I am notorious for taking random trips to places like San Carlos, Mexico, Grand Cayman and Bonaire. These are the benefits of making good money and having absolutely no responsibilities. What can I say. It’s all fun and games till the money runs out, believe me. I manage to pay for these trips with extra earned money from contract work or what are called “Adventure Bucks” earned from hosting events with my former singles club in Phoenix, a club that boasts of adventure and was founded in the year 2000. Recent changes have occurred within the club and yours truly, The ScubaJedi, was unceremoniously voted off the island by the current manager, who is a complete tool. Hereinafter referred to as The Tool. The Tool told me that he wanted longer term members out of the club, so he was terminating memberships of those long term loyal members as they were dragging the club down with their negativity regarding the club. Makes sense, huh? People rejoining the club and paying the high membership fees because they’re not having any fun and they hate it. Turned out it was me and one other woman singled out and booted out compliments of The Tool. He’s basically a liar and a bad person. Those are outstanding traits for the head of a social club, right? Oh well, maybe he’ll come down with amoebic dysentery or something really appropriate like that . Moving right along….

Anyway we had a trip to Bonaire for, as you may have guessed, SCUBA. We were going in conjunction with a sister singles group, Tucson Fun and Adventures. There were 8 of us from the Phoenix going and several (lost count) from Tucson. Three of us from Phoenix were fairly experienced divers and three were beginners. Two of them were first time divers save their certification trips. One guy, Charles, who will be mentioned many times in this blog entry, got his scuba certification just for this trip. He signed up for it not knowing it was a scuba trip. When he found out it was primarily for divers, he said, “Well, I guess I’ll go get some scuba lessons.” I thought he was an exceptional sport about it, and he turned out to be a very good sport about a lot of things.

The plane arrived at 5am on Sunday morning. Too early to do anything except sit and whine about how muggy it was and slap various insects away from our bodies. I think most people lost about a quart of blood on this trip, and Charles even more than that. Eventually we checked in and anxiously awaited the breakfast cafe to open for some much anticipated coffee. The cafe at Buddy Dive is like everything else in Bonaire pretty much, open air with a nice view of the Leeward side of the island and Klein Bonaire. Betty, Sally, Lori and I decided to have some food and wait until we could get our keys to the room (apartment) we were to share with the two guys from our group, Charles and Kirk. It was a three bedroom condo, one small dungeon-like bedroom downstairs and two palatial grand en suite bedrooms upstairs. I foolishly envisioned the boys taking the downstairs room leaving us princesses to our girls privacy upstairs, ah, but that was not to be. Curse my metal body, I just wasn’t fast enough. I left the cafe to go see if the room was ready and get a key. Just as I was making my way back to the office, Kirk and Charles were headed to the condo, keys in hand. They rushed in and claimed the master suite with the private bathroom and balcony for themselves. I was pissed. In retrospect, I should have camped at the desk, snagged the key first and bolted like Flash Gordon to the condo and laid claim to one of the good rooms. So I, being shy and conservative as many will tell you, did not want to be with the boys upstairs so I threw myself on the sword and took the dungeon. Whomever wanted to share with me could, and as fate would have it, it was Lori, who considered herself screwed (and not in that fun spanky way) to be stuck downstairs as well.

I tried not to let it damage my calm, but I was already fit to be tied in having to share with strange (and I mean strange) men in the first place. The Tucson organizer of the trip was fairly presumptuous in thinking we’d be cool about sharing co-ed, I thought. I can’t speak for the others but I was not happy about it at all. But, I tried my hardest not to let it harsh my mellow. After all, I was in a world class diving destination. But, it did spoil my mood. I wanted it to be perfect with all the trouble I’ve been going through with work lately. But that’s another blog.
We got settled in and then went to get signed in at the dive shop and obtain our diving permits. The entire island of Bonaire is a marine park and they require diving permits. It costs $25 and they give you a little plastic disc to attach to your diving gear so they know they got your $25. There really aren’t any scuba police down there in the depths watching and writing tickets.
We had to attend an orientation regarding the care and awareness of the marine park, then we got a tour of the facilities and were sent on our way to do whatever we wanted, which in our case, was diving.

