Bonaire Day 2

July 3, 2011

Today was a great day all around. We had great weather, great diving, great food, and great company. Tim had an awesome day diving, now that his eyes were not trying to burn their way out of their sockets due to sunscreen.

We all slept in and all we all managed to get a good nights sleep. We had some breakfast and then headed down to do our first dive off the hotel pier. This time all our equipment surfaced when we tossed it in and we got in it and headed down. Tim was just amazed at all the colorful fish and coral. Eric and I are enjoying re-experiencing the enthusiasm one has as a new diver. Tim is just fascinated with the purple tube sponges--as I think I was too when I first started diving. We finished our dive and loaded all our gear in the car.

We decided to head south to Tori's reef. We had never dove their, so it was a first for Eric and I also. It was an amazing dive site, probably one of the best we have done on the island so far. There were schools of barracuda and schools of several other kinds of fish, which we have not seen before on Bonaire. There were trumpet fish everywhere we looked. We also saw several giant needlefish and just for Tim we ordered up an intro with a sting ray. We will definitely go back to Tori's reef again.

After Tori's we stopped by the hotel real quick and grabbed a few things before we headed to Dive Friends to get some more tanks for the next day. After that we headed to Yellow Submarine downtown and did our third dive. We saw several large spotted eels, cleaner shrimp, filefish, trunk fish, sail fin blenny, and Tim finally got to see what he describes as a "massive tarpon with teeth and a temperament of a pissed, cheated on ex-girlfriend." Also, towards the end of the dive we saw a very large old anchor that we got some good pictures of.

On the way back in to shore we waved to the underwater Yellow Submarine pier cam. Then we got out and headed back to the hotel to get cleaned up to go out and look for some dinner. Since Tim was paying for dinner we tried to find the most expensive restaurant we could. We ended up stopping at Casablanca. The food was actually really good, but the service was a little slow--but about standard for the Caribbean.

After dinner we came back to the hotel and looked through the days video footage and some of the photos and then headed off to bed.