The Richter Scale^®

I just finished posting the Bonaire Insider’s first ever review entry, about a fabulous dinner at the new Tex-Mex restaurant on Bonaire - Papaya Moon Cantina. You can see the full review here.

I went with my wife Linda, and our two kids, and we had a most excellent meal. I truly had never expected to have excellent Tex-Mex on Bonaire, so this was a very welcome surprise. My only dilemma is how to balance my newfound lusting after the Raspberry Lemon Tiramisu with my low-carb diet.

I give Papaya Moon Cantina a 9.0 out 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

A few weeks ago, my wife Linda and I were fortunate enough to have been invited to participate in a regional gathering of one of the organizations we belong to, the Chaine des Rotisseurs, a gastronomic association devoted to the enjoyment of fine food and wine. The regional gathering, known as a “Confrerie de la Chaine des Rotisseurs”, was organized by the Atlantic Caribbean Assemblage in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

The Bonaire Bailliage of the Chaine des Rotisseurs, to which Linda and I belong, is actually directly under France, and not part of the Atlantic Caribbean region of Chaine, which is part of the United States Chaine. Nevertheless, we were invited because we are in the Caribbean and knew Drs. Marcelo and Virgen Oben, two of the organizers, whom we had met at a Chaine event in Curacao three years ago.

In sum, the long weekend entailed an evening with eleven of the best chefs of San Juan at a “Taste of Puerto Rico” dinner, an amazing wine tasting the next day, followed by a black tie French Gala Dinner Dance. On the final day we had a wonderful brunch. Linda and I also took an extra day to visit the famous Bacardi rum factory and go shopping. We had a very nice and relaxing time, made some new friends, and ate and drank very well.

Kudos to the Chaine Bailliages of Puerto Rico who hosted us and did an absolutely incredible job organizing and running all these events!

Instead of boring you with more written details, I will instead point you here to my photo gallery of our time in Puerto Rico at the beginning of November.

Back in August I had picked up a Subal housing with a pair of Sea & Sea YS-90 strobes so I could take my Nikon D200 underwater. As fate would have it, travel and a general lack of time kept me out of the water here on Bonaire, until yesterday.

I finally got a chance to both take the hour or more that it took to unwrap the housing and accessories and rig up my D200 DSLR, without leaks, and then take a nice leisurely hour-plus dive with friends Martin de Weger and Sebastian Schulherr. Martin is Dutch, Seb is from New York City, and both are long time repeat Bonaire visitors as well as moderators of BonaireTalk.

This was to be Martin’s 600th logged dive, and it was a nice one. We also did a thorough cleaning of the Bonaire ReefCam, one of the many WebCams on Bonaire that I am responsible for maintain and operating.

In any event, it had been perhaps five years since I last dove with a camera housed in a metal case, and I had forgotten about the 4-5 pounds of additional weight, so I had to work a bit harder to stay buoyant than I otherwise would.

The housed D200 is a pleasure to work with, though, especially as I get to use my strobes in TTL thanks to a little gadget from Sea & Sea which allows the YS-90s to sync properly to the iTTL of the Nikon D200. I never liked manual strobe twiddling and this gadget gives me yet another excuse to not need to bother with that.

I can tell however, that I will definitely need a fair number of additional dives with this rig in order to have it feel as comfortable as my old Nikon 8008s, which I had in a Subal housing as well, back five or more years ago.

I am pleased, though, that the D200 handles much more as did the old film SLRs underwater than do the present generation (and earlier) digital point and shoots. Fast focusing, great light balance, and the ability to immediately determine if my subject was in focus.

For those wanting to see my initial results (these all shot with the standard Nikon 18-70mm DX zoom lens), take a look at my visual dive log.

Outsiders often don’t quite understand the relation of Bonaire to Holland. Some assume our island is part of Holland, but it isn’t at present. But it will be next year as the Netherlands Antilles get dissolved.

What Bonaire is at present is one of five islands in the country of the Netherlands Antilles (the other four being Curacao, Sint Maarten, Saba, and St. Eustatius), and the Netherlands Antilles are in turn part of the Dutch kingdom (or more appropriately, Queendom).

And our monarch here is Her Royal Majesty, Queen Beatrix of the Royal House of Oranje (hope I got that all right).

Queen Beatrix is paying Aruba (another country under the Dutch kingdom) and the Netherlands Antilles a visit this week.

