We moved to Conception Island overnight. The first dive was at Hocus Pocus, a wall with some swimthroughs. We saw a yellow-headed jawfish (the fish of the day), and some blue parrotfish (I'd never seen them before, they are BIG, and really cool, so graceful looking). The vis was "bad" (we thought it was fine, just milky near the surface), so we moved to a different site for the second dive. We moved to Grouper Ledge. We saw a bunch of grouper (surprise surprise!), a queen triggerfish (so pretty), flamingo tongues, an eel, and more blue parrotfish. In Bonaire, we only saw one flamingo tongue the whole trip. We saw tons on this trip. I was getting really good at finding them for Rob to photograph. He ended up with tons of pictures of them! We went through a really cool swimthrough up the wall... the water looked so blue on the other side.
In the afternoon, we were at Missing Link, a site with a big old encrusted chain running down the wall into the abyss. Rob the DM told us about a big anchor along the wall in the opposite direction from the chain, so we decided to check that out first. It was probably about 8 feet long. Must be pretty new though, because there wasn't much on it. We headed back toward the chain but didn't make it to it when we had to turn. We saw a small ray at the edge of the wall, in the sand. The boat was moored to a coral head that was pretty far from the wall (beyond visibility, with featureless sand between the two). We couldn't find the coral head, so we did a free ascent (Rob shot a bag, his favorite). The boat had swung in the other direction, so we had a bit of a swim back. But the weather was perfect for a swim :) For once, I was warm when I got out of the water. On the next dive, we made it to the chain (of course it turns out we turned right before it on the first dive). The chain was very encrusted, with lots of stovepipe sponges growing on it. I found a slender filefish on a gorgonian (which is a teeny little guy that I'd never seen before), which Rob got some nice pictures of. There were a lot of ocean triggerfish at this site. I was leading on the second dive (Rob led the first), and I was super attentive to the heading we took from the coral head to the edge of the wall, because I did not want to get lost again! Of course the boat ended up swinging so that it was perched over the edge of the wall, and we could see it above us. So I didn't even end up having to navigate back to the line. We sat out the night dive again because I was cold and tired. I read a little and went to bed early instead.
