Saturday, October 31, 2009

Caribbean Note VII

This week we finished old business and errands and got back to the serious work of diving.

I was able to get good information and a map to an old donkey trail that leads to a divable cave. I’ll check that tomorrow and if it proves out I’ll have located three caves with depths of up to ninety feet and hundreds of feet of passages to explore. The more people I talk to the more I understand that nobody has the whole story about Bonaire Caves. Each person who has dived them knows, at best, a few places that are wet, but most of those places are not divable. I’m still searching for a rumored fourth cave in the north, but I’m not sure it really exists; and that’s out of literally hundreds of dry caves and wet wells on the island.
Berit and I have been diving the east coast this week and have seen some great sights. The soft corals between Lac Bay and The Willemstoren Lighthouse are amazing. There are fields of Sea Fans waving in the shallow surge and big potholes and undercuts carved out of the ironstone bottom by the winter storms, all filled with lobsters and urchins and anemones galore. We even saw a sleeping Hawksbill turtle in the coral.
Today we saw the biggest fish we had ever seen in the water. We think it was a Tiger Grouper and while we see groupers all the time, they’re usually around two feet in length and weigh twenty or thirty pounds; a pretty big fish for sure but this fish today looked like a Volkswagen, and it was just a few feet from us! It had to weigh several hundred pounds and was HUGE!! I’ve heard about big groupers like this but thought they’d all been killed by spear fishermen long ago. Nice to see there’s at least one still around.
We saw an Eagle Ray paired with a Southern Stingray cruising along together; and soon after a squadron of five Eagle Rays all effortlessly swimming along like a group of fighter planes patrolling the reef; and fish of all kinds schooling for protection. The Barrel Sponges and Elkhorn Coral are thick here as well as the big Gorgonians. There are stupendous stands of hard coral in the north, but they are abundant here on the east side too.
The one thing we still don’t see are sharks. We understand the east coast is known for Reef Sharks and Nurse Sharks, but they are not around when we are there. We’ve done a lot of dives here and can say with a certainty that Baby Beach and Cai Reef are our current favorite sites.
Next weekend will be our last note from the Caribbean. We’ll be home the following weekend and look forward to seeing you all. Seven weeks down and two to go.

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Caribbean Note VI

First weird occurrence was a plane crash just off our coast about a half mile. Turns out a small drug plane was using the lights of Bonaire to navigate at night and while flying low along the waterfront, in front of all the tourists having dinner in the nice restaurants there, exploded and fell into the sea. There was a man still strapped into his seat and burned up before the plane sank and bales of Cocaine floating at the crash site.
And while everyone was trying to solve that mystery a small commercial plane crashed in the same place a couple days later. This time ten people were aboard and everyone was rescued except the pilot who was knocked unconscious in the crash and couldn't be pulled from the cockpit before the plane sank in something more than 600 feet of water.

Quite an exciting week!

We have made friends with a local (Bonairian) couple and it's kind of like being friends with Archie and Edith Bunker. He worked for years as a local cop and knows everyone (or everyone knows him) but is retired now and (kind of) hates the Dutch. If you consider the Dutch hold the local people in the standard colonial headlock after centuries of slavery and the virtual slavery of the plantation system, it's not hard to see his point of view. She is as sweet as any grandmother could be and speaks very little English, but has always been the stay at home mom and is the expert on cooking local foods. Since Berit and I enjoy trying new things we've been having a weekly dinner with them where the ladies make Oxtail Stew and Funchi and Red Beans (with pig's tails) and Rice and the old standby's like Iguana and Fish Head Stew etc.

Well, he is quite the amature web browser and spends some time everyday watching web broadcasts and getting his news and information on the computer and was having a problem with his CPU overheating and shutting off. He knew that Berit was connected to the mysterious programming world so asked if she would take a look at his computer and see if she could fix it. Berit agreed and we spent all day Monday diagnosing and solving the problem. We had to visit every little PC shop on the island 'til we found a heat sink fan to replace to one that was malfunctioning but in the end we were successful and put everything back together again and fired up the computer . . . and it wouldn't come back up.
The computer had been working when we shut it down and opened it up. The fan was working now, but the computer would not boot up. We must have zapped the motherboard, or maybe the processor had just gotten so hot it was shot, but all in all we took a computer that had a minor problem and turned it into a computer with a major problem. We took it to a repair shop and after an extensive diagnosis concluded that the motherboard was not working and should be replaced.

