Our Fishy Tales : Curacao 2006

CURACAO, Netherlands Antilles, Southern Caribbean
(Change of jobs, and Sheena & Richie's visit)

CURACAO - September and October 2006
(Thanks again to Mark and Suzy at The Dive Bus and Jesper for the use of some of their photos on this part of the web site as at this stage we still had no camera following the theft in Costa Rica)

September
(Sadie)
So back to work and life as normal….or so we thought! Turned out that in our absence Mark & Suzy our employers at the Dive Bus had come to the conclusion that they needed Andy working full time for them rather than me. Up until now I had worked full time for them while Andy worked part time for them and part time for the dive centre at the Marriot Hotel.

Once again the fact that I can’t drive came back to bite me on the bum. I have to say that at the time I was pretty mad with them as they had always known that fact and professed not to care which one of us worked for them. However they now said that it was coming into their busy season and they needed a full timer who could drive.

So we swapped jobs! I went to work for the mad Dutchman called Tom at the Caribbean Sea Sports dive centre at the Marriot hotel. I couldn’t help feel a bit smug as for the next month I worked my socks off teaching 2 or 3 courses a day whilst Andy sat in the Dive Hut on the beach twiddling his thumbs. After that things settled into a fairly good routine of working hard and playing hard. Now that we were both earning good full time wages we finally managed to go out a bit more and see the nice side of the island that had eluded us so far.

I had a head start in this as after only three weeks working for him, Tom my boss, organised a works teambuilding trip to a desert island called Klein Curacao. It’s a small uninhabited island about 5 miles off the coast of Curacao. So we loaded up all three dive boats with dive and waterspouts equipment, food and of course plenty of booze!

We set off after work as the sun was setting and the trip over took about 3 hours as it was against the wind and therefore waves. Luckily I have never been seasick in my life but it wasn’t so for Sandra the office manager who was also 7 months pregnant at the time! As we arrived at the island there was nothing to see by but the full moon which was just rising like a huge yellow Dutch cheese, highlighting the derelict lighthouse and abandoned fishing shacks like a scene out of a spooky movie!

Once we had set up camp on the beach, lit a fire and the BBQ a few of us went off to explore. I wish I had a camera with me as I really did feel like an extra in the Blair Witch project as we climbed up the lighthouse and then went on to explore a shipwreck rotting on the west coast of the island.

After a fairly drunken night sleeping on the beach, we spent the next day playing on the water ski’s and wakeboards and making a couple of dives on the untouched reefs. We were lucky enough to see a family of sea turtles and a large spotted eagle ray, but unfortunately no sharks L. As the sun set again we headed home on a much quicker and smoother ride.

October
Our good friends Sheena & Richie were our first house guests in Curacao arriving on the 27^th Sep and staying for 3 weeks. At first we were a bit apprehensive about sharing a house for so long, but it couldn’t have been easier or more fun. They arrived pretty exhausted from a fairly uncomfortable flight and working way too hard for the last few months, so we gave them a couple of days to themselves to acclimatise to the heat and the island while we went to work.

Once they had had enough of just chilling out on our sun beds on the terrace we took them to our favourite beach Porto Mari and taught them to dive. Richie took to it like a fish to water ('scuse the pun) but it has to be said that Sheena found it all a bit more challenging J It didn’t help that the mask she had bought before they came was the totally wrong shape for her face so kept flooding and fogging, but there were a couple of times where I thought she might hit me and divorce Richie before they were even married!

Still they both managed to get through the course in a record two days and relaxed more and more every time we took them for fun dives afterwards. Whether Richie will ever persuade Sheena to go on a diving holiday again remains to be seen though!