonian, and seemed quite confident that I couldn’t see him.

We scarfed down some lunch in town, and then met up with a divemaster back at Sand Dollar for our afternoon dive on Salt Pier. Since it’s a working pier for the salt ships, every group needs to register with the harbormaster and go with a guide, even though you only dive when there aren’t boats there. It’s a great place for fish nerds: there are half a dozen sets of pier pilings which provide nesting areas and shade for schooling fish. French and queen angelfish are all over the place, as well as schools of snapper and lots of sergeant majors protecting nests.

Jeff perked up when our divemaster mentioned it was also a good place to find tarpon. Sure enough, when we headed to the northern edge of the pier, we found an entire school of tarpon cruising around. Jeff played with the big fish while I swam in and out of the pier pilings, occasionally letting my hair down for a photo.

We pondered a night dive, but ultimately decided to take it easy and rest up for a busier day on Wednesday…

I spent most of Saturday looking forward to Sunday: a full day of diving, after a real night’s sleep. And as a special bonus, the day I’d hit dive #400; I’m a total sucker for meaningless milestones.Jeff and I made noises about attempting an early morning dive, but opted to sleep in a little instead and do our first dive after breakfast. This also meant we didn’t have to haul our dive gear up the night before; Sand Dollar has the rather annoying policy that you can only access the gear storage area from 8:30am-9:30pm, making it a bit of a pain to dive early or late.

We had fond memories from our last trip of one of Bonaire’s best-known dives, the wreck of the Hilma Hooker, so the four of us drove down south to check it out around 10am. We got off to a bit of a false start when Michael realized he’d left some crucial gear at the condo, and had to make a quick run back up north. It actually worked out for the best, as we didn’t descend until nearly 11am, after most of the morning divers had already departed. In fact, for most of the dive, we had the whole wreck to ourselves!

As would happen over and over again throughout the week, I was amazed to discover how easy this dive seemed now that I had some more experience under my belt.

When we dove it in 2004, even the entry was horribly challenging for me. The surf is generally zero-to-ankleslappers, but there’s a bit of a step down right where the water hits the shore. You’re hobbling around on rocks that are full of holes, slippery algae, and spiny urchins, and once you’re past the obviously tricky part you still have a ways to go in knee-deep water with random holes and rocks trying to trip you up. I used to need Jeff’s hand to hold all the way in to keep from wobbling and falling over, and that was when I wasn’t dealing with a camera.

Carol still had a bit of tricky time with the entry (her camera is the heaviest), but I found it to be much easier than I remembered. I took my time feeling out the good spots to step, sat down as soon as it was comfortable to do so, and didn’t expend nearly as much energy worrying about tipping over as I did last time.

Likewise, the “long” surface swim just didn’t seem that bad after a few summers of LA county’s ADP program. And the dive itself, which was super-short and stressful for me on our first trip due to its depth, felt like a total breeze now that we were diving on Nitrox. All in all, I just felt infinitely more relaxed and comfortable with all aspects of diving. It’s amazing how much difference a little experience can make – and how the exact same dive sites even looked different to me when sizing them up.

We took advantage of the extra bottom time (Nitrox!) and checked out both ends of the Hilma Hooker. I actually spent most of my time in between, cruising back and forth through the hold that’s open at both ends, with a neat window where you can look out at the rest of your dive buddies. (Something else that was scary to me last time.) We spent about twenty minutes at depth, then slowly cruised our way back into the shallows, with a nice long stop for me at the top of the ship’s hull to check out all the nesting fish.

We didn’t have far to go for our next dive: Angel City is just next door to the Hilma Hooker. We took our time setting up gear and soaking up a little sun, and I dug out a couple of paper party hats for Carol and I to don for our underwater birthday photos.

Angel City boasts easy access to Bonaire’s second fringing reef, which comes to its highest point in this area before dropping off. You can see the second reef from the first one at this site (and the ones on either side), so it’s an easy swim to go check it out. Being a little deeper and a little less-dived, the second reef is downright lush with coral and sponge growth. There were strange coral formations everywhere, each with its own cloud of little fish. Up above, schools of larger fish cruised the area, teasing all the photographers up into the water column as we tried to get closer.

It was a gorgeous place to celebrate dive #400!

It was already mid-afternoon by the time we left Angel City and headed back up to our condo. After scarfing down a late lunch from Sand Dollar grocery, Carol was ready for some down time. The rest of us decided to hop in at Bari Reef to see what we could find.

My favorite thing about Sand Dollar’s house reef is that you really don’t have to go far at all to start seeing interesting things. On this dive – and every dive – we basically landed right on top of interesting subjects. I spent the start of the dive in 15 feet of water watching a sharptail eel hunting through the coral rubble for his dinner.

I had the macro lens on for this dive, which is equal parts fun and excruciating; lots of neat little critters to shoot, but focusing on them can be a serious bitch! I’m still learning the ropes in that department. But I was excited to spot what may be the tiniest fish I’ve ever seen, and I found it entirely be accident. I was shooting some interesting texture on a sponge when I noticed something with eyeballs on my monitor – which was zoomed all the way in and at close range. Sure enough, it turned out to be some sort of juvenile blenny (like blennies aren’t small enough when they’re grown up), not any longer than my pinky joint. I have lots of blurry footage to prove it. As well as this photo from Jeff:

Jeff was dying to hop back in for a night dive, but I pleaded exhaustion. (I know! After just three dives!) I blamed the previous day’s travel schedule. And so ended Day 2 in Bonaire…

It almost went off without a hitch.

