| Curaçao Diving, June 2025 | |
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Play slide show — just for looking at the pictures. | |
| One of Sarah's former co-workers and family friends invited us to join her family and other friends diving in Curaçao. We'd not been there before but have had a lot of fun on Bonaire (the middle of the A, B, C islands — Aruba being the first) on our prior trips in 2018 and 2022. We really enjoyed catching up with Kelly's family and other friends every day; However, our diving plans were seprate, so we met up with them on the surface. |
| And we spent a fair amount of time below the surface. Sarah worked with a dive travel planner and arranged for a couple boat dives with Ocean Encounters and air and equipment rental from The Dive Bus. We started with Jake (in yellow, above) from Ocean Encounters at Tugboat. The boat ride was a little rough but it was a cool dive with many Moray eels (like the one below) among other fish around a reef that seems in good shape. After a bit of surface interval on the boat, and a short motor across the bay, we dove Director's Bay which has a great wall. And we saw a turtle there (below right). |
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| The next day, we thought we'd pick up gear from Ocean Encounters and visit their house reef. It was still a bit pushy and we didn't like the need to cross the short boat channel they use. |
| We also thought the underwater windows for the aquarium next door looked a little crazy. So we cut that dive short. |
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That gave us time to do some shopping and hanging out with Kelly and crew. The Avila Beach Resort Kelly found as our home base was great; central to lots of nice places to dine and right on the water. |
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That's the view from our room above on the right. The next day, we had arranged for our check out dive with The Dive Bus. Unfortunately, Robert was not feeling well. While he read his book, Sarah and I joined Gwen from the Dive Bus on their house reef, Pierbaai. Another fun dive with a couple eels (spotted and regular Moray) swimming around. And we saw some of the transplanted staghorn coral being restored. |
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| in the afternoon, Robert enjoyed the air conditioning and Sarah and I poked around old-town Willemstad, a short walk from the Avila. The story about the building colors is that the governor thought whitewash too bright in the tropic sun and banned white buildings. After our walk and a chance to cool off, we headed to dinner a few blocks from the Avila. |
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| Robert found us a great and unexpected spot to visit the next day: The Catherdral of Thorns. It's an outdoor art space built of ... thorns. Completely unique (as far as we know) and an interesting place to wander around. Beyond the Catherdral, there is a variety of art on the grounds and a small gallery in addition to artist's studios. |
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| From there we drove up to Westpunt and the blowholes at Shete Boka National Park. The crashing waves are very impressive; the cave you can visit as the waves crash in is an exciting place — the park seems pretty confident about how high the waves will come in. |
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| After a very nice lunch (with the entertainment of the occasional cliff jumping visitor), a snorkle around the Avila's lagoon was a great way to cool off. Note the lagoon's spotted Moray below and trumpetfish further down. |
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| The next day, we were back with Ocean Encounters on their boat. And with Robert feeling better, we headed to Saba / Tugboat Saba. We saw another turtle (below left), a sting ray in the sand and scorpionfish among others. |
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In the big version of the image above, you can just make out a very well camoflaged scorpion fish. It really does look like another rock on top of the rock in the middle of the picture. And the tugboat Saba is on the right. After a break on the boat and quick motor around, we visited The Pier which turned out to be one of the most fun spots to dive. Swimming around the pier we saw a puffer and more scorpionfish. |
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| Robert (with some help from Sarah) connected with the coral reef restoration folks in Curaçao and arranged to do a little coral tree maintenance after we got back from the boat dives. The reef restoration work is done on the Ocean Encounters house reef (to the right — our first, short dive there, we went left), Stella Maris. They were short divers so Anna asked if David would join them. Of course, he was happy to. |
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That's Anna and Robert enjoying "tea" after coral tree cleaning. The next day we were back at The Dive Bus. Rather than just renting gear and going on our own, they arranged for Rudi (a dive master) to take us back to Director's Bay (where we had our first dives on Curaçao); a wall we really liked. We preferred the bus to the boat — the trip started a bit later so we could sleep in, and it was just the four of us. We went left first, came back after one tank for snacks and surface interval (not on a rocking boat) and then went right for our second tank. |
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That's Rudi on the right showing us another scorpionfish; you really have to look closely below to see it. Rudi's picture comes later (and has David thinking about replacing our scuba camera). One oddity we did not get pictures of: a naked diver. It turns out some folks believe your 100th dive should be done naked. We don't hold that belief :) |
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We went back to Dive Bus and Rudi for our last day of diving on Curaçao. He took us to Kokomo for our last dives. Again, we went left for the first tank and right after a snack for the second tank. We also had one more diver on this trip, Enrico from Brazil. We saw trunkfish (below), sailor's eyeballs (below left, on the coral) — a large single cell organism, lionfish, another scoprionfish (look closely below the sailor's eyeballs). |
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That's a peacock flounder above (not as well camoflaged as the scoprionfish, but still blends in pretty well). And above the trumpetfish on the left is a pair of banded butterflyfish. The next set of pictures, starting with Robert and David on the right, are from Rudi and his camera. |
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When Sarah first saw the photo above on a big screen, she realized how cool it was. That David taking a picture (an inferior picture) of the scorpionfish in the foreground. Props to Rudi. A great, fun trip. We are very lucky to have such good friends inviting us on such fun trips! |
Vacation notes:
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