This is a large, "local" beach. I call it a local beach because it's not a commercial beach packed with bused-in cruise ship tourists sitting elbow-to-elbow in rented beach chairs. Instead there are local families having birthday parties, local kids playing soccer and lots of open space for people like me with an exaggerated sense of personal space. Basically, to me it seems like a normal beach like we would have in Canada, if Canada was in the tropics. There are picnic tables shaded under palm-thatch umbrellas which, shockingly for Curacao, are free. We snorkeled out around the left side of the beach. Frustratingly, my camera strobe malfunctioned and didn't fire so I didn't really get the kind of photos I wanted. It was especially frustrating since this site seemed to have more than the average amount of corals and fish.
We reached the area near Playa Santu Pretu. Sometimes the tour companies call it "Black Sand Beach". I knew that there was a shipwreck off this beach. It's called the "Catherine" and it's a destination for dive charters. I tried to find information online about this wreck, like how it sank. Naturally? Artificial Reef? When? The internet refuses to say. I saw a small buoy out off the beach. I wondered if it marked the wreck so we swam out to it. As we got close, we started to see wreckage on the sandy bottom. Then the wreck appeared. It was upside down and broken in half. It was only about 20' deep so paying for a boat charter scuba dive here would probably be overkill.
