Off to Aruba
Kim and I are headed to Aruba to spend the Christmas holidays, returning the 27th. If all goes according to plan, we will be in the air by the time this posts.
I’ll have Internet access in the room and will do some blogging and checking for high priority emails while we’re away but my pace will be markedly lighter than normal. My OTB colleagues will be pinch hitting but it’ll be Christmas here, too, so I suspect the volume will be off a bit through the New Year.
Aruba???. Overrated. Sunny,warm, white beaches, blue warm water….hmmmph. I’ll stick with my snowy, chilly (14F at the moment) overcast dreary Michigan…..
Safe travels…turd.
Sometimes it’s good to get not only outside the beltway, but off the greater continental shelf.
Have fun! (Be safe!)
If you see Natalie, say hi!
Merry Christmas and have a great Kwanzaa
There are a couple of nice wreck dives down there. They claim there are no sharks in their waters but our group saw one on our second day of diving.
You got lucky. I was doing fieldwork in Curacao and spent every available off work moment for six weeks diving and went to several sites specifically looking for sharks and only saw one (a cute little meter and a half nurse) on my last week there.
Aruba has great walls, but the reefs of Bonaire are more pristine due to tighter environmental regs.
Have fun.
I like the ABC Islands, despite Greta Van Sestern’s bile. On Curacao and Bonaire (sorry, haven’t been to the non-Netherlands Antilles Aruba) the diving is great. I didn’t see any sharks, but did see one seahorse.
However, I hope the socialist Imperialist 60 NM to the south doesn’t invade while you are there, though he hasn’t threatened lately (past year) that I know of. You should ask some locals what they think of the despot to the south. You may get an earful. A and B make lots of money off folks from Venezuela depositing their money there (with duplicate records in The Netherlands).
If you want to visit another ABC island, there is no schedule. The planes leave when they are full, or when an undetermined waiting period is over.
I recommend the non-blue “Curacao” liquor. Tasty. Also an Indonesian Riijstafel (Rice Table buffet) I know there are a couple on Curacao, so there should be some on Aruba too.
My brother got to pet a shark first time he went diving. The only time I did that was when we caught one in Alaska. Usually don’t get lucky enough to see many when I’m diving but have see some when I fly a small plane around at some locations.
Definitely a cool experience. There was a resident white tip I used to visit. After several visits over the course of a few weeks she was comfortable enough around me that I could pet her. I visited her a few times a week for about 6 mos and got to see her grow from a little less than a meter to a little over a meter and a half. Work moved me away and I haven’t seen her since. I went back several mos later, but she had moved on.
Most of the sharks I have seen just kept swimming or kept their distance and checked me out for a few minutes before moving along.
Barracudas are generally much more curious and you can see some nice schools of 40 or 50 down in the ABCs and they will sometimes follow you for as long as you stay down keeping 5-20m away. It seemed that every time I would pull my camera up they would pull back just far enough to keep my shot out of focus and as soon as the camera went down they would pull up close.