Scuba diving is awesome!  J  I had a great time in Curacao, and I spent about 5 hours snorkeling and about an hour scuba diving.

We pulled in on Friday last weekend, and the first thing that struck me was the clarity of the water.  You have to be in pretty shallow water to clearly see the bottom.  We were going to pull in to the downtown area of Willemstad, which was the biggest city in the nearby area, but the water was too shallow for us.  We moored in a nearby bay, which ended up being great for snorkeling, and we went scuba diving in the same bay.

Friday was a duty day for me, so I had to stay on the ship.  Our mail was lost for a while, so we had a big working party to get over 300 pounds of mail on board, and anything that had been mailed to me, since the deployment started, finally arrived at this port.  We also had a big trash party (stinks bad, literally) and some huge stores working parties.  All of the work on Friday was well worth it, because of the snorkeling and scuba diving that I did Saturday and Sunday.

Saturday morning I got out the snorkeling mask and tube that I bought in South Beach, and I was glad that I bought some good equipment back there.  They had the same type of masks here, but I didn’t see any good snorkeling tubes here.  I immediately walked off the ship with another guy that bought some snorkeling stuff in South beach, and we snorkeled in the shallow water.  It is amazing when you can see all the stuff under the water.  We saw a multitude of different types of fish.  There were some fish that we saw that were extremely well camouflaged that hid in rocks.  We saw what looked like an underwater snail, and right underneath the pier that we were moored to, there was a huge school of little tiny fish.  When I say huge, I mean that there must have been at least 5000 of these little shiny fish that all stayed in the same spot and surrounded you as you swam through them.  I snorkeled that morning for about 2 hours and had to stop because our scuba diving class was that afternoon.

We had to take a beginner’s class, because scuba diving can be dangerous if you don’t understand the hand signals, the equipment you’re using, or the dangers of the water pressure around you.  Once we got to the dive shop, which was close to where we were, we watched a video about the basics of scuba diving.  Then an instructor took us in small groups of 4, and introduced us to the equipment and repeated the basics of hand signals and safety.  After that we went down to the beach, got into the scuba diving gear, and went to a shallow part of the beach to demonstrate the basics that we’d learned.  The training took a long time, but some people are slower learners than others.  It’s really awesome to breathe underwater for the first time.  It’s a little weird at first, and I think that the snorkeling earlier helped a little.  I used the same mask that I had used for snorkeling earlier, and I knew that it would keep a good seal.  Even if your mask doesn’t keep a good seal, there is a way to clear your mask of water that the instructor taught us.

After we’d all gotten a basic grasp of scuba diving, we all followed the instructor out into the deeper parts of the water.  All together, we didn’t go further than about 7 meters (~20 feet), but it felt like a lot deeper than that.  I never knew about the Buoyancy Control Device (BCD), which you use to go higher or lower in the water.  You basically use the air from your oxygen tank to inflate a vest that makes you float.  It was difficult to get the buoyancy right, but after a little practice I was able to get at the right depth in the water.  There wasn’t a whole lot to see in the area that we went to, and I actually saw cooler stuff when I was snorkeling in the morning, but learning how to scuba was great!

After scuba diving, we went to a beach that the liberty bus was taking us to, called Mamba beach.  There was a good restaurant there, and each set of tables was covered by a “grass hut.”  I got some fajitas, and we had tiramisu for dessert, which was excellent.  The sun had started to go down, and there were an awful lot of empty beach chairs on the beach, so we laid out on the beach for a while and relaxed in the warm Caribbean breezes.  (I’m trying not to make too many people jealous.)

The next day, Sunday, I went snorkeling during the morning again, and I finished off a roll of film for an underwater camera that I’d bought the day before for scuba diving.  I wished that I’d had two or three rolls of film, or an underwater digital camera.  I’ll try to get the pictures put on CD so that I can upload them to Flickr.  I uploaded some pretty good pictures this morning for Curacao.  We went to downtown Willemstad, which is the biggest city in Curacao.  Since it was a Sunday, the majority of the stores were closed, but there were a few restaurants and stores that were open.  There was a market downtown on Sunday that was similar to a Grower’s Market or a Farmer’s market, like there is in the US.  We got to the market too late to see what was being sold, so we ate at a large restaurant that was open to the air.  You could look out over the city of Curacao as you were eating.  It was really nice.

We walked around for a little while longer, and I got some night pictures of Willemstad, and then we headed back to the place where the bus dropped us off.  The bus had a slightly erratic schedule, so we ended up taking a cab.  The money that they use there is US Dollars or Nederland Antilles Guilders.  You could usually use either one at any place that you went to, and apparently the Guilder has a fixed exchange rate with the US Dollar.  The exchange rate was about 1.75 Guilder to 1 USD.

The next day, I had duty, and we had a huge working party for loading more supplies.  You wouldn’t believe how many gallons of liquid eggs we loaded that day.  It must have been at least 100.  The following day we left port there, but I won’t forget what the snorkeling and diving was like there.  I hope that the other places that we go to soon are half as good as Curacao was.