Caribbean Note V

This weeks note is the last for our current trip. We will be home on Saturday night. Our laptop has given up the ghost but friends arrived yesterday and brought a very nice HP notebook computer with them, so this email is sent courtesy of them.

We have been diving all this week, including a nice drift dive from La Dania's Leap to Karpata with a lot of surf on the exit and a night dive the girls did by themselves at The Cliff where they were buzzed by big tarpon. Our friend was recently certified and today gets to start collecting his warm water diving experiences here is Bonaire.

I'm still trying to make it to the Windjammer to catch the Lionfish there; maybe it will happen this week. The manager of the Bonaire Marine Park has built an air operated LP hose "speargun" to spear Lionfish in the coral, but so far it's not working very well. The whole Lionfish extermination attempt is problematic at best.

I did finally find a very nice Golden Coney and, of course, all the usual eagle rays and octopus and squid and turtles and groupers et.al.

We're bringing a friend home with us to spend the month and maybe we can talk him into cooking a nice oxtail or goat stew while he's here. Hope you are all in good health and happy.

Caribbean Note IV

I managed to get on the computer yet again. It's been a struggle! We've spent as much as a couple hours trying to get past the bad video card. We log on and in the minutes it takes to load up and move through the few screens to get on line the computer freezes or spasms out in a multi-colored array of odd shapes and patterns. Once we're on we have a great connection and (most times) minutes or a bit more to check email and such before we're knocked off again. We'll get this fixed when we get back, but will try to tough it out the next two weeks 'till then.

The big diving news is that we found a Seahorse at "The Lake". It was very exciting! We never see them. It was close in, shallow, brown and about three inches tall, hanging on a coral branch in the sand flats. Nice.

It seem like there are more critter this time than ever before. We're visited by some many birds during the day and now by bats at night who fly up onto our patio and eat the bugs off our screen door.

We're still on the Lionfish hunt and this week managed to get two in the net at once at "Chocogo". My free trip to the Windjammer is scheduled for this coming Friday and the latest sighting has three of them together at the crows nest in two hundred and twenty feet. Berit won't be able to come this time (too deep), but who knows, if she misses too many more dives like this, maybe there will be a rebreather in her future?

The vacant house next door finally has a Dutch couple staying there the last few days. We hope we can find out more about who owns the house. It would be nice to have "The Kids House" next door so you'd all have a place of your own to stay when you came to the island.

It seems like the past four weeks have gone by so quickly that we're thinking about our four weeks in Oregon before we return in the middle of April.