A couple of days ago she arrived with much fanfare on Bonaire - her first stop in the Netherlands Antilles. She was greeted by members of the Antillean government as well as Bonaire’s own Lt. Governor. Because of my work on Bonaire Insider, my partner Susan Davis and I were granted a press pass and were able to take a fair number of pictures (see here and here) and trail along with her entourage for several of her stops on the island. And then yesterday, I met the Queen personally as one of the artists whose works were on display at the exhibition she opened at Kas di Arte.

What struck me the most about the Queen’s visit is the genuine love, admiration, and enthusiasm her subjects on Bonaire have for her. There was regular cheering whereever she showed up, and a real sense of pride among all the people that yes, this was their Queen.

I must say that Queen Beatrix certainly exuded an amazing amount of charm and friendliness. One look at her and her warm smile, and you just sensed that she was a nice person. Or at least that was my first gut reaction. But our Dutch house guests (one of whom is a big fan of the Queen) say that perception is very true. What also amazed our house guests and us alike was how freely she mingled with the crowds. While there were body guards in evidence, they were typically at a distance, giving the Queen free reign (pun intended).

Certainly Queen Beatrix does not have the power of someone like my (as an American) president, George W. Bush, but she does seem to have nearly universal approval, something Bush does not, and for me that was a very stark contrast.

Queen Beatrix left Bonaire for Sint Maarten this morning and life is returning to normal here on Bonaire once again.

After having broken her hand in the late spring, and then a summer full of travel, my wife Linda is finally back in full swing painting. She has three active paintings going at any one time (as oils take a while to dry after a coat of paint has been applied), and just finished two new paintings these past two weeks. And one of them is my new favorite.

And that would be the one above, entitled Pelican Vigil. Breathtaking, especially when you see the original.

The other new painting is Trupial Brunch. Trupials are in the Oriole family of birds, and an amazing yellow orange in color across their necks and bellies. They also have this cool blue outline around their eyes. Linda captured them well in the painting (pictured below). She also did an excellent job with the cactus.

She has also converted much of our home into exhibit space for her works, so if you find yourself on Bonaire, call us at 717-4112 for a private showing. The plan is to build an extension onto our home (which on Bonaire is about a 6-9 month project - we’re still waiting to get near-final plans from our architect) which will have a sizable (1000 square feet or so) dedicated exhibit area (and will expand my office with another 150 square feet of space as a result - that’s much needed).

For more information on Linda’s new paintings, take a look at the Linda Richter web site.

We (my wife and I) were recently invited to participate in a juried art exhibition on Bonaire, featuring Bonaire’s artists. The jurying took place a few weeks ago, and the exhibition is slated to happen during the early part of November, with the possibility that Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands will officiate.

I created three very different pieces to enter into the jurying process:

All of these are based on my photographs, and all involve some level of various digital painting or manipulation. Of the three images, two were selected to be exhibited in November - a pleasant surprise. The only image not selected was “Shades of Growth” - not surprising as the judges indicated that they were looking at color as well as content.

More information on all three of these images can be found on the Jake Richter Art Site. All three images are available in a very limited closed edition and are available for purchase at Caribbean Art.

I’ve been busy the last couple of weeks with my latest project - a news blog called Bonaire Insider. The idea for Bonaire Insider came about over a month ago when my business partner in NetTech N.V., Susan Davis, and I decided we wanted to get fresher news on the home page of the Bonaire tourism information web site, InfoBonaire, which we own and operate.

It took some intense programming, as well as a lot of exploratory work with the same blogging software which I use for this blog (Expression Engine from pMachine), but two days ago we launched Bonaire Insider.

Among the cool features are the ability for people to sign up to get automatic copies of new posts to the Bonaire Insider news blog, integration of the RSS news feed from the site on the InfoBonaire home page, and integration with Google for running context sensitive ads (to help at least partially offset the costs of running the new site).

We’re still working on generating our internal style guide for news items, but it seems to be coming along well - we’ve had over 10,000 page views in just the first couple of days. Not a bad start for a small site about a small Caribbean island.

A friend of mine in the U.S. is a professional amateur jellyfishologist (as best I can describe him), and for some years he has been trying to track down a particularly rare type of box jellyfish which he believes has not yet actually been properly IDed and classified. And I’ve been trying to help him here on Bonaire. It started with a promotional video someone here on Bonaire shot some years ago, that just happened to have a scene where the videographer was swimming with the particular box (cubazoid) jellyfish my friend Bud was looking for.

That was several years ago. Since then, there have been a few rare sightings of this critter - identified by four long tentacles which are brown/white banded - similar to a sea wasp, but a lot more toxic. But in recent weeks there have been several reports of people seeing this box jelly.

