Curacao Day 6: Our Age Catches Up to Us

Since we'd called it an early night the night before, we both woke up fairly early today, around 8:30a. We hung out on the back porch for a couple of hours, just relaxing and watching the boats go by. Mike loves to look them up on a marine traffic site on the computer. The site tells you each boat's flagship, route, etc., which is quite amazing with the current era of terrorism and pirating. After a while, we drove over to Blue Bay to the dive shop to turn in our used tanks and get some new ones and then headed to Porto Marie beach for some diving. Porto Marie is a nice, sandy beach with facilities just a few miles north up the island from our house.

Before getting in the water, we had some lunch at the beach restaurant. Mike had a ham and cheese tosti and I had a cheeseburger and fries. Then we made the long trek back up the hill to the parking lot in the heat to gear up and drive the car down with all of our gear. I still had problems getting the integrated weights into my BCD and carrying all of it into the water. I never had that much trouble when I used a weight belt. When entering the water, Mike fell and hit his knee on a rock. It didn't keep him from continuing the dive but it would come back to haunt him later. We had already decided to dive separately as I knew I wanted to stay shallow. So Mike set off to the depths and I stayed behind. I didn't see much at all as there was very little in the shallows but turtle grass. Mike went to 172 feet with the camera.

Ocean Surgeonfish with barrel sponge

Anemone

Lionfish

Trumpetfish

Afterwards, we went back to the restaurant and had a couple of pina coladas then headed home. Mike fell asleep in the car. I stopped along the way to take some pictures of a beautiful roadside church.

Mike was done for the night. He fell asleep on the couch while I unloaded the dive gear and got caught up on emails and the travel journal. He woke up a little later and had some Cheetos and Jumex for dinner then promptly went back to sleep. I just had my leftover fettucine alfredo from yesterday's lunch. I watched Gordon Ramsey episodes on TV the rest of the night, read my Kindle, and went to bed.