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Bonaire Part3: Diving

Although we had done all our paperwork at the dive shop the afternoon that we arrived, we still had some things to take care of the next morning. We didn't need an early start. They asked us not to come until after the dive boat had left at 8:30. First we needed to get some rental gear. Tim was pretty much set. He has all his own equipment and only needed weights. I needed a regulator and weights. I also got a shorty wet suit. I have my own wet suit but can get by with a shorty in the warm waters around Bonaire, and it means I need less weight when I dive. That's a good thing. Mickey needed to rent everything. After we got our gear, we had to do the buoyancy check required by the marine park. We had to go in the water, deflate our BCD's, and show one of the dive instructors that at least the top of our heads still showed above water. That meant that we weren't negatively buoyant. The idea is to make sure people don't badly overweight and then crash into the reef. Even touching coral lightly will kill it and Bonaire is strongly committed to preserving their reefs. We passed our check and the guy cleared us to go. After my buoyancy problems last year, I wanted to have a little more weight just to be on the safe side. Tim hopped out of the water and got an extra two pounds for me.Technically I was cheating but I was very careful and never touched the reef on any of our dives.

There were three types of dives that we could do on this trip. The simplest was to dive the house reef. There is a boat dock at the south end of the Sand Dollar property. It's near the dive shop, where there are lockers for divers to store their equipment. There are benches on the pier where it is easy to gear up. The dive shop keeps a supply of filled tanks right next to the dock. It's easy to do a giant stride off the end of the dock into 10-12 feet of water. From there it's only a fifty foot swim to the start of the reef. There the bottom drops from about twenty feet to a sandy bottom at about a hundred feet. The slope in between is covered with coral. When the dive is over there are steps leading out of the water and up onto the dock for an easy exit. There are rinse tanks at the top of the steps for rinsing gear. Except for a half hour when the dive boat left and a half hour when it returned, we could dive the house reef any time, day or night. That's why Bonaire bills itself as "the home of diving freedom".

A dive package was included when I booked the condo. It allowed six days of shore diving - which meant we could use their dock and the tanks that were left there. We extended that to eight days to cover all of the time that we had available to dive. The package also included three two-tank boat dives. The boat trips were short but provided access to sites on Klein Bonaire. It's only a half mile from the main island but that's too far to swim. The boat also went to sites further north on Bonaire that although close to shore, weren't easy to access from land.

Finally, we had the option to do shore dives anywhere on this side of the island. Most sites have public access that is marked by a yellow rock with the name of the site on it. In fact, most of the rental vehicles on the island aren't cars. They're pickup trucks with wooden pallet/racks in the back to hold scuba tanks so they don't roll around. You pick up tanks at the dive shop and then drive to different shore diving sites.

We had a rough plan for our diving on this trip. We arrived on a Monday and left the following Wednesday afternoon, so we were on the island for ten days. Two of those were just for travel. We also wanted to give ourselves twenty four hours of no fly time between our last dive and our flight home to avoid DCS (Decompression Sickness - aka The Bends). That meant we lost another half of a day. That left us with seven and a half days of diving. On Tuesday, our first day of diving, we would do multiple dives on the house reef. That would allow us to make sure we were comfortable with the local conditions - the right wet suit, weights, trim, etc. Plus Mickey and I hadn't been diving for a year. It would let us get back in practice before we went diving on the boat with a group. It's embarassing when you get on a dive boat with lots of people and set up the regulator on your tank backwards.

After a full day of diving on the house reef, we would do our boat dives on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday morning. If we still had ambition after getting off the boat, we could do dives on the house reef in the afternoon or at night. And yes, we definitely wanted to do some night dives.

When our boat dives were used up, I had a pickup truck reserved with Avis for Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and, Wednesday. That would allow us to do some shore diving at different sites, and still do additional dives on the house reef if we wanted. I'd turn in the truck when we went to the airport to leave on Wednesday.

We all thought this was the right level of detail to plan ahead. We had reservations for things that needed to be scheduled ahead of time, like the boat dives and the car rental. Other than that, we still had a lot of flexibility.

Now we were finally going to start executing that plan and do our first dive. We dropped down to the sandy bottom and swam to the drop off which was the start of the reef. There was a very slight current from the north so we headed that way as we descended the slope. It was awesome. This was what we had come to Bonaire for. We saw a lot of cool stuff, like when Tim found a monster lobster hiding under an overhang. The only bad thing was that I had a difficult time equalizing. I am cursed with terrible sinuses and it can be a problem for me when I dive. This time it was significant because we went down to 93 feet, which meant doing a lot of equalizing. It turned out to be my deepest dive of the whole trip. After this experience I made sure to take a decongestant (sudafed) before diving. That helped a lot and on subsequent dives I didn't have much trouble.

By the time we got out of the water it was after eleven. Since we needed an hour surface interval after such a deep dive, we decided to go to lunch. Tim is fanatical about CrossFit and does a tough workout every day. He claims he eats 4000 calories a day and after spending two weeks with him, I believe it. He seems to need to eat about every two hours so he was overdue. We took quick showers and then went back to the restaurant at Buddy Dive again.

Afterwards we retired to the condo to let our lunch settle. Tim decided to lay down. He said that he was just getting over a cold and wasn't feeling that well, and that a short nap would help. Mickey and I threatened him that if it turned out that he had covid and it ruined the trip, we would arrange for him to disappear at sea.