We checked our weights and went for a dive, and I ended up going to 114 feet to the bottom of the trench off the reef. It’s easy enough to do as wall type diving lends itself to just going deeper and deeper. I gaged 114ft and decided that was deep enough for the moment and headed back up. It’s pretty easy diving in Bonaire, the entire island is a protected reef and there is a lot of shore diving. When you come up the wall and get to the top of the reef you’re pretty much at your safety stop and can linger there for 3 minutes and look at the octopus. We found an octo living in a little bit of coral near the Buddy pier. When I first saw it it was surrounded by all these divers and I thought for sure they were going to get inked. At least I was hoping tosee a bunch of curious divers in a lively moment of confusion in a cloud of octopus ink. That would have been picture worthy.

And so the trip went. We dove, drank, ate, bitched, laughed, slept a little. Charles, was itching to go somewhere else besides Bonaire. He wanted to go to Venezuela really bad. He wanted to charter an airplane to take him and anyone else who wanted to to South America. Fortunately, he spoke to the dive shop manager, Augusto, who was from Venezuela and wouldn’t even go back there himself. He told Charles that he would most probably be dead before he left the airport. That changed his mind and so he began concentrating on Curacao or Aruba. He wanted to hit all the ABC islands.

Charles was the one who had to get the diving certificate before he came on the trip. He turned out to be a really good diver, and I hope he continues to dive.

I got back on deck, Kirk and Charles were already there, and then the others were making it back. Lala came back on deck and gave everyone a lecture about the virtues of looking at your gauges once in a while when diving, it helps. I look at my gauges constantly. Or rather, my diving computer, as it tells me everything. Such a gossip.

We had two days of two tank boat dives and two days of one tank boat dives. The shore diving was spectacular and one day Lori, Betty, Sally and I decided to hop in the van and take a ride down the coast and do some shore diving. We decided on a site, The Hilma Hooker, which is a 300′ vessel scuttled in 1984. We dove and swam to the reef which dropped off to a sandy area and another reef across a deep channel of sand. I didn’t see any ship anywhere. But I did get to see a nice eagle ray glide past in the channel. So we paddled around for a while till the air ran out and came back to shore. Coming out of the surf, Lori remarked, “Wow, that was a great wreck”. When I went back to the shop and told Lala we couldn’t find the Hilma Hooker he thought I was retarded.
We went back another day and snorkeled out to the buoys and descended the lines to the wreck, so we ended up finding it after all.
The last day we went shore diving, Charles had rented a motorcycle and was tooling about the island. He came upon us at a dive site to stop and say hi and that he was having a great time. Later that day, he was in the hospital getting his face stitched up. Wrecked the motorcycle, cut himself up pretty bad and broke his foot. Only the day before he had a close call with a scorpion fish in a mangrove that took a shine to him. He had gone on a kayak snorkel outing and met with some mischief that day as well. Scorpion fish, in case you’re wondering, are poisonous.
Earlier in the week, Betty and Lori declared that they saw a shark. No one believed them as seeing a shark in Bonaire is about as likely as seeing a polar bear wandering the Superstition Mountains east of Phoenix. but they stuck to their story. Everyone else was pretty convinced that they say a tarpon, which is a large fish.
On our last dive together, Lori and I were cruising down the reef at Buddy Dive and there was a huge tarpon just hanging there. I looked at Lori and made the shark gesture, she looked at me and made the f*** you gesture. I laughed so hard I flooded my mask.

Later on we took a sunset sailboat cruise, which was really nice.

We took a day long surface interval before flying out and did some touring of the island. We pretty much stuck to the South Farthing as we were lost in the area the first day we tried to find the Hilma Hooker. There is a lot of garbage washed up on the beach around there and it’s kind of a shame that no one picks it up. There was an amazing amount of flip flops.

So that was Bonaire.

The ScubaJedi