And on Sunday, a teen aged girl a few minute walk from my house was unfortunate enough to have found out how dangerous the sting could be. She’s apparently doing well now, but did end up going to the hospital. Through a combination of efforts described on a thread on the BonaireTalk web site, I ended up with the jellyfish in question, and in the image above you can see my wife Linda holding the still live jellyfish down with her finger in a rubber glove so I could take a picture to send to Bud for him to forward to the various scientists he works with.

More pictures can be found here, along with information on how the pictures were taken.

The next step will be to get the jellyfish - which I now have preserved in formalin - a watered down version of formaldehyde (that nasty smelling carcinogenic liquid you may recall from biology class, as it was what the frogs we had to dissect were stored in) - to the U.S. for DNA analysis.

I just returned from five weeks of travels last week, just a few before the latest air security madness originating out of England. However, as I am a frequent traveler, I monitor the latest “trends” in travel, and this morning stumbled across the latest TSA Requirement - namely shoes absolutely must be removed before going through security screening.

Mind you, shoe removal was something most folks already did at the request of TSA staff, but in the past flip-flops and thin shoes were more or less exempt. Not any more.

This, by itself, is not a big deal, but its just the latest trend in the on-going encroachment of our personal items and space by a bureaucracy that does not properly train its staff for accuracy, consistency, and efficiency. It’s all just a big charade to give people the sense of security.

In the meantime we cannot bring any liquids not already in our bodies through security, and then any we buy in a presumably secure (sterile) area need to be consumed before boarding. I can’t wait to see how long the bathroom line will be on my next flight from all the people guzzling their 32 oz. Super Sized Cokes before they boarded. I also wonder how much more responsive flight attendants will be when it comes to providing extra hydration for folks who normally travel with their own spare bottles of water (like myself).

And the poor people flying in or out of the U.K.! Having to give up their reading material, electronic gadgets, and just about everything else. I’m not sure what I would do with myself on a 6+ hour flight without anything to read, work on, or play on. I would need counseling after such mental deprivation. And, ironically, the TSA tells people not to check lap-top computers and electronics in their luggage, putting them in contradiction to the U.K. rules unless one is not to travel with their electronics any more. Goodbye business travel, and hello teleconferencing.

Worse yet is that some airports - and San Juan, Puerto Rico comes immediately to mind - have such poor baggage control that luggage-handling thieves regularly abscond with sizable amounts of electronics and photographical loot. This loot then appears on eBay, indicating the thieves got it out of a secure area. If they can get it out, can’t they also get stuff into such areas? If the TSA cannot ensure the sanctity of our bags once they are screened, what good are all these other security measures other than feel-good fluff?

I’m pretty convinced things will only get worse for U.S. air travel, and it will be little things - but lots of them. Shoes now, then anything with metal buttons or zippers, writing supplies (pens have ink, and that’s a liquid, right?), and ultimately clothes. Welcome to Naked Airways.

By the way, for a humorous take on the contraband liquids issue, take a look here.

For several years now it has seemed to me that there’s been a real shopping void on-line. Tough to believe, eh? After all, there are sites dedicated to buying most anything on-line, right? Well, the void I refer to are products from and related to particular Caribbean island destinations.

Considering I live on Bonaire in the southern Caribbean, it was a no-brainer to start with trying to figure out how to get Bonaire originated items on-line. The idea was easy, but the execution was not because selling tangible products requires fulfillment, and shipping stuff directly from Bonaire would make things prohibitively expensive.

So, last summer, my wife and I got together with old friends in New Hampshire and founded Caribbean Stuff, LLC, based in New Boston, New Hampshire, with friends Tracy and Mike Griffin, to provide both the U.S. presence for any future on-line store, as well a distribution point. New Hampshire is one of the few states blessed with no sales tax, and that’s an added bonus.

My wife and I launched http://www.CaribbeanArt.com last fall to test out Caribbean Stuff’s distribution and fulfillment processes, and that worked (and continues to work) great.

I’m pleased to report that approximately one month ago, we successfully launched http://www.BonaireStuff.com with approximately 90 products, and sales have been good. We’re now looking to expand to provide products from other Caribbean islands via a new on-line store to be launch later this year.

As Bonaire is known for its flamingos (presuming you’ve even heard of Bonaire), one my favorite areas of BonaireStuff.com is the flamingo section (just type “flamingo” in the search box at http://www.BonaireStuff.com), where you can get flamingo hats, flamingo sunglasses, and even a “grow-your-own” pet flamingo (just pop it in water and watch it grow). We’re working on further expanding our Bonaire product line as well. If you want to stay abreast of any specials or news from BonaireStuff.com, there’s a place on the BonaireStuff.com home page (near the bottom) where you can subscribe to a newsletter.