Photos of Bonaire

These photos were taken a billion years ago when Mikki thought that they were really great, but now we know they were underexposed, too far away from the critters, taken with a bad camera with lousy optics, and otherwise rather embarassing. They are offered here to show that one CAN improves with time, with effort, and patience. You can see much better pictures at CyberDive, our Travel Site

If you're looking instead for the story of the trip, I'm afraid you'll have to scroll. It's at the bottom of the page! If you'd rather just bail and go to the Cyberflight home page, use this link . Caution, some of these files are rather large.

Click on the thumbnails if you want to see the entire photo.

Basket coral type stuff
A Queen Angel scared to death
Spotted eel and his friends
Teeny tiny blue chromis
Some Cool Coral
Coral from the Hilma Hooker
A Jasonfish
A Quiet Scene..til I took the picture
Turtle Follies
More Cool Coral
Yet More Cool Coral
Even More Cool Coral
Guess What? It's Cool Coral
Even More Still
Fish trying to hide
Kinda Puffy Coral
The Evil Scottfish
Turtle Escapes
Egads! Cool Coral
Some Divers and No Coral
Cool Sea Fans
A French Angel Fish
Rock Beauty
A Toitle
Purple toilet paper tubes
Spanish Hogfish (oink)
Some Ugly Diver

Bonaire is fantastic. Beautiful weather, great accomodations, and friendly people. The week I sepnt there was a well needed vaction, and a wonderful (if not physically demanding) rest.

This is the short account of the fun that was had and the people met along the way on November 1998 dive trip. It was a dark and stormy night....no, it was a bright and windy day departing from DCA on an American MD 80 to Miami. Thankfully, Reece helped with the three rooms worth of luggage necessary to live for a week in the wilds of Bonaire. After the horror stories of ALM (All Luggage Missing), I made sure to put my regulator, a dive skin, change of clothes and other essentials in the carry on. I also heeded much web advice and watched carefully as the tags were placed on the luggage to make sure it was going to the same destination I was. All of this worked out well. I met Peter Cataldo, my dive buddy and travel partner at the gate, said bye bye to Reece and off we went for an on time departure with arrived with plenty of time to get through the maze of Miami International to find the departure gate for ALM. This was Wednesday, the only day that ALM flies direct from Miami to Bonaire. Still, the plane was not very full, and we had a bit of room to spread out. Soon after boarding, however, we were told that all the passengers had to move to the back of the aircraft for take off. I checked the seat card to make sure we hadn't boarded a Jetstream 31 or a Dash 8 or something. Nope, it was an MD 80. I asked the flight attendant what was up, and he said I could come talk to the Captain. I told him I wasn't supposed to get up because by now we were taxiing. He insisted, so we headed for the cockpit where we were stopped by a more clueful flight attendant. After the seat belt sign went off, I asked if I could talk to the Captain for a minute to ask about the curious weight and balance problem and was told to forget it. Most interesting. The landing was also rather interesting. At between 20 and 30 feet above the runway, a loud buzzing sound followed by application of full power occurred. After we mushed into the runway, no reversers seemed to be necessary. Hmmm. I wondered if one of my flight students was landing, then realized they flew better than that.

After a short wait through customs, and a mercifully short wait at the baggage carousel (all luggage was retrieved, none was missing. This was a happy day), we found the teeny tiny car rental place and got our cute little white 4 seat Toyota pickup with the quaint manual transmission. We got a little map, and some directions to the Sand Dollar, and promptly found that our certainty factor for where we were and where we were going was rather smaller than we would have liked. Eventually however (it's a small island) we found the place and checked in. It was a wonderful 2 bedroom condo on the first floor (so no baggage hauling up stairs was necessary :-)). It had a great patio, a nice kitchen, and best of all, air conditioning in the bedrooms. After a good night's sleep, we went off in search of the Sunset Beach Dive Center.(See the unofficial web page.) Asking at the Sand Dollar office got us the information that the Sunset Beach Hotel was out of business. Apparently they had gone bankrupt. They didn't think that the dive shop was still open. We, however, knew they were indeed alive and having a great time. How did we know? The Jasonfish told us so. We were supposed to meet said Jasonfish at the aforementioned establishment.

After making one false turn and finding ourselves at Captain Don's Habitat, we went back in the appropriate direction, past the abandoned hotel (that had one great beach, by the way) and found Mary at the open and thriving dive shop. After the check in and orientation (and buying our little blue marine park tag) we were given dive numbers, pegs to put our stuff on, and a quick "do not touch anything or we will do really bad things to you" talk. We later found that this especially included the parrots, since Fuego the mini macaw would take pieces off of your fingers. I never did make friends with him, but did make friends with the nice amazon parrot. Soon after Fuego "welcomed" us, we also found Jason, Scott, and Bob. Jason is my pal (at least I hope he's still my pal) from Sea Ventures in Fairfax, VA. Scott, I found later, is an evil Dive Con also from Sea Ventures, and Bob is a Nikonos toting diver from Denver. They were all great guys and a lot of fun. We got our stuff together, grabbed some tanks, and headed off for the first dive of the trip, the "Front Porch."

Bonaire has so many divers and so many dive sites that there had to be some means of labeling them. They decided to use painted yellow rocks with the dive site name written on them in black letters. The site directly off of the pier at Sunset Divers is called Front Porch. This was our introduction to diving in Bonaire.

And what an introduction it was! My previous dive trips had included the Millbrook Quarry, and Key Largo . This was completely and spectacularly different. For one thing, there was great visibility. For another, there were lots of colors, zillions of fishies, and no amazing barfing boats. This was absolutely positively fantastic. We saw morrays and spotted eels and seriously cool fishies. Bonaire was going to be fun.

Each morning after our first dive at Front Porch we took the dive boat out to some of the sites off Klein Bonaire. We saw South West Corner, Ebo's Special, South Bay, Annex, and our last day we went somewhere called Bon Bini something or other. All of the dive sites were absolutely amazing. We also had the luck of having an almost native show us the best dive sites along the South side of the island. We went to Windsock, Tori's Reef, and the Hilma Hooker in our trusty dive boat the HMS Evil Rental Truck. The turtle was spotted at Tori's Reef for turtle spotters who are interested.

Special thanks to Jason, Bob, Scott, Kelly (Jason's brother who kept Jason from killing us), Walt, Mary, and Anton. No special thanks goes to the large annoying person who thought it was a peachy idea to jump out of the boat at the end of his dive as divers were trying to surface. Hopefully he will read this and then figure out what those bubbles under him mean. He came very close to straddling Peter's first stage. That would have been rather...ahem...painful.

Unfortunately, we finally had to go home. After an interesting but very short day of shopping, using a public access terminal to send a few email messages (at about 1 guilder (1.78 or so US) per minute), bought some T shirts, and went back to sadly pack. The only good thing about leaving was that I wouldn't have any more mosquitoes at home to suck blood out of me. Nothing else was good about leaving. I was seriously wishing to spend another week diving, and would have if I didn't have Thanksgiving plans. (The Thanksgiving plans were scuttled by Exxon's delivery of contaminated fuel to airports all over the area, causing hundreds of pilots to have to give up their Thanksgivings since their planes were unflyable, so I actually COULD have stayed in Bonaire, damnit!)

After an uneventful flight, we arrived back home. I'm already planning the next trip to Bonaire. Once again I'll stay at the Sand Dollar and dive with Sunset Beach Dive Center.

CyberFlight is an equal opportunity employer. Even strange people like Mikki. They don't get paid anything, but you can change all that. Then Mikki can leave her job in the circus.

mon aeroglisseur est plein d'anguilles