That was all on Monday. Tomorrow is Monday and we still don't have it back. He is fit to be tied. We've had endless excuses for why it's not ready yet, including the plane crash delayed the part from Curacao, but he is convinced that it's all lies and the lazy people who promised one thing on Monday and another on Wednesday and something else on Friday are just jerking us around and somehow behind it all the Dutch could somehow be responsible!!

We hope to have the computer back on Monday because Tuesday we are having another dinner, In order to have a break from the local food Berit is cooking Pot Roast. WooHoo!!

You know the ultimate disappointment in the new foods zone was the day Verna cooked pizza for us. We kids were little and Mom and Dad were going to General Conference in Independence and left us with Stan and Verna and their kids while they were gone. Verna was (circa 1960's) a health food nut and great money saver where food preparation was concerned, but her meals were always healthy and nutritious. So when we heard she was cooking pizza we were thrilled! We loved pizza, and because Mom was in the same vein and always prepared our meals at home, we never got to have pizza. We were stunned to think how lucky those kids were that their mother was so great a chef that she could actually make pizza at home.

When it was served that night for dinner our glee turned to disgust. She had used whole wheat flour and the topping was kidneys. It was the most horrid thing we had ever tried to eat, and because of the "you have to finish your plate before you can leave the table" rule we were forced to sit there stirring the kidneys (not meat) on top of the bread (not crust) until she'd had enough of our wastefulness and let us escape. I thought it was the worst meal of my life . . . until the Okra stew.

I'll let Berit tell that story:

First of all, let me say, I loved the Okra Stew. Last week, over Oxtail Stew, they mentioned that if they could get some good Okra that they would make us some Okra Stew next time. Well, I immediately flashed back on my childhood experiences with okra, although few, and had to wonder if that would be a good idea, but what can you say when someone has offered to cook you a meal. Later in the day Michael and I discussed the "stew" and Michael had a few things to say about okra. His main objection being the drool-like, snot-like liquid that results from cooking okra. As far as he's concerned the only way to eat okra is fried to death. He mentioned that if the stew was going to have any of the snot-like liquid that that was going to be a big problem. All I could do was chuckle. It was going to be very entertaining.

Tuesday arrived and our guests showed up with a big pot of stew and mouths watering. They each said that they could single-handedly eat the whole pot. He lifted the lid and Michael's worst nightmare presented itself in full blown green slimy goodness. The men went outside to have a beer while Monica and I prepared the funchi. Funchi is made of corn meal and I think is probably comparable to polenta. I've tried making it here and I like it but it's another thing that Michael doesn't care for. When all was ready, he dished us all up huge bowls full of stew and we each dropped a chunk of funchi into our bowl. You each a little funchi with each spoon of stew. Absolute bliss for our guests and also myself, pure torture for poor Michael. Later he told me that every time he looked at any of us we would have a long thread of slime hanging from our mouths down to our bowls. And did I mention that the stew contained fish and salted pig's tails. Well, Michael survived without losing his lunch in front of our friends and managed to down about half of his bowl. The rest of us all had seconds. Mmm-mmm good! They returned on Friday with Red Beans and Rice. Delicious -- and Michael thinks so too.

We miss you guy's! We hope to see you all soon. Three more weeks is all we have left and we will be back.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Caribbean Note V

Wow. The end of the fifth week already. How time flies.
We started off the week by scouting a new dive site called The Cliff, which is one of the few sites here that features a wall, which starts at about 20fsw and drops straight off to about 60fsw where the reef slopes down to the maximum depth for recreational diving (about 130fsw) and then extends out onto the typical snow white coral sand flats where we often see garden eels and rays. (How's that for a run-on sentence! My seventh grade english teacher is rolling over in her grave.)

