We have expressed it before and many times, we love Bonaire. The people of Bonaire are so friendly everywhere you go they greet you and are ready to start a conversation. Although small and dry the island has a natural beauty and wealth that not too many places can match. The underwater world with its coral and beautiful sea creatures is unsurpassed. The diversity of the landscape is surprising.

The southern half is dominated by salt flats, wetlands and mangroves. Most of the land area is used for solar evaporation of sea water to obtain salt. The large salt “dunes” you can see from a distance and the pink colored salt pans are striking. Some of the old slave houses on the west coast along the road to the south point of the island are restored. Along this road after it turns to the east and back north you get a good view of the pink flamingoes. The east coast line is rugged with steep cliffs and a pounding sea against the rocks. Not a place to be with a boat with problems. This rugged coast line is interrupted with a beautiful bay called “Lac Bay” protected by a reef. Lac Bay is interesting for bird watching with mangroves and wet areas that are home to many permanent and migrating births. The mangroves not only protect the coast line in storms it is also the breeding place for fish. Dorothy and I took a kayak and snorkeling tour through the mangroves and that was a beautiful experience. Paddling through the channels under the low hanging mangrove trees with no sound except the sound of the paddles in the water is a very special experience. On the south side of “Lac Bay” is the world famous area for wind surfing with a few beach bars that make you feel young and wild again. Drink beer and listen to the music from Jimmy Buffet and the Eagles.

The northern part of the island is a Wild West desert landscape especially the north/east part. The north/east part along the coast with its limestone cliffs and caves remind me so much of the Texas Hill Country where we lived for 25 years and in this area you find the small green and yellow parrots. Goto Lake a relative large shallow lake that again is home to a large flock of flamingoes after most of them left the area after the large petrochemical fire in the oil storage facility next door. Slagbaai Park is a 140 acres nature sanctuary located in the Northwest part of the island. Parrots, flamingoes, parakeets, iguanas and many other species of birds and reptiles can be found in this reserve. The beaches inside the park are an important nesting ground for all four species of sea turtles found in the Caribbean.

One of the most beautiful beaches of Bonaire lies about 2700 ft. off the west coast of Bonaire on a the little uninhabited island called “Klein Bonaire – Little Bonaire”. After all the goats that were destroying the islands vegetation were removed the island is recovering and a tree planting program is helping a lot. Several water taxies ferry people from and to the island which is surrounded by clear turquoise water. The dive locations around this island are my most favorite dive locations.

The most favorite dive location for Ned & Anna DeLoach who are beloved naturalists, underwater photographers and videographers is “Eighteen Palms”. Ned & Anna DeLoach are known far and wide for their New World Publications, that along with author and photographer Paul Humann has produced the Reef Set marine-life field guides, including Reef Fish Identification, Reef Creature Identification and Reef Coral Identification — Florida, Caribbean and Bahamas. Over the past two decades Ned DeLoach and Humann have co-authored 10 field guides, and co-founded the Reef Environmental Education Foundation (REEF). Over the years Ned and Anna have written a series of columns about marine life for dive-related magazines in the United States and Asia, currently including the monthly "Critter Hunt" for Scuba Diving and "Species" for Sport Diver. It was great to have this couple join most of our afternoon dives. They claim that “Eighteen Palms” is the most diverse coral and reef fish location in Bonaire. I dove 3 times with them in the group in this location and it was incredible.

Although I am still working on improving my diving skills, I wanted to have a digital underwater camera. But of course not one of these expensive ones especially made for diving. At the advice of my grandson Jack I purchased a “GoPro Hero” with all kinds of attachments to clip it onto anything and a head strap. I made some nice videos using the camera with a strap to my wrist. One day I used the head strap to make a continuous video. Half way during the dive I realized that my camera was gone and I was very disappointed that I lost this nice camera so soon after I purchased it. When I came back on board of the dive boat and I told the other divers about it, the captain came to me with my camera and said that he saw it drifting in the water due to the nice orange floater attached to the headset. Probably the floater lifted it from my head, allowing the captain to find it again. The pictures I took with the camera are not too great, but the videos start to look good.

So that is what we did in Bonaire in the close to 3 weeks we spent on this island. I dove while Dorothy was snorkeling. We crossed the island on our rented scooter including our shopping tours to the grocery store with all the nice and tasty Dutch food items like “Raw Herring with onions”. We purchased more of these special food items until Dorothy complained that the refrigerator was filled to the rim. In other words I did not buy what we needed, but what I liked. That is of course de credo of being retired; you do what you like not necessarily what you have to do. We kayaked like I described above, met our friends and spent time in our famous beach bar “Karel’s”. We also checked out available homes for sale and/or long term lease. We love Bonaire and we can envision that after our sailing days are over we might spend more time on this great island.

But we have a plan to sail to Colombia and Panama and that means we have to move on. So on Sunday September 20 we left early in the morning to Curacao. After a sail I always check very carefully if there are problems with any of the equipment on board including the rigging and the sails. Unfortunately I did not notice the problem with the longest batten of our main sail. Probably due to the heavy rolling during the trip from Grenada to Bonaire the sail was flogging a lot causing the batten to come out of its pocket making a hole in pocket and the batten stick out so we could not use the full sail. Therefore we had to make the crossing to Curacao with a very big reef in the sail. Fortunately the wind was good so with this reef we had a very comfortable sail. The anchoring in Spanish Water was a little difficult due to the fact that only limited space was available and with the strong wind it took some time to get the anchor to hold.

We are intending to stay in Curacao for about 2 weeks and we will report about this in our next blog.