Took a drive out to wander around the ruins of the Balashi Gold Mill. Aruba found some gold a couple hundred years ago, two companies ran mills on the island, found quite a bit of gold, never made any money, and closed when World War I broke out. Nice place to climb around and spend half an hour thinking about life on an island in the 1800s.
Just around the corner at the top of the hill is the Aruba Donkey Sanctuary, so we popped in there again. It was feeding time, so we didn’t get much attention from the jackasses. Or the jennies. Eating, pooping, and ignoring the tourists.
There is this adorably ugly duck that lives in a park nearby us. We go visit him every evening after dinner. The locals all know him, and someone puts out a bowl of fresh water for him each day. As soon as he sees us he comes walking over with his butt wagging like crazy. He somehow lost his voice, so he just makes strange raspy noises and bobs his head up and down. He’s like a little old man, and seems like the happiest ugly duck ever.
In the process of cleaning out the boat we found the kids were sitting on a couple hundred pennies, like everyone else apparently. There’s not a lot to do with a jar of pennies in Aruba, so they’ve been taking walks and leaving little piles of them in random spots. It’s kind of fun. We walk past a few hours later and the pile might be gone, or it’s just scattered about like whoever found them didn’t want them either. Then there was the crab. They found a crab shell, and set it up so it looked like it was guarding two pennies. The next day we found two crabs were now there, and they now had five pennies. I told them they should try to do that with quarters.
We’ve never gone on an organized dive before—preferring to do our own thing—but here in Aruba it wasn’t as easy to go off on your own. So one morning we spent an hour filling out paperwork and climbed onto the boat.
Almost immediately after jumping in they took us over to these things for pictures. All I could think was, “Oh boy, the kids are going to hate this if they drag us from one fake dive “attraction” to another. Fortunately, we moved on quickly and did some proper reef diving.
These were dives thirty-one and thirty-two for us.
We’ve decided the one big expense we need to make on our new boat is a dive compressor. We enjoy diving enough that we’d like to be able to jump in the water anywhere and explore. Dive compressor, tanks, some upgraded regulators, new wetsuits, and probably BCDs (kids are outgrowing them quickly). If anyone has any great used equipment, we’d be happy to take it off your hands. And if you’d like to kick in on a compressor to keep us in the water on those deserted islands (or put the kids to work scraping boat bottoms), you can hit the Patreon link here.
Got to watch this big guy slide across the ocean floor until he found a comfortable hole to hide out inside.
I have to give our dive leader kudos, she was an excellent frogfish spotter. She found three, and there’s no way that I would have seen a single one of them on my own. There’s one in each picture below. Overall, our two dives were okay. None of us were blown away by them, but there wasn’t anything to complain about. We’ll continue to strive for diving on our own, though, unless there is a particularly unique experience to be had with a dive company.
9 Comments on “Diving Aruba”
Having learned how to dive when I was 10 yo…it and one other sport has stuck with me for 53 years. Your life choices will have an enduring impact on the lives of those young’uns! Well done! Goodonyas!
Lucky ducks, they are!
Your ‘old man ugly duck’ is a Muscovy Duck. Lot’s here in south FL.
Yep, we researched him right away. The name comes from the region surrounding Moscow. Curiously, nobody knows why they are called that, as they aren’t natives there and hadn’t even been introduced there before the name had been stuck. He’s become our pal. We visit him every day.
When will you let Lowe and Quest contribute to their own section in the blog?
They’ve never asked, or expressed any interest whatsoever in doing so. We encourage them to do things that interest them, not press them to do things that don’t.
Pat, I have a GB question for you. Can you run the AC at the dock, with shore power? How about when you are under way on the mains? I assume that the solar can’t do it when you are on the hook, not enough amps. The water maker takes a lot of juice as well and I understand that you have a gas powered Honda that gets that job done. Have you ever priced what a new Genset would cost. Robbie
AC at the dock on shore power, yes. I’ve never attempted to use air anywhere else, but I would seriously doubt it could be run off of anything else. Not because of the amps but because of the size inverter you would need. 3,000 Watt inverter would not do the trick with 80s era air conditioning. Grand Banks owners are always replacing their old gensets with newer tech. New ones are super quiet and way more fuel efficient. About 10-15k to replace and install.
Your sales of BTC was quite timely.😁
Have a lot guys bumfuzzled V or was I the first?