Hilma Hooker and Salt Pier

We started at Hilma Hooker since it was the deepest dive on our 2 dive list yesterday. It was pretty dang cool, and we went to 95’ deep.

It’s a cool story too. Apparently the ship was smuggling weed and got confiscated. While in the “pound” it started to leak a bit so the Bonaire government got with local scuba folks and found a good place to sink it so that there would be a wreck dive on the reef and within reach of local divers.

For that one you surface swim out to the marker buoy on one end, then dive down to the wreck and swim along it, surfacing at the buoy on the other end or exploring the reef on the way back. Our navigation is getting a little bit better. Also the buoyancy is better and air use :D It’s nice to get better at this.

On our surface break was spent driving south and then back, we looked at the kite surfing school, the slave huts and salt works. Then we headed back to the Salt Pier. That’s where Cargill refines salt to ship world wide. It’s a L O N G pier that houses a conveyor belt to load the ships and you can only dive there when there is no ship loading. The ship left the day before so we were all set. There happens to be a LOT of fish here, the scuba people call that, fauna, I’ve no idea why they don’t just call them fish :D. We saw turtles again, maybe some sharks and lots of interesting fish behavior including a whole school of fish doing the barber pole move around one of the pier pilings.

We’re still having lots of fun, and the food is good too. :D Today we’ll do our last two dives and explore the island a bit while our gear dries out so we don’t peg the luggage scale meter on the way back.