The reason we wanted to dive The Cliff was that someone (who dives it at night with a black light) told us it was a good place to observe the coral spawning, because there is such a variety of hard and soft corals and because of the topography you can see a large expanse of the reef all at once. That way when a coral head puffs out its polyps you can spot them here or there and rush around from this one to that one depending on the action at the moment. The coral spawns in September and October and only in conjunction with the full moon, so we had to be in the water between 10:30 and 11:30 PM around the 11th of the month.
Night dives are always tough 'cause it's harder to gear up in the dark and find our way across the coral rubble and into the water with just the help of our dive lights. So after our afternoon scouting dive we knew which direction we wanted to swim on the reef and at what depth we would travel and where the likely coral heads were and what path across the beach to the water. We went home, had dinner and waited 'til around ten o'clock then drove to the site and got our gear together on the tailgate of the truck; then as I turned to reach into the bed of the truck for our gearbag my rebreather crashed to the ground behind me. AAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
I've been diving my Megalodon for five years and this is the second time I've dropped it. It is chocked full of electronic components and sensors and hoses and fittings and valves and has very delicate connectors everywhere. Plus it weighs close to 100# fully assembled and when it falls things are bound to break. I bent down in the dark and reached around it and gathered it up in my arms like a child who has fallen and found that instead of one piece it was now in three pieces. Needless to say our night dive was over before it started.
We went home. I carefully put the pile of parts on my workbench and piece by piece determined that everything was still OK. The tank brackets had been forced off the canister and the unit was disassembled but nothing was broken. I felt like the whole incident could have been a commercial for the ruggedness of the Megalodon Rebreather. It takes a licking but keeps on ticking! Just like the old Timex watch commercial! The next day I completely disassembled it and cleaned and checked and re-calibrated and put it all back together again and we returned to The Cliff and did our coral spawning dive that night.
This time everything went as planned. . . except for the coral spawning. We saw all kinds of really cool stuff like Parrot Fish sleeping in their mucus membrane cocoons and an octopus out hunting on the reef and brittle stars and hard corals feeding and squadrons of huge Tarpon (jpeg attached) buzzing us and using our lights to hunt reef fish. It was an amazing dive but we'd missed the coral spawning.
We've made friends with a Bonarian couple and expressed our interest in local dishes, so on Wednesday we had them over for dinner they cooked us a big pot of oxtail. I have to tell you it was a little disconcerting to gnaw on the bones of what looked like spinal column but the meat was really good! We've already had Iguana and fish (head) stew and of course goat meat, but now we've had backbone stew too. We love Bonaire!
Today we're diving a favorite site Tolo (aka 'ol Blue). The last time I dove there was on our marathon 2 1/2 hour dive to Witches Hut. . . can't wait!

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Caribbean note IV

We hope you're surviving the run up to Halloween and are getting your costumes all figured out for trick-or-treat!
We've just finished a week long Sailing Regatta Festival here on the Island. The sailboat races have been going on all week and prizes awarded for every class of vessel from Sunfish races in the harbor to big boats racing from Curacao to Bonaire to kids with little remote sailboats controlled from the beach. At night the waterfront is crowded with hundreds (thousands?) of people in a Rose Festival kind of atmosphere with music performed by groups from all over and food booths and Saturday Market style crafts booths mixed together with games and contests where people play a game like Bingo for prizes.
Last night was the final blowout and the party was still going on after midnight with everyone dancing and food booths still cooking and selling Shoarmas and BBQ'd goat and little kids running around with lighted toys and old women Salsa dancing with young men and old men drinking beer and watching the young women dressed to the nines stroll up and down the boulevard trying to catch the eye of the young men sitting together in groups along the seawall acting too cool for school. What a busy week. There are several festival times during the year and this was our first. The crowds are multinational, but predominately Bonairian.
Berit and I have finally completed our first dive on the wild side. We went with a local guide who has a good reputation as an East Coast (windward) dive guide and we were very pleased. Normally the water is so rough that diving this side is like a Navy Seal operation where the divers are loaded onto a fast boat and powered out of Lac Bay through the channel into the chop and swells of the Ocean and dropped quickly outside the reef where the group has a chance to see bigger and more of everything there is to see on the western (leeward) side of the Island. Then picked up in the same rocking and rolling conditions as the crew drags everyone aboard and jets back into the calm waters of the bay. These boat dives are typically 45 minute affairs where getting seasick is part of the fun.
What we did instead was walk into the channel from the shore and swim out along the bottom with the current and turn kick along the reef and return the same way. The difference is we were able to cover more of the reef and have a much longer dive (an hour and twenty minutes plus) and see everything there was to see. We dropped into the current near a huge pile of conch shells and finned along 'till we were surrounded by dozens of big Tarpon at a place called, not surprisingly, the Tarpon Pit; then out through the mouth of the channel on a 180 degree compass heading and turned right and followed the reef where we saw the same fish we normally see but more of them and bigger fish and all on the same dive. In addition to the Tarpon we saw eagle rays and spotted morays and big green morays and turtles and grouper and all kinds of brightly colored tropicals along with jacks and Lobsters and angels and juveniles of every kind.
It's important to note that Berit's air consumption is very good. My time at depth on the rebreather is essentially unlimited, so we were doing the dive on Berit's air, as we say, and we knew that the swim back along the channel would be the most difficult part of the dive so planned on turning the dive with a bit more that half the volume remaining of the person whose air consumption was greatest. So, Berit's air consumption was every bit as good as our guide's and the dive was extended to the maximum point (the Sea Fan Garden) that out guide had been able to reach himself. A less experienced diver might have "blown through" his air in half the time. So, Berit gets an atta girl for exceptional gas management and diving skill! She really is quite good in the water.
The swim back along the channel was as difficult as advertised and I can still feel the sore muscles in my hips from the workout, but what a great dive. We'll be doing more East Coast Diving from now on.
Tonight is one of only two times during the year when the coral spawn, so we're waiting until 10:00 PM to dive a site called The Cliff to see this happen. It's predictable like the tide. For a few nights in the middle of September and again in October at about 10:30 PM the coral on the reef (it has something to do with the moon) explode in a shower of polyps like popcorn popping. Some polyps are very tiny and some are as big as BB's and the fish and the brittle stars and the other reef dwellers all gorge themselves in the frenzy. We hope it happens tonight as predicted.

