Today we intended to spend the whole day SCUBA diving. The plan had been to hop in the dinghy and head to one of the moorings nearby. But, yesterday we had forgotten to do the most important thing on our errand list: buy dive tags. Since we were going ashore anyway, we decided to get breakfast. We were excited to find that several places offer hearty breakfast menus. We picked a place where the food was good, but the service was painfully slow. Then we went to a dive shop near the restaurant to buy the tags.

It has rained a lot the whole time we have been in the Caribbean, which is odd since it is supposed to be the dry season. In Guadeloupe and Antigua, it was usually an odd squall or two each day, though we had a few days with more rain. In Dominica, we had several days where the squalls consistently came through every couple of hours. In our short time in Bonaire, we have experienced squalls every couple of hours, just like Dominica. Usually, they are fairly hard rains that last only a few minutes. Anyway, while in the dive shop, another one rolled through. This one was probably the biggest rainfall we have seen since arriving to the Caribbean. The heavy rain and lasted a long time, probably a couple of hours. We waited it out in the dive shop and had a lovely chat with one of the dive guides. He gave us lots of useful information, including a place we should be able to find a camera. Most importantly, though, he told us that even though the yacht mooring area is not listed as an official dive site, the diving behind the boats is fabulous.

By the time we left the dive shop, it was almost lunch time. The store that should have the camera is a little north of Harbor Village Marina. As instructed, we dinghied up to the dock at the Harbor Village Hotel and tied up. He told us it was another 10 minutes walk north on the main highway. Once we were out on the street and completely unprotected, another crazy hard squall hit us. Fortunately for us, a mini-van taxi drove by shortly after the rain started. The van was almost full, with only one seat left. The taxi mercifully stopped to pick us up. A child moved to mom’s lap to accommodate us. The people were very nice about having their taxi hijacked. Probably, the fact that it was only two minutes out of their way helped. In that two minutes, the taxi driver nearly hit two other cars, which is a pretty crazy percentage considering we passed only about 5 cars total.

Anyway, he dropped us off in front of the door and we went running in. They didn’t have what we were looking for, either, and once again, we had a long chat with the sales guy while we waited for the rain to stop, then walked back to the dinghy dock. This area definitely has a different look to it than downtown. The main highway runs north to south. The west side of the highway (waterfront) has some big hotels, and in between hotels are vacant lots filled with scrubby brush. The east side has a single strip mall, a radio station, and lots more vacant land with desert like shrubbery. We passed one cross street heading east, and it looked to be lined on the north side with commercial warehouse buildings. A little ways south of the intersection, we saw a river that parallels the cross street. The river mouth lets out at Harbor Village Marina.

By the time we got back to Kosmos it was 1500. Where had the day gone? We did as the dive guide recommended and dove right off the back of Kosmos. The sandy strip our mooring is on is actually pretty narrow, probably about 250 – 300 feet wide from the quay to where the reef begins. There were lots of small blennys and gobys shooting under rocks in the sandy area. The reef is a 45degree sloping wall. As promised, the wall was stunning.

There was a lot of variety to the types of coral and sponges, but not a lot of color variety. There were some bright purple tube sponges and a few of orange elephant ear sponges. There was some boulder star coral in hot pink. Some of the brain coral and mustard coral were bright lime green, but most were more muted shades of yellowish-brown. There was a lot of smooth flower coral, which are a hard coral that look like little white flowers. There are generally quite a few of them in one spot and they are each about an inch wide. There is some whitestar sheet coral, which are actually common around the world but we have never identified before. They are usually kind of roundish in shape and quite thin, with a grooved texture. There is some kind of growth that we have mentioned seeing in other places that looks like pipe cleaner. There is a lot of the pipe cleaner looking species here. Most of the rest of the coral and sponges are assorted shades of brown. There are less soft corals here than in the other places we have been to in the Caribbean, and the few that are around look more like solid trees than we have seen, with tall, dark, relatively thick branches. We didn’t see any giant barrel sponges, sea vases or sea fans, which we saw in all the other dive spots in the Caribbean.

In terms of worms, there are tons of Christmas tree worms in a big assortment of colors. There are also a lot of split crown feather dusters, which are a different version of the “feather worms” we mentioned seeing at the other sites in the Caribbean. These don’t look as much like bird feathers as the other variety does. We saw both kinds of worms in the sand as well as along the wall. We also saw some anemones, but still no clownfish. Are there no clownfish in the Caribbean? We also didn’t see any starfish, another type of fish that seems to be missing in the Caribbean.

What makes the site so great is all the fish. There are tons and tons of fish, and all kinds of varieties. Normally, fish are afraid of people, and when they see you, they get scared and run off. In the rare case where the fish are regularly fed, they will swarm you looking for food. Here, the fish are used to seeing people but not being fed by them, and they simply continue on with their business, not phased at all by human presence. It was really neat for us to be able to watch the creatures behave more normally.

We saw quite a few trumpetfish, both yellow and silver. What was odd was that they were often swimming alongside other species of fish (it seemed no particular species, either), which is a behavior we don’t think we’ve ever noticed before. We saw several goatfish, and one in particular was feverishly digging a large hole in the ground, just like a dog would. There are quite a few grouper in several varieties lurking around. We saw two grouper that looked like they were about to fight they were facing each other and looking angry. One lunged at the other, and it ran off.

There were several French angelfish. All of them were quite large, but one in particular was enormous. Two of them followed us for the entire dive. And they got uncomfortably close to us. They would often swim literally two inches from our faces, looking at us expectantly. We suppose they want food, which is forbidden in the park. We were both nervous that the fish would attack us like those grouper attacked Christi’s dad in Fiji.

We saw some new species, too. One is called a honeycomb cowfish that is very similar in size and shape to a trunkfish, but instead of being covered in spots, it looks like it is covered in brown pentagons. It is pretty cool looking, definitely unusual. Another one is called a coney, which looks like a grouper. Actually, it looks enough like a grouper that we could have seen it other places and misidentified it. Another new one for us was harlequin bass, which has a white and yellow body with black stripes and spots. That is another one we could have seen before and not identified. We also saw a rocky beauty angelfish, which has a bright yellow head and tail, yet another we may have seen before. Another that we may have seen before and possibly misidentified is called a schoolmaster, which is a silver fish with a yellow tail and fins. It resembles snapper.

There were lots of the usual species, of course. There were several more angelfish species above and beyond the French angelfish. There were several species of butterfly fish, including banded and four eye. There were lots of blackbar soldierfish. There were several sanddivers, and one was particularly large. There were several species of surgeonfish. One variety is a coffee brown all over with no particular markings, and we identified it as ocean surgeon fish. There are literally thousands of little silver chromium fish floating around.

In more fun fish to look at, there were several trunkfish and a porcupinefish. There were several really big schools of both smallmouth grunt and bluestriped grunt. Both resemble yellow snapper in their markings (though the shape is a little different), so it is possible that we have seen these species other places and misidentified them as snapper. There were several varieties of parrotfish, including the stoplight. Here the parrotfish are brighter in color than the other places we have been in the Caribbean, looking closer in vibrancy to the South Pacific varieties. We saw a couple filefish species, a spotted drum, some blue tang, and Creole wrasse.

Not wanting to push the limits since it was just the two of us, we were down for only 40 minutes and went down a total of 62 feet. There was no current at all and visibility was excellent. We thoroughly enjoyed our dive. When we got back to Kosmos, Christi stayed in the water for a while and worked on the waterline. Keeping the bottom clean is feeling like a futile effort these days. Tired from the swim, we had another quiet evening aboard. [30]