{"id":6006,"date":"2015-06-22T16:32:04","date_gmt":"2015-06-22T20:32:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tusentakk2.com\/wordpress\/?p=6006"},"modified":"2015-06-30T01:39:20","modified_gmt":"2015-06-30T05:39:20","slug":"catching-up-bonaire-april-26-june-14-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tusentakk2.com\/wordpress\/2015\/06\/catching-up-bonaire-april-26-june-14-2015\/","title":{"rendered":"Catching Up — Bonaire, April 26 – June 14, 2015"},"content":{"rendered":"

Although we have posted snippets to Facebook, it has been a long time since our blog dealt with our above-water activities.\u00a0 This posting will attempt to remedy that situation and get things synchronized again.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 But of course the anti-fouling also helps.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The first picture in the gallery below shows Roberta and Michael (<\/span>Celilo<\/em>) laboriously scraping and scrubbing their dinghy on shore near our moorings.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We mostly lifted our dinghy up at night, but even so, only Barb\u2019s obsessive scrubbing kept ours reasonably clean.\u00a0 When she would get cold on a dive she would signal me that she was going up.\u00a0 I would remain below but near the dinghy for a bit longer.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I wonder, do you suppose I should feel guilty?<\/span><\/p>\n

April 30 was \u201cRincon Day\u201d in Bonaire.\u00a0 It is an annual affair, but made special this year by the presence of the King & Queen of The Netherlands.\u00a0 Most of the population of Bonaire must have been there in the second-largest (and really the only other) town on the island.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 As our taxi driver later remarked, the King wasn\u2019t much of a dancer, since he is Dutch, but the Queen was magnificent, since she is from Argentina.<\/span><\/p>\n

On May 11 we had Roberta & Mike (<\/span>Celilo<\/em>) and Kim & Doug (<\/span>Gabrielle<\/em>) over for dinner on <\/span>Tusen Takk II<\/em>.\u00a0 Kim is the fish identification expert who trained and certified us for doing fish surveys for REEF.\u00a0\u00a0 It was at her suggestion that I visited a particular dock looking for new fish to photograph.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 I later sent the photo to a scientist at Smithsonian, and he confirmed the identification.\u00a0\u00a0 This was of some moment, at least to we fish nuts, because the Oyster Blenny had never been identified in Bonaire before.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 <\/span>Bodacious<\/em> and <\/span>Celilo<\/em>, the primary rescuers, had dashed out in their dinghies and climbed aboard.\u00a0 The catamaran was locked, and so the engines couldn\u2019t be started.\u00a0 The wind was too strong for the dinghies to be able to push or tow the cat back to the mooring field.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We arrived just in time to help push the cat into position against the dock and away from the rocks.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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. <\/span>\u00a0Bodacious<\/em>, <\/span>Celilo<\/em> and <\/span>Tusen Takk II<\/em> were never contacted and thanked by the cat owners for rescuing the boat.\u00a0 We later heard that when the cat left and went to Curacao they ran aground on their approach to Curacao Marina.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Oh my.\u00a0 You can take me now, Lord.\u00a0 Later that day, Barb took a picture from shore showing <\/span>Bodacious<\/em>, <\/span>Celilo<\/em> and <\/span>Tusen Takk II<\/em> at our moorings.\u00a0 And then on May 18, we all had a farewell dinner at <\/span>It Rains Fishes.<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0 Barb snapped pictures of <\/span>Celilo<\/em> leaving on May 19 and of <\/span>Bodacious<\/em> on May 23.<\/span><\/p>\n

Not a happy time to have good friends leave. \u00a0Not at all. \u00a0 But what do cruisers do when friends leave a site without them?\u00a0 They socialize with new people, of course.\u00a0 Rhian & Rob (<\/span>Beyzano<\/em>), who we met last year in the Windwards, showed up in the mooring field, as did Kari-Anne & Per-Arne (<\/span>Blue<\/em>), Norwegians we have known for a couple of years.\u00a0\u00a0 Other Norwegian boats also arrived, with some staying longer than others, including Snorre & Ingunn (<\/span>Spinnvill<\/em>) and Vigdis & Lasse (<\/span>Polaris<\/em>).\u00a0 And Americans Linda & Steve (<\/span>Moondancer<\/em>), and Australian singlehander Ian (<\/span>S\/Y ?).<\/em>\u00a0 And of course S\u00f6ren (Lady Elaine<\/em>), 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. \u00a0Most 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.\u00a0 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. \u00a0On another afternoon many of us gathered at the Zazu bar for a two-table rousing game of Mexican Train.\u00a0\u00a0 We were due to leave Bonaire the next day, but could not resist joining the group for a post-game sundowner aboard Beyzano.<\/span><\/p>\n

We had had our last dive a few days earlier.\u00a0 Sad, yes, but sorrow mitigated by Barb conducting a fish survey in which she identified over 100 different species.\u00a0 In one dive! \u00a0<\/span>Some details:\u00a0 Barb and I had recently upgraded our thermal protection, so getting cold on a long dive was no longer a problem.\u00a0 We dove at 5 pm, a time when the fish are particularly active and about.\u00a0 We dove on a site that is well known for its diversity of species and the diversity of its micro-environments.\u00a0 In all, the dive took over 100 minutes, but was safe because it ended in shallows.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 (I had not followed her to the deep sites, so I didn\u2019t use as much air.\u00a0 What, she dove without a buddy????\u00a0 Nope, she dove with S\u00f6ren,<\/span>\u00a0who had also recently cracked the magic 100 mark.)<\/span><\/p>\n

The results of a survey are entered into a database maintained by REEF (www.reef.org).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Barb conducts abundance surveys, which means she not only says what she saw, but how many: <\/span>S<\/strong>ingle=1, <\/span>F<\/strong>ew=2-10, <\/span>M<\/strong>any=11-100, and <\/span>A<\/strong>bundant=over 100.<\/span><\/p>\n

We got certified and trained for surveys by Kim West when we were in Bonaire in 2010.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 (We actually scored much nearer to 100%).\u00a0 The highest level is level 5, in which one must score at least 95% of 100 species taken from THE WHOLE DAMN BOOK (4<\/span>th<\/sup> ed. of Humann & DeLoach, <\/span>Reef Fish Identification, Caribbean<\/span>, which contains 683 different species!)\u00a0 Sound impossible?\u00a0 Nope.\u00a0 S\u00f6ren just achieved level 5. \u00a0I wanna be like\u00a0S\u00f6ren when I grow up.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\t\t