Although we have posted snippets to Facebook, it has been a long time since our blog dealt with our above-water activities.  This posting will attempt to remedy that situation and get things synchronized again.

The waters of Bonaire are relatively clear, and the sergeant majors and brown chromis sufficiently hungry and plentiful that the bottom of the boat stays surprisingly clean.  But of course the anti-fouling also helps.  The importance of the paint is evidenced by what happens to unpainted dinghy bottoms that are not raised up out of the water at night.  The first picture in the gallery below shows Roberta and Michael (Celilo) laboriously scraping and scrubbing their dinghy on shore near our moorings.  The job proved to be so tedious that they abandoned the effort after cleaning the fiberglass but before removing the growth from the hyperlon tubes.  We mostly lifted our dinghy up at night, but even so, only Barb’s obsessive scrubbing kept ours reasonably clean.  When she would get cold on a dive she would signal me that she was going up.  I would remain below but near the dinghy for a bit longer.  Invariably, when I surfaced I would find her not in the dinghy but still kitted up in scuba gear and under the dinghy, scrubbing away with a scouring pad.  I wonder, do you suppose I should feel guilty?

April 30 was “Rincon Day” in Bonaire.  It is an annual affair, but made special this year by the presence of the King & Queen of The Netherlands.  Most of the population of Bonaire must have been there in the second-largest (and really the only other) town on the island.  There were opening ceremonies with speeches and flag-raising and performances, and then a lull before a parade that featured bands and costumed marchers depicting the history of the island.  When the last sound truck had passed the Royal Observation Stand, it stopped for a time and the Royal Couple joined the parade, with the King and Queen dancing to the music as they progressed.   As our taxi driver later remarked, the King wasn’t much of a dancer, since he is Dutch, but the Queen was magnificent, since she is from Argentina.

On May 11 we had Roberta & Mike (Celilo) and Kim & Doug (Gabrielle) over for dinner on Tusen Takk II.  Kim is the fish identification expert who trained and certified us for doing fish surveys for REEF.   It was at her suggestion that I visited a particular dock looking for new fish to photograph.  When neither of us could identify the subject of one of my photos, she sent the picture off to a scientist, who identified it as an Oyster Blenny.   I later sent the photo to a scientist at Smithsonian, and he confirmed the identification.   This was of some moment, at least to we fish nuts, because the Oyster Blenny had never been identified in Bonaire before.

On May 13 when we arrived back to our boat after a dive, we got a call on VHF to come help rescue a boat that had broken loose from the moorings and was drifting off dangerously close to Klein Bonaire.  Bodacious and Celilo, the primary rescuers, had dashed out in their dinghies and climbed aboard.  The catamaran was locked, and so the engines couldn’t be started.  The wind was too strong for the dinghies to be able to push or tow the cat back to the mooring field.  They managed to use one of the sails to keep the cat off of Klein until a large dive boat arrived and towed the boat to the marina, where the dive boat had to disengage and the catamaran was in danger of hitting rocks at the end of the dock.  We arrived just in time to help push the cat into position against the dock and away from the rocks.  Turned out the cat had scraped along another vessel in the mooring field when it had first broken loose, causing some damage to the other vessel.  While being towed by the dive boat, the bow of the cat was damaged because the towing line was too short and the cat kept banging into the swim platform of the dive boat.  Bodacious, Celilo and Tusen Takk II were never contacted and thanked by the cat owners for rescuing the boat.  We later heard that when the cat left and went to Curacao they ran aground on their approach to Curacao Marina.

On May 17, two days before their departure to Curacao, Roberta and Mike had us over for a breakfast of eggs and sausages and sourdough pancakes with genuine maple syrup.  Oh my.  You can take me now, Lord.  Later that day, Barb took a picture from shore showing Bodacious, Celilo and Tusen Takk II at our moorings.  And then on May 18, we all had a farewell dinner at It Rains Fishes.   Barb snapped pictures of Celilo leaving on May 19 and of Bodacious on May 23.

Not a happy time to have good friends leave.  Not at all.   But what do cruisers do when friends leave a site without them?  They socialize with new people, of course.  Rhian & Rob (Beyzano), who we met last year in the Windwards, showed up in the mooring field, as did Kari-Anne & Per-Arne (Blue), Norwegians we have known for a couple of years.   Other Norwegian boats also arrived, with some staying longer than others, including Snorre & Ingunn (Spinnvill) and Vigdis & Lasse (Polaris).  And Americans Linda & Steve (Moondancer), and Australian singlehander Ian (S/Y ?).  And of course Sören (Lady Elaine), a single-handing sailor from Sweden who had worked as a farrier, had already been there and joined us on many dives and social events.  Most of us attended the world premier showing of the movie Jurassic World, the very first offering of a new outdoor theatre, which features a huge screen behind stone walls.  After entering through a small gate and buying tickets, we each picked up a plastic chair and placed it where we pleased in the gravel lot.  On another afternoon many of us gathered at the Zazu bar for a two-table rousing game of Mexican Train.   We were due to leave Bonaire the next day, but could not resist joining the group for a post-game sundowner aboard Beyzano.

We had had our last dive a few days earlier.  Sad, yes, but sorrow mitigated by Barb conducting a fish survey in which she identified over 100 different species.  In one dive!  Some details:  Barb and I had recently upgraded our thermal protection, so getting cold on a long dive was no longer a problem.  We dove at 5 pm, a time when the fish are particularly active and about.  We dove on a site that is well known for its diversity of species and the diversity of its micro-environments.  In all, the dive took over 100 minutes, but was safe because it ended in shallows.  Good thing, because even though Barb uses much less air than I do, she was down to about 200 psi by the time she finished.  (I had not followed her to the deep sites, so I didn’t use as much air.  What, she dove without a buddy????  Nope, she dove with Sören, who had also recently cracked the magic 100 mark.)

The results of a survey are entered into a database maintained by REEF (www.reef.org).  Surveys are conducted world-wide, but Bonaire is such a hot bed of activity that special slates have been created containing the most common fish from the island.  Barb conducts abundance surveys, which means she not only says what she saw, but how many: Single=1, Few=2-10, Many=11-100, and Abundant=over 100.

We got certified and trained for surveys by Kim West when we were in Bonaire in 2010.  We stopped at level three, which means we correctly identified pictures of at least 80% of 50 species taken from a pool of about 150.  (We actually scored much nearer to 100%).  The highest level is level 5, in which one must score at least 95% of 100 species taken from THE WHOLE DAMN BOOK (4^th ed. of Humann & DeLoach, Reef Fish Identification, Caribbean, which contains 683 different species!)  Sound impossible?  Nope.  Sören just achieved level 5.  I wanna be like Sören when I grow up.