Today is a special day here in Bonaire – Happy birthday professor Fernandes! I started off the day at 6:00 getting breakfast with the professor Fernandes and professor Miller and the rest of my classmates. After that we packed up the vans and went on a dive to a dive site called “Oil Slick” which was amazing.
The dive was spectacular we saw tons of eels. The eels we saw were Spotted Morays and Chain Morays. There was an abundance of fire coral and a big healthy elkhorn coral right at the entry point. I also spotted some large brain corals and soft colorful fan corals. Other reef life we spotted were tube sponges and a large file fish. After the dive was over and we drifted back to the entry point with the current and exited by some steps next to our starting point. We all made it up safely and broke down our gear and headed to the next dive site here in Bonaire which was right off the main road in the city. We parked in the city and re-geared up, walked across the street and hopped in the water.
This dive was very different from the others because there was much more human activity that could be seen. This came in the form of boat traffic which we had to watch out for and large pieces of trash on the reef such as barrels and tires. What was interesting about that though was the reef had begun to take over the large pieces with encrusting corals and algae’s. There were two interesting fish that stood out on that dive. One was a balloon puffer fish the size of a football that swam inches from my mask and just let me swim right next to him. The other fish was a Juvenile French Angel Fish which had magnificent bright yellow vertical bars and yellow outlines on its scales.
That dive concluded our dives for the day and we were free for the rest of the day. We decided to go into town and we wanted to find some authentic food. We went to a restaurant called Exito which was a little hole in the wall where the locals eat. I had no idea what I ordered because they didn’t speak English so I just pointed to whatever looked best and they packed it into a box. It was the best meal I’ve had on this trip so far. It turns out I had ordered chicken and peanut sauce, dirty rice and some amazing plantains with mixed vegetables. After we had all eaten we made the 2 mile walk back to the resort along the coast and relaxed there until we went to sleep to get ready for our early morning cave explorations the next day.
To learn more about SPC’s Bonaire program click here.