The first week of December was uneventful, with daily dives and visiting with neighbors. Then, on December 6th, our dinghy outboard wouldn’t start. A little probing showed there was no spark. I had power to the capacitative discharge ignition (CDI) module but none out of the coil. The motor being only a few months old, I called the Bonaire Budget Marine store. They asked me to get the dinghy to a dock and would have their mechanic probe it with his meter. I rowed it into the marina. The mechanic checked all of the leads and determined that the CDI module had failed. He said Budget would supply a warranty replacement, which would be shipped from St. Martin as soon as possible. I asked a neighbor tow me back out to the mooring field and to Wight Skye.
We were stranded on our own boat. Well, not quite. Cruisers are a friendly and helpful fraternity. Neighbors offered us rides to shore if we needed to go. On the 13th, a week after the breakdown, our replacement CDI module still hadn’t arrived. I got paranoid and ordered one over the internet from a Maryland Tohatsu dealer with instructions to ship overnight to our daughter’s address She’ll be flying down to Bonaire on the 18th and could put it in her luggage. By the 15th, Jack and Fred, S/V Denali Rose, offered us the use of an old Evenrude 4 horsepower outboard. We jumped at the opportunity to get off the boat, walk on dry land, buy some groceries, and make other preparations for our daughter’s visit.
Our daughter, Michelle, and her friend Beverly, arrived on schedule, December 18th. In their luggage was the new CDI module, and I had my outboard running in a few minutes. Our warranty replacement didn’t arrive until the 21st. Glad I got one from a US dealer.
Over the two weeks of the girls’ visit, we showed them much of the island with our rental car. Unlike the most of the rest of the Lesser Antilles, most of Bonaire is composed of uplifted reef. Only in the northern end did basaltic material erupt to the surface. The core of the island is strongly folded and faulted rocks of volcanic origin, along with silica-rich sediments and turbidites. This intrusion and faulting activity occurred during the Lower Cretaceous, about 120 million years ago. Above these rocks are fossil reefs, uplifted at the same time, and visible today everywhere on the island as white, sandy soil, low limestone cliffs and the iron shore along the windward side. About a quarter mile west of the leeward shore is another island, uninhabited, and barely above sea level. It is named “Klein Bonaire” and comprises 2.3 square miles.
The island is low and flat everywhere except the northern end. Much of the southern part is less that six feet above sea level. The highest basaltic peak in the northern end is 781 feet. Bonaire is less than 24 miles long and is 6.8 miles at its widest part. Its area is about 111 square miles, equivalent to a square 10 ½ miles to a side.
The climate is arid, averaging 19.31 inches per year, falling mostly during the November and December wet season, with a minor second wet period in July. The extremely porous fossil reef and sandy soil allows rainfall to soak away rapidly leaving less than 10 percent of the island with soil suitable for crops and gardens.
By the time the girls arrived, I had selected a particular snorkeling circuit of about a half mile, starting from Wight Skye, heading north along the reef edge to the rock jetty of the marina inlet, loop around and head back toward Wight Skye over the shallow sand flats of the foreshore. It’s hard not to resort to superlatives in explaining just how rich in numbers and variety of fish this particular place is. It’s a fish magnet. Probably, the North Atlantic Equatorial Current that splits and sweeps westerly around Bonaire meets here, concentrating plankton. Also, something about the marina rock jetty is very attractive. Perhaps it’s the protection of the hollows among the great stones. Great schools of Creole Wrasse flow here in the late afternoon to mate. Clouds of Brown and Blue Chromis are always here gulping up plankton. The big predators come in here, probably to snack on Chromis and the small Wrasse. With a scum of algae on the rocks, there are always large numbers of Parrotfish and Blue Tang grazing. Mix in Jacks, Chub, Tarpon, Morays, Schoolmasters, Grunt, and you’ve got most species found scattered on the reefs all concentrated right before you. The sand flats have the excavators: Goatfish, Mojarra, Bonefish, Trunkfish, working constantly to dig, blow holes, pump sand and strain out a meal. The flats have numerous isolated brain and boulder corals, several of which are cleaning stations. Here the bigger fish arrive and ask for a cleaning by assuming a head-up position. Quickly, the cleaners come out and commence picking parasites and cleaning wounds. The cleaners are either gobies or young French Angelfish. There are numbers of Sharptail Eel, poking into holes and cracks, always attended by a Bar Jack hoping the eel will flush out a meal for both of them. The Yellowtail Snapper cruise around eating many things, but seem especially fond of the gametes floating in the water column right after a male and female of most any species mate, racing into the cloud of milt and eggs taking great gulps.
The girls stayed with us until the 2nd of January.
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