We got a bit of a late start on the day, but, decided to make our first dive of the day at Hidden Beach. Hidden Beach is an unmarked dive site. The coast consists of coral stones, where you will find no beach, hence the name of this dive site.

Among other seacritters, we saw an octopus hiding in a coral that wasn’t interested in having it’s photo taken. Our dive buddy, Jonathan, was crafty enough to grab a really great shot of the octopus, though! Check this out:

After Hidden Beach, we decided to make a quick stop to grab a quick geocache at Sorobon Beach. It was a quick cache-and-dash, but, it was cool to start the adventure of geocaching outside of the US mainland.

We headed back to the resort for some lunch and to get a few more dives in. Unfortunately, Josh’s dive computer needed a new O ring, so he had to sit the next dive out while he ran up the street to Bruce Bowker’s Carib Inn to get it fixed. Jonathan and I decided to go ahead and do the dive, and, I am VERY happy to report that it was my first dive ever without Josh. Not to brag, but, it went REALLY well with no issues. We dove the 18th Palm dive site and got to see scorpionfish and a pair of playful angelfish that were obsessed with the bag of collected underwater trash that Jon was carrying. We saw a pretty decent spotted moray eel!

After Josh got back from getting his computer fixed, we did another dive at 18th palm and reached a depth of over 90 feet. It never ceases to surprise me how bright it is, even at 90 feet under water, in Bonaire. Visibility was pretty great and we stalked a peacock flounder for quite some time. Check out this great photo that Jonathan snapped:

I decided to buck up and go on my first Bonaire night dive. Even though I got unreasonably cold (and I’m not sure why), we got to see a bunch of tarpon, a ton of eels and a banded coral shrimp that resembled a candy-cane. Since I got so cold, I used significantly more air than I had been, which was a bit disappointing, but, I’m happy that I did it (and can start to track how getting cold impacts my air consumption). It was pretty difficult for me to get my bearings in the dark with so many fish swimming around, so, it was back to hand holding with Josh for the night dive. There are worse problems to have, but, I’m going to continue to challenge myself to keep conquering the difficulties. I’ll get there!

The guys had been doing 4 dives a day for the past few days, but, today was the I did 4 dives today and I was really happy with how surprisingly good I felt at the end of the day. Sleep definitely came easy this evening.