Curacao Day 3: Diving at the Casa

Mike was in one of his moods and stayed up most of the previous night. He went snorkeling in the dark to check out the dive site right off the house. He then decided to do an early morning solo dive from the house. He went to about 70 feet. I was awake and sitting on the back porch when he got back. Since we were feeling kind of lazy, we decided to dive from home. But we were hungry so we wanted to get a bite of lunch first. We drove over to Pirate Bay, a beachfront restaurant at Piscadera Bay, just a few miles from the house. We came up with our dive plan while Mike had some French onion soup and I had chicken fettucine alfredo.

When we arrived back at the house, we carried our dive gear down the long flight of stairs to the sea. Mike had to first bring up his tank from the morning dive. It's a long haul up those stairs with a tank on your back.

To get into the water from the bottom of the stairs, you must either put all of your gear on and go down the ladder or go down the ladder and put your gear on in the water. Either way was difficult for me, especially with my new, integrated weight BCD. I struggled. Mike struggled to help me. Again, it was not a good situation. Mike got frustrated. I got frustrated. So in the end, he again went solo diving and I decided just to snorkel. I was a little nervous about snorkeling in this area because the boat traffic was pretty heavy. I did have to constantly pull my head up to look around and make sure I didn't get smacked. The reef was a good ways down from the surface but I managed to see some decent fishlife including squid and a huge pufferfish. Mike went down to 143 feet but this time took the camera.

Yellowtail snapper

Tube sponge

Blackbar soldierfish

Foureye butterflyfish

Blackbar soldierfish with barrel sponge

After the dive, Mike made us some pina coladas.

View through the kitchen window

Curacao bird (looks like a big-eyed dove)

Tonight's dinner was a long drive to the north/western side of the island to a restaurant called Trio Penotti. It's located just across the road from Mt. Christoffel, the tallest point in Curacao. We were so tired we didn't take any dinner pictures which was unfortunate because we were entertained throughout our meal by several kittens running around the patio. Dinner was again tasty and I had a sirloin steak with potatoes while Mike had primavera soup and garlic shrimp with polenta. We crashed after the long drive back home.