Playa Lechi

Today was a day of extremes and amazement. We woke up early (as always) and traveled across the channel to the uninhabited island of Klien "little" Bonaire. This boat dive satisfies our Boat diving section for our advanced scuba certification. We also did our underwater coral disease and algae ID quiz. My teacher points to different effected corals and we had to identify what the cause of the damage is.. Coral bleaching, white band disease, predation. We all thought we were prepared. We were wrong. Turns out many of the diseases look a lot a like, it doesn't help that we only just had the lecture on them yesterday. But really I shouldn't be complaining about taking tests underwater and swimming around looking at corals.
Tricia, from Minnesota, just reminded me about the flying fish we saw on the way to Klien. Incredible! They just skimmed over the water and really looked more like birds than actual fish.
After a riveting few hours of lectures on dive physiology. We took the tanks back out. Drove down the street to one of the top 10 dive spots for reef fish diversity in the world! I thought I had seen a lot of fish before, but nothing prepared me for this dive. There were whole schools every way I looked. All the beautiful colors! Two of my favorite finds today were Queen Angelfish and a Spotted Trunkfish

 Our assignment for the dive was to record the number of different types of fish we saw from the list of Reef fish of Bonaire. So not only did I have to take in the beauty of the dive site and the unbelievable amount of fish but also had to identify and record what I saw. Overstimulating to say the least!
All the reefs and water around Bonaire is a marine park and is very protected, no fishing, no touching. Thats the first thing you learn when you swim in Bonaire. Only one exception is made for LIONFISH.

A beautiful but venomous non-native predator.  Islanders and scientists frequently go on lionfish hunts to decrease their large numbers, turns out they are also incredibly delicious! We ate filleted lionfish tonight and tomorrow were supposed to have more lionfish pizza! Just doing our job to decrease the population one bite at a time!