Kralendijk, Bonaire

Tuesday 26th August
This morning I cleaned out the fridge; in our haste to get away from Los Roques a bowl of soup that I had carelessly placed in the fridge upturned and caused a horrible mess. This made a good excuse to clean and sterilize ready for re-provisioning later.

We took the dinghy across to the marina late-morning, Bob wanted to check the slip he’d booked. Unfortunately the office was closed, everywhere shuts here between 12 & 1:30 - 2:00pm, so we walked around the marina and sat at the bar on the front of the resort. There were some huge iguana’s moving around between the tables, one of them was very large and Daniela took some photographs.
We ordered margaritas and Daniela and I shared a dish of nachos. After we had eaten we returned to the office to discover that no slip had been reserved for us, as they had promised, the marina manager, who had made our reservation six weeks before was away on vacation and they had nothing reserved for us, despite having taken Bob’s credit card details over the phone when he had booked the slip… They promised to find room for us and that we could definitely move onto a slip on Friday;
We took the dinghy over to the airport later, to arrange a rental car for tomorrow. Once the car was organized we went into town and walked around to do some sightseeing, we arrived at the Mona Lisa restaurant, reputed to be the best restaurant in Kralendijk. They were able to allocate a table for us, and we had a lovely meal; Daniela was in high spirits, the food was good and we were all having a fun evening.
The people from the boat moored next to us in the bay were also in the restaurant, and asked us to join them for a drink later at one of the local bars, they left the restaurant before us, and after dinner we walked all around the town looking for the bar they had mentioned, but couldn't find it, so eventually we gave up and went back to Daisy, for coffee and an episode of CSI …

After a couple of hours of failed attempts at sleep, we both got up to check outside, the boat was rolling quite violently and the dinghy, which we had unusually left down due to it having been such a calm quiet night, was now crashing and banging against the stern, Unfortunately the wind had once again switched to a south westerly and we were stern in to the sea wall, the boat alongside us had swung 180 degrees on it’s mooring, and was swinging dangerously close. We watched for a while, as the lightening continued to flash spectacularly all around, the waves built and the dinghy bounced and crashed about on the stern. Bob decided to bring the dinghy up on the davits before it got damaged. I ran around putting fenders out and Daniela came up on deck to help Bob with the dinghy. It was quite a difficult operation, the dinghy was bouncing wildly about and it was very hard for Bob to maintain his balance while he attached the davits. Eventually they managed to get it up safely.
Daniela returned to bed, but Bob and I stayed up on watch for a while longer.

Once we did return to bed, I couldn't’ sleep as the boat was still rocking and rolling violently pulling hard on the morning lines, and my ever imaginative mind was hard at work mentally creating every possible disaster waiting to befall us.