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.