I am writing this while sitting on our screened porch, watching the palm trees wave at the ocean. A pretty nice view! The wireless connection here is very good. I’m uploading a very large video and it’s really quick. Can’t complain one little bit about the connection here!
We did some shopping for groceries, and we’d been told to prepare for sticker shock. But, the prices were very good, much better than I ever figured it would be. For dinner we had varkensschnitzel – a pork cutlet already in a tasty bound breading, with carrots, red cabbage, and cookies for desert. The total we spent was under six dollars. That’s cheap compared to the eighty dollars we spent on dinner Sunday night in a restaurant!
We also spent some time in the ocean on Monday just in front of the Divi resort. It was pretty darn nice. The visibility was very good, and the coral is in very nice shape. There was lots to see, and lots of places to explore. Like Sunday, it was hard to focus on one thing, because you didn’t want to miss anything going on just over there – or over there!
The most fun we thing we saw was an octopus out and about. Usually they are hiding in a little hole, and all you see is an eye, or a tentacle. This guy was out and moving around the rocks and coral. I’ve included three shots of him, in three completely different colors. It’s all the same octopus, just different times of our interaction with him. He can color himself to match the surrounding rock and coral. Pretty cool.
I had just said to Pam that I hadn’t seen any “needlefish” or houndfish around here. They are a pretty common fish, staying within five or six inches of the surface. Well I had barely said it, when we saw this incredible grouping of them, all in one huge school of several hundred of them. This was easily the largest school of them we’ve ever seen!
Towards the end of our swim, we saw a pair of French Angels and they wanted to hang with us. It was pretty funny. Every way we turned there they were! Maybe they figured we’d feed them, but we have not seen anyone here in Bonaire feed the fish, a practice I think is wrong. Bonaire is really in the forefront of protecting the ocean, its inhabitants and the coral.
This little guy in this picture is called a blenny – in particular, a red-lipped blenny. Can you guess why?? This is a fish Pam really likes. They are not very big, about three inches tops. But they have really big eyelashes – no clue why a fish needs eyelashes!
I’m adding two movies of the octopus we encountered. Kinda fun stuff. Just a quick note about the movies – I upload them to YouTube in full High Definition and they can be viewed in full screen mode, too. But, sometimes YouTube doesn’t put the highest quality mode available to you, the end user. So at the bottom of the movie, on the right side, there is a little icon that looks like a gear, or a spiky wheel. Clicking that will allow you to change the mode to full HD – it’s definitely worth it!
This last movie is just a short look at a peacock flounder as he swims across the ocean bottom. I think the way he kinda just floats and moves looks like a magic carpet!
The internet is so impressive here, I uploaded one more little movie. This is of a group of white parrotfish. It’s not often you see them in such a long school; definitely you see them together, just not in a long school like this. Anyway – it’s a short movie.