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.