National Park Diving

Good to go!

Today, we spent the whole day in Washington Slagbaai National Park exploring and diving. We woke up bright and early to get to the park when it opened. Our first stop was at Supladó to look at a blow hole. The waves were amazing here and when they would crash along the shore, water would spray out.

Our next stop was the first dive site of the day, Boka Bartol. We spent about an hour diving going down to ~70 feet exploring the area. We saw two sea turtles, a ton of black durgon, and a green moray eel along with a bunch of other fish. At the end of the dive during our safety stop, we played around on the sand flats taking our fins off to do different tricks. We finished the dive and headed to the next.

Black durgon

After an hour surface interval, we went on our second dive at Playa Bengé. During this dive, we went to a depth of ~80 feet exploring the reef, a steep wall and hanging out in the open ocean. We saw about six lionfish along the wall. Again, we spent a while in the sand flats messing around doing tricks. 

Into the blue

I touched a flounder

After the second dive, we went and found a spot to have lunch, which was at Playa Funchi. The previous night we ordered two large pizzas to take with us. While we were eating, we had some friends join us. There were four iguanas and a ton of lizards watching us. Some of them even tried climbing up on the bench we were using. After lunch, we explored the park some more. We stopped at another area called Wayaká. This area was another dive site but we just enjoyed the view.

Our final stop was Boka Slagbaai. No diving is allowed at this location because it is a marine reserve. However, there was a cliff that we were able to jump off of. We would not have stopped here if we did not see a person jumping when we drove by. It was about a 25-foot jump into the ocean and we did it twice.

Successful cliff jumping

To wrap up the evening, we went on another caving adventure. This cave was all on land and we went about 300 meters in. We saw some bats while crawling around exploring the cave.