Sunday, October 4, 2009

Caribbean Note III

Happy Birthday Gary!! How does it feel to be sixteen? That was a long time ago for me in a galaxy far far away . . . clear back in the year of the famed Summer of Love. We hope you're having a great day. We'll celebrate with you too when we come home.
Speaking of another galaxy; we finished watching the last season of Battlestar on DVD and (spoiler alert) are you kidding me??? It wasn't enough of a stretch to have two separate Earths with identical continents but they had to throw in angels too?? WhatTheFrack!? And this entire group of people just agrees en mass to give up technology (when they can't seem to agree on anything else) in favor of an arduous survival level existence fraught with hardship and death because . . . why again?? . . . because 150,000 years later we're back in the same fix yet again?? What a terrible finish to the series.
So we moved on to Mad Men and after a marathon of madness just finished the second season of this series, which we like a lot; very smart and very cool. We especially like the time capsule features included on the DVD's and the care with which the writers include historical events in the plot line. Two thumbs up from Michael & Berit!
We've spent time Iguana watching and Iguana chasing too. We have a Palm Tree that has produced bright red nuts that a big Iguana comes over to eat. It's a hoot to watch him try and climb the smooth bark and then crane his neck to reach the cluster of nuts only to slide back down before he's had his fill. The other day Berit took pity on him and picked and tossed nuts to him one at a time 'till he'd had about fifteen of them. I tried to open one (a nut not an Iguana) and it took a hack saw to cut it in two. They must be able to digest scrap metal.
Our Bonairian friend was over (having an Amstel) the other day when Rexx chased a big Iguana into our house. He explained that Iguanas are like Pit Bulls and will bite and not let go even after you cut their heads off. So we chased this thing around the house with him skidding and scurrying and sliding around on the tile floors from one room to the next 'till he finally reached down and grabbed him like the Crocodile Hunter and tossed him back outside. We always have them around but this was the only time Rexx had gotten close enough to one to cause a problem. They usually keep their distance and run away when they are approached.
We've also done a good deal of cave hunting and I've attached pictures of e few I've found. #247 is a large dry cave as is #256, but #252 and #264 are both wet and divable. I still need to rope into them with the proper gear to do the underwater survey but at least I'm starting to get on the right track in finding them. I understand there a number of wet caves but only a handful are worth the effort to dive.
This week is the annual Sailboat Regatta with the coming week full of boat races and activities. The town is all spiffed up for this event and started off this morning with a mile long swim to Klein Bonaire (a small island offshore) and back again to Eden Beach. Berit took a few pictures of the swimmers (zip file) and here's a link to the Eden Beach web cam.
We have scouted the East Coast (wild side) dive sites and will begin diving them with a dive outside Lac Bay called Cai. We're going with a local guide who will lead us through the channel into the ocean outside the reef. I'll let you know how that turns out next week.