April Leonard
- April Leonard's trip Bonaire 2021
This is the house reef of our villa. It was a nice dive. We saw hamlets, a drumfish, white-spotted file fish, scrawled file fish, an ocean trigger fish, a lettuce sea slug, and a turtle. I saw several nimble spray crabs during our safety stop.
2021-12-19 - Bonaire Oceanfront Apartments House Reef/Big Sexy's Reef, Bonaire, Netherlands Antilles
20.9m - 49 min
I found a frog fish! We also saw two small spotted morays, a large green moray, and a tarpon. This site had great sponges. There were four scrawled file fish as we were started the dive and a juvenile French angel as we were getting out.
The reef at this dive was very beautiful with a lot of healthy coral and black coral. We saw black durgeons, barracuda, tarpon, cowfish, a juvenile trunkfish, and a weird echinoderm (black and white crinoid).
Another great dive at Salt Pier. This time we saw a couple really large parrotfish, a big green moray, and four small turtles. Most of the turtles were eating sea grass along with a trunkfish.
There were not really many noteworthy animals on this site but the reef was pretty and healthy. A nice dive.
This was another pretty reef dive with a lot of nice sponges. We saw a couple eels - one big green moray was swimming along the reef. We also saw something - Justin thinks it was a large flat worm - I think it was an anemone or eggs of some creature (branching anemone). During the safety stop I was a mantis shrimp.
Another dive at our house reef. It was a nice dive, but the visibility wasn't great. We saw five lionfish but we also saw a huge snapper, two lettuce sea slugs, and several drumfish.
This was a solo dive on our house reef. It was fun. I spent time in the shallows and moved more slowly than usual. I used this dive to try to get good pictures. I saw maybe a dozen lettuce sea slugs on this dive.
We did a night dive at our house reef. Again, there were so many lettuce sea slugs; I wonder if it's their mating season. There were lots of lion fish out hunting - it made me a little nervous that we might accidently run into one. It was fun to see the urchins and brittle stars and to see them go back in their holes when we shined our lights on them. I saw a tube anemone during the safety stop.
This was a really pretty dive. We didn't really see any noteworthy animals, but the coral was healthy and the reef finger structure was nice as always.
Another pretty dive with nice healthy coral. We saw a big green moray out swimming around the reef.
A pretty reef dive with a lot of nice soft coral in the 15-30ft range. A French angel was taking the same route as us during the second half of our dive so we got to swim with it for awhile.
The was a great dive - a really nice reef surrounding a sandy area. We spent a lot of time in the sandy area looking at garden eels. There was a big patch of staghorn coral near the start of the reef. We saw our first soap fish of this trip.
This dive has a great reef structure but we stayed too deep on the previous dive and went too deep early in this dive to really have much time to enjoy it. We may come back tomorrow and do this as our first dive so we have more time. We saw garden eels, a huge parrotfish, and a fish with a mysid shrimp on its face.
We did this dive again and got to explore more of the reef. This site could be done multiple times without seeing it all. We saw a hamlet with unusual coloring - black with a yellow tail. We also saw a memorial to someone who passed away - we wondered if their ashes were scattered there.
I really liked this dive! It was a sandy area surrounded on all sides by reef. It was shallow enough to explore all areas. There were so many fish - it felt like we were in an aquarium. There was a turtle at the safety stop.
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