Bachelor’s Beach is south of the airport, right off the main road. The beachs are nicely marked with yellow painted rocks, and each entry to the ocean has a unique name. Every beach we’ve been to, has about twenty divers. The diving is phenomenal here, with every dive easily gotten to by simply entering the ocean – rather than needing a boat, like a lot of dive sites.
Bachelor Beach has a unique entry – a set of stairs to nowhere! The divers on the cliff above Pam are in the vehicle next to ours – the little white Jimny (no that’s not a misspelling – it really is called a JimNy.)
The coral was lush and magnificent, again, like all of Bonaire. The variety of fish was good, with tons to see. The most remarkable thing we saw was a “cloud” of margates. Now, we’ve seen margates before, one or possibly two together. But this was a mass of margates, literally hundreds of them moving over the reef. We saw this mass of fish, and I looked at Pam and said, “Are those margates??” Very cool sight.
This movie was taken by Pam, and the margates were down at about forty feet or so, so that’s why it seems so dark. When the margates “scatter” it’s because I’ve dived down to get a better close up shot. (Not very successfully mind you!) I’ve put another movie Pam took just below it of the margate’s usual behaviour – hiding in his little cave, all by himself, ultra-shy and wary of divers.
There were lots of barracuda of course. Each time in, we’ve seen four or five of them. One time, we saw one barracuda actually chase another barracuda off – and man, they can move big time! Usually they move very slowly, not disturbing the water – but when they want to go, wow…
Pam took a movie shown here of a bonefish. They are very shy fish, and very tough to get in the picture. They are very silvery, and shiny, and play in the very shallow waters, where the sun gleaming on their skin makes it tough to see them in the viewfinder of the camera.
We have a whole ton of shots of half the fish. OR they are out of focus because the camera simply can’t differentiate them from the brilliant white sand. It takes a second for the camera to focus on one, but it’s pretty darn cool.
The scrawled filefish is a big guy, about two feet or so, and we saw one as soon as we got in, and later on under a wharf. They are really cool in the ocean, changing color from white, to green, to brown to blue. They swim very lazily, and let divers get quite close to them before moving off.
This is a sunset picture right outside our room. That little dock there with the chairs on it is where we jump in the ocean for our late afternoon swim around the ocean. Pam’s been known to lie in the sun waiting for me to get back. 🙂
Have I mentioned how phenomenal the internet connection is here? WOW – I’m totally impressed. For an island that only has a population of fourteen thousand, I never dreamed they’d have this kind of highspeed connection. It’s even faster than my at home cable internet, and I’ve never lost connection even once. One of the reasons we’ve been able to put more movies in the posts is that the connection is so quick and reliable. Really great stuff.