The last time we went to Bonaire, it involved a red-eye, multiple connections, and two painfully long layovers – one in the Curacao airport, which was truly awful. And we each paid about $1200 for the privilege.

This time, thanks to Continental’s new direct flights to Bonaire, we paid less than half that and only had to deal with one red-eye and and a layover in Houston – not such a horrible place to be stuck. We were there for a while, though; since the Houston-Bonaire flight only leaves once a week, we took an early LAX-Houston hop just in case anything went wrong.

Jeff and I met up with our friend Carol at LAX, where she said goodbye to her short-on-vacation-time boyfriend and introduced us to her non-boyfriend, Michael, who was our other dive buddy for the week. We’d met Michael once before on a dive boat, but I hadn’t been able to put the face to the name when she invited him to come along to Bonaire. When he showed up at our gate, I was relieved to discover he was someone I absolutely adored. Imagine a 50-something-year old LA professional photographer with a wicked sense of humor and about as irreverent and heathen-y as it gets, then make him a scuba diver – a perfect fit for us!

Our first flight left on time, so we wound up with six hours to spend in Houston. We were supposed to meet Ben and Kathy there, who were flying from Denver. Jeff got an email from Ben warning that they were having some sort of passport issues, but they’d be on a later flight and should still make it. I called Ben to get the full scoop: apparently, their passports had gone through the washing machine (literally) at some point. Ben had actually used his since then to travel to Paris on United, so he’d assumed everything was fine. But Continental had denied them boarding because their passports were not up to code.

Since he’s a loyal United customer, that airline tried to fix him up. The passports scanned just fine with United, so they took a United flight from Denver to Houston where they’d be transferred back to the Continental flight. Hopefully no problem, right?

Wrong. They arrived just as Continental was doing passport checks on every passenger. As soon as they reached the counter and presented their slightly-damaged (but not the important, front page) passports, the Continental representative started frowning. Apparently that whole “denied boarding” thing in Denver had made it into the system, and their whole itinerary with Continental had been deleted. After 30 minutes of intense discussion between Ben and a manager, the verdict was in: no Bonaire for the Brantleys. Even if Continental bent the rules and let them fly, Bonaire customs would almost certainly turn them away. And being late on a Friday night, when no passport offices were open, they were basically just out of luck.

Ben and Kathy handled it with remarkable grace – I would have absolutely lost it in their position. In fact, I did a pretty good job of losing it in my position. But we didn’t have much time to commiserate; we had a plane to catch, and the Brantleys had luggage to collect and a hotel to reach.

My only real complaint about Continental’s Bonaire service is the lousy timing – we landed at 5:30am after 3.5 hours of fitful dozing. Not the best mood to start a trip in! Carol and I kept watch on our pile-o-bags (below) while the boys picked up our rental trucks.

Because of Kathy’s fatigue issues, I’d requested a room that would be available first thing Saturday morning when we arrived. So we owed it to our missing friends that we were able to walk right into a lovely second story apartment at Sand Dollar and unload all our stuff at seven in the morning. We also owed them some extra space… with no Brantleys, Carol and Michael were able to each spread out into their own room.

We tried several times during the week to request a downgrade in the hopes of getting the Brantleys some cash back, but no luck – the place was packed. Much guilt was felt, but a little relief as well, to be honest – because the room we had was wonderful. Being on the second floor, with a screened in patio, meant we had a nice breeze and a relatively secure place to leave dive gear. We were also on a corner, so the patio was a huge wraparound one with several seating areas, an excellent “camera table”, pegs for gear, and a hammock.

I’ll have to make it up to the Brantleys somehow the next time we go on a dive trip!

After breakfast and an hour-long dive orientation, I was a complete zombie and in no shape to hop in the water. I lay down for a short nap, and apparently fell into such a deep sleep that Jeff had a really hard time waking me up after 45 minutes. We dragged our sleepy asses down to the Sand Dollar dock and hit the water around 1pm for our checkout dive.

I was instantly blown away by the visibility. Our first Bonaire trip was in December, and I remember the vis usually being around 60-70′. Here at Bari Reef, it was easily 100′ – and the water was perfectly calm and still. We dive so much in California that it feels downright shocking to be able to maintain your exact position in the water column without battling any current or surge. I left the camera behind for this dive and just enjoyed the feeling of doing an effortless dive in clear water!

Another surprise to me was spotting a turtle – on our last trip, we only saw turtles on the east side, but apparently Bari Reef is a popular hangout for them these days.

I also found myself getting really chilled in just my 2mil suit, which had kept me more than warm enough last time. On our surface interval, I swung by the dive shop to add a 2.5mil vest, which I wore the rest of the week and stayed perfectly comfortable in the 79-81 degree water.

Dive #2 was at Bari Reef again – with such a convenient house reef, and as tired as we were, none of us felt the urge to travel. We got in the water around 5, so we spotted some of the early dusk action: lots of spawning creole wrasses zooming all over the reef, peacock flounders sailing over the sand in search of mates, and a sharptail eel on his evening hunt, accompanied by a motley crew of fish sidekicks.

Below is my favorite clip from the day – Magic Carpet Flounder!

After Dive #2, we zombied our way through dinner at The Reef restaurant (attached to Sand Dollar and surprisingly delicious) and collapsed early for a long night’s sleep…