Bonaire 2011 Day 1

July 2, 2011

We made it to Bonaire a few minutes early at just after 5 a.m., which is 2 a.m. Arizona time. We made it through customs fairly quickly and then grabbed our luggage and headed to pick up our rental car. We got a really nice Suzuki minivan that has plenty of room for the three of us and all of our dive gear.

Then we made the short trip down the road to the Bellafonte. We unloaded all our luggage from the car and headed to our room. We got a really nice two bedroom two bath grand suite. None of us got much sleep on the flight so we all crashed in bed for about three hours. Eric said he got some sleep then, but Tim and I didn't get much.

After our "nap" we headed downtown to get some lunch. We went to El Mundo (the place that used to have my favorite chicken salad sandwich). Unfortunately they no longer have that on the menu so I ended up having a crab salad sandwich and Tim and Eric both had Dutch pancakes.

After lunch we headed to the grocery store, which by the way is a madhouse on the weekend. We got a few things and got the heck out of there. We headed back to the hotel and put our groceries away and then headed down to the dive shop to do our "checkout dive" and get our marine park tags (which are mandatory to dive here). We got our tags at the dive shop close to Bellafonte but we had to drive downtown to Yellow Submarine to do our check dive.

After our checkout dive we loaded all our wet stuff in the car and headed back to the hotel to do our first official dive here in Bonaire off the pier in front of the hotel. We did our usual entry of inflating our BCDs and throwing them in and then putting them on. Tim got int the water first and Eric tossed in his BCD and he put it on. Then I got in and Eric tossed in my BCD. Unfortunately, mine didn't float and instead went straight to the bottom of the ocean. Fortunately, the bottom of the ocean was only about seven feet down at that point.

So after we retrieved my equipment and we were all set, we started our dive. Tim did great on his first ocean dive. He was amazed at how clear the water was and how much there was to see. Unfortunately, he must have gotten sunscreen in his eyes and they were very uncomfortable and burning the whole dive. Before we ended our dive we were lucky enough to see our first turtle of this trip, a baby hawksbill. I managed to get some good video of the turtle.

After our dive we all got cleaned up and then went to look for some dinner. We ended up going to Buddy Dive and eating at the beach bar. The weather was beautiful all day yesterday, but it was especially nice in the evening with a wonderful almost cool breeze. Eric and Tim both had pasta and I had a giant chicken quesadilla and of course we all had to have dessert. (Just to let Dick know, the key lime pie was fabulous.)

By the time we made it back to the hotel we were pretty much all ready to crash, which we did shortly after watching the video I had taken of the turtle and Tim.