08/12/2009, Curacao
We left Bonaire at 6:00am and arrived at Curacao at 1:00pm same day. For some reason there or no cruiser's guide books for Curacao or Aruba. The paper charts as well as the chart plotter were off up to 3 miles in some areas. This presented a real problem when approaching land or entrance to anchorages etc. We were told that the entrance to Spanish Waters was hard find and not recognizable until right on top of it. That's ok if you know how to first get right on top of it. We proceeded very slowly as we thought we were approaching the general area, but still couldn't see the entrance. We finally saw a tug approaching from the opposite direction we were going along the coastline. We noticed he appeared to be turning in toward land so we watched carefully as we saw him swallowed up by an unseen opening in the rocks. We quickly followed in his direction and sure enough about 150 ft from shore you start to recognize an opening. The entrance inside was narrow but marked quite well to avoid running aground. So we did the usual one eye on the depth gauge and one on the markers and got the anchorage. We met up with Barbara and Michael from s/v Astarte and met Mike and Linda from s/v Casa Del Mar. The next morning we took the bus to town of Williamsted, about a 30 minute bus ride to do our check-in. It is a real nice town with a very Dutch architecture. You felt as if you were in Holland.
We anchored near the channel where the wind surfers surf and the small sailboats have their races. We were asked politely to anchor further away, but there wasn't any room for our 7ft draft. So we had a close up look at the races and wind surfers. I was able to get my laptop fixed (wouldn't turn on, or if it did, my wireless internet wouldn't work), I was told in Grenada that is was the mother board. Wrong, it was a small ribbon cable connecting the power-on switch to the mother board that was bad. The fan for the compressor for the refrigeration stop working. I hook up a temporary fix to get us to Cartagena. We also ran into Bob from s/v Pauwke, but his wife Mieke was home for a visit in Belgium.
We stayed for almost 3 weeks, partly waiting for a weather window.
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07/22/2009, Bonaire
This is a usual day doing provisioning, It is hot and you walk everywhere and carry everything.
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07/21/2009, Bonaire
Just looking to see which way to the bar
We left Grenada at 8:00am on Sat. 7/18 and arrived at Bonaire at 10:15am on Tues 7/21. This was a 3 nighter and it was great sailing. We finally got to really use whisker pole that we installed last year in Panama. It was really nice to sail downwind without the constant hassle of adjusting the jib. We just set it out there and tuned it occasionally. We sailed like this most of the 3 days. We chose not to stop at any of the Venezuelan islands and just go straight across. We ran into a few squalls but we just reefed the jib with the whisker pole still out, it was really enjoyable
There only mooring balls in Bonaire so as to protect the coral. There is no anchoring allowed anywhere around the island. The water is the clearest and cleanest we have seen. Bonaire is very eco- conscious. The entire island is very clean. We met Barbara and Michael s/v Astarte, we met them in Prickly Bay. We stayed here for 3 weeks. There are 3 islands referred to as the ABC's (Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao) they are off the coast of Venezuela and are Netherlands (Dutch) islands. In Bonaire it is all protected by outer reefs that make it nice and calm but allow nice breezes (hence the name Bonaire). We stayed here 3 weeks and just relaxed and enjoyed the beautiful weather. We did provisioning here because we were told that Curacao and Aruba was much more expensive or more difficult to get. We rented a motor scooter and toured the island. The roads out along the shore were a little precarious (as in very narrow when a car passed) but we saw a lot of the island.
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