Our third day of boat diving was the last of our early morning dive days. We were up at 6:30 AM again, I had breakfast with Dad in the restaurant and were down on the dock for 7:45 AM. Our boat today was the Every Buddy, and Elizabeth was our dive guide again. We headed out to Klein Bonaire for a third time. We visited two new dive sites, the first was named Forest, and the second was named Ebo’s Special.
Our first dive, at Forest, was very picturesque. The dive site got its name from the large forest of black coral which used to grow there, however due to its value in jewellery the black coral has all been harvested and all that remains is the name. The dive site was still beautiful. The dive profile was quite similar to our previous dives; we swam along the reef at about 20m for 30 minutes, then ascended to be on top of the reef at roughly 10m after turning the dive. I saw a pair of tarpon below us at about 30m depth, along with a few eels and many small fish. I also saw a sea urchin, and a porcupinefish swam right past me. We spent the full 60 minutes at this dive before we got out of the water.
The second dive took place at the dive site named Ebo’s Special, however as we were starting the dive I saw air bubbles coming from my camera case so I quickly handed it back to the captain and did this dive without a camera. It was a nice dive - at the end we swam through a shallow channel between the coast of Klein Bonaire and a ridge of finger coral which was a neat experience. In this channel I saw a large lionfish, which I made sure to give wide berth. I saw another urchin, and more porcupinefish, however there was definitely less interesting wildlife to see on this dive as compared to others we had done.
We returned shortly after noon, and went through the usual routine of rinsing our gear and getting it packed back into the locker before heading back to our room and getting cleaned up. We joined Mom in her room for lunch shortly after 1 PM. After lunch we went back down to the dive shop and got our gear out to do a shore dive on the house reef. I had reset my camera case and tested it after lunch, and thankfully it worked well for the dive. We swam to the ‘right’ from the dock, and went for a full 30 minutes before turning the dive. We passed by the wreck of the Machaca, and then swam back on the top of the reef past the coral nursery. We ended the dive shortly before 60 minutes with lots of air remaining. We saw an octopus, a moray eel, and a couple of spotted snake eels in the shallow water. The octopus was particularly interesting as we got to see it swim - in Mallorca the octopi we saw were all stationary, so seeing it swim was a new experience!
After returning from the shore dive we got cleaned up then went for a drive north on the Queen’s Highway, leaving around 4:30 PM. The road was super narrow but gave us a great view of the ocean. It started as a narrow two-way road, but just after the Weber’s Joy dive site the road turned into a one-way road going north. We stopped at a couple of points for photos before turning onto the Kaminda Karpata towards Rincón, the other town on the island, at the Karpata dive site.
As we entered Rincón we discovered that the main road was closed, and since Google Maps wasn’t aware of the closure it wasn’t attempting to route us around the closed road. We asked some locals sitting near the road how to get around the road closure so we could continue on to Kralendijk, and one of them graciously explained the roads we would need to take to get around the closed section of road. Unfortunately it ended up being very complicated - there were probably 20 turns on roads with long names, and by the end of the explanation we had all lost track of what we needed to do. I started driving in the direction they pointed us in, which took us off the paved road and onto a dirt side road. Driving slowly, we used Google Maps to trace out a route which took us as far north in Rincón as we could be to avoid running into the closed section of the road. Some of the roads weren’t named, and occasionally we took what seemed to be a wrong turn, but after about 15 minutes of trial and error we found our way back to the main road on the other side of town, past the closure sign! This let us continue on our trip back to Kralendijk. The last bit of excitement we had as we were leaving Rincón was seeing goats on the side of the road - at one point shortly outside of town a few goats darted across the road and we had to decelerate quickly to avoid hitting them.
We made it to our 6:30 PM dinner reservation with minutes to spare at El Bigote, a Mexican restaurant in Kralendijk. The food was delicious - I had the enchiladas and really enjoyed my meal. I looked it up after and discovered that the road was closed for a Carnival parade. We didn’t have room for dessert, and returned to the hotel around 7:45 PM. We did our dive logs and then I was in bed by 9:15 PM.