From Hidden Beach, the four of us went up the coast to Pink Beach. (At the time we didn’t notice that it was two “beach” dives in a day.) Actually, first we went much further north, for a lunch stop at the Stoked food truck. As usual, we were served tasty but messy food, with the seating area closed due to COVID and a paucity of other shade available. So we huddled under a tree and ate off of the hood of the rust bucket.
Pink Beach is one of the few place on Bonaire that boasts palm trees on the beach, leave-behinds from an abandoned resort. Our book also warns that there’s sometimes current, but as with most dives we’ve done here, we got in and found the water essentially motionless. We got in, descended, and found some beautiful sponge and tube vases.
The gently sloped wall sported a mix of soft and hard corals, leading more towards the latter than the day’s first dive, but still lacking the big pillars of some of the dives a little further north.
And, of course, there were lots of fish, mostly the usual suspects. Like these butterfly fish in the left – and note the honeycomb cowfish also hiding bottom-right in the same shot, trying to be camouflaged. Top right, a blue-striped grunt, also hiding, and bottom right, a queen angelfish.
It was a good day for spotted trunkfish.
It was an even better day for filefish; here are two scrawled and two slender, both pairs showing off the range of colors they can display. (It’s not just bad editing.)
Andrew’s goal to photograph small and skittish creatures continues, with this tiny cleaning goby showing up in focus, and the purple-head wrasse on the right not quite making it out of the frame before he hit the button.
From the not-fish depatment department, here’s a pair of marine mammals, a really neat pattern on a “star encrusting sponge”, and the double spiral feeding head of a christmas tree worm.
And finally, two scenes from the back reef: several different kinds of coral, and a sand tilefish hovering above its burrow.