He said that he was only taking a short nap but several hours later he was still sleeping. Mickey and I figured letting him sleep was the best thing to do, to see if he could shake whatever was bothering him. We had only done one dive that day but we still had a whole week left, so we didn't think it was a big deal (yet).

Our biggest problem was that we were scheduled to go out on the dive boat the next morning. We really wanted to get in a couple more shore dives first. So late in the afternoon I went to the dive shop to see if they would push our boat dives out one day. The lady in charge really did not want to do that. I think the reason was that it moved our last day out to Saturday, and they might have been busier that day. Or maybe she was just being a grouch. Whichever it was, it took a lot of begging and pleading and sad puppy eyes before she finally gave in and let us reschedule.

The next day Tim was felling better and was ready to go diving again. We settled into a routine. Tim would get up crazy early every day, like 4:30 am. He found a CrossFit gym three quarters of a mile down the road. He would go do a workout, then come home and shower and shave and have breakfast before Mickey and I rolled out of bed sometime between 7 and 7:30. Neither Mickey nor I eat breakfast so we were able to get ready, get our gear, and be at the dock by 8 am. Plenty of time to catch the boat, or later in the trip, get in two shore dives before lunch.

Of our six boat dives, four were on Klein Bonaire. The other two were on sites further north on Bonaire that didn't have a good shore entry because of rock cliffs. There were quite a few divers on the boat, fifteen or sixteen, so they had two dive masters that each took seven or eight divers. All of the sites we dove were excellent but I do like my diving a little less crowded. The dive masters usually did a good job of being aware of all of the divers in their group and their skill levels and concerns. They usually went quite slowly and turned around while we still had plenty of air. I really appreciated that although one guy complained loudly after a dive that he still had air left when he got back in the boat. He was just being a jerk because when we reached the boat, divers could ascend or if they preferred, spend extra time in the shallows near the boat. There was always plenty of stuff to see there so the guy didn't really have anything to complain about. Besides, all of us noticed that he was a terrible diver. He did a lot of photography and while he was concentrating on taking pictures, he often crashed into the reef. That's a major no no. It kills the coral. He even got called out publicly once by one of the dive masters during a briefing but he just laughed it off. Definitely an asshole.

One day our boat captain and divemaster was a young Dutch woman named Leike (pronounced lee-ka). After the second dive they passed around a sheet for everyone to initial. It was their way to check that they didn't leave anyone behind. Tim noticed that she had drawn a little heart next to his name. I think he figured that he was going to ditch us and have a date for that evening. Then Mickey and I burst his bubble by pointing out that she did the same thing next to our names. He wasn't willing to accept that so he asked her about it. "Oh yes. You all have the same name as mine except for one letter."

The only dive master I was unhappy with was the last one. He didn't check air levels like the others. When I finally signalled half a tank to him, he gave me an ok and looked like he was turning around. But then he saw something interesting further along and just shot off at high speed, waving for us to follow him. Mickey signalled me that he was going to turn around and I thought screw it, I'm heading back too. We ascended to the shallows to reduce our air consumption but didn't make it back to the boat before Mickey signalled he was low on air and was going to surface. I went up with him. We were over fifty yards from the boat - a bit of a surface swim. I was not very happy with the dive master. He showed up long after Mickey and I had gotten back on the boat. I had given Tim money to tip all the divemasters that we had over the past three days but I went to him after the dive and said no tip for this guy.

Most of the dives that we did on our own went well although I did dork it up once. While diving Bari Reef I noticed something slip off of Tim's BCD and fall to the bottom between some coral heads. Turns out it was a small signal light. Being an environmentally conscious diver, I went to retrieve it. I had to go head down vertical so that I could reach it without touching the coral. As I started to rise after picking it up, I didn't notice that one of the pouches of my integrated weight system slipped out of my BCD. Fortunately Tim was watching by this time and saw it. He picked it up quickly and then grabbed me so that I wouldn't float up without my weights. He held on while I slipped the weight pouch back into place. No harm done. I decided that I really didn't like the design of the integrated weight system on my BCD. The pouches were just held in with velcro and depending on my attitude in the water, they could pull out fairly easily. No more doing underwater somersaults for me.

I expected that with our flexible arrangements we would do a lot of night dives. It didn't work out that way. By the evening we were usually ready to have a good dinner and then kick back with a beer. We did manage to do two night dives. The first was really impressive. As always, there were tarpon following us but these got so close that they would actually bump into us. At one point we saw a moray eel swim over and attack another moray that was crouching in some rocks. It ended up getting chased away, Next it tried to attack a lobster hiding under an overhang. It got chased off again. I guess even moray eels have a bad day sometimes. We defintely saw some unusual and amazing stuff.

Our other night dive was intersting but not in a good way. It was the only time that we dove off the dock that the current was heading north so we swam to the south. That took us to a site called Front Porch. It used to be the house reef for the old Sunset Beach Hotel, where I stayed the first two times I visited Bonaire in the early nineties. I dove it many times and it was a nice site. The hotel burned down twenty five years ago and it wasn't replaced until a brand new hotel called Chogogo opened late last year. It looks a lot fancier than most of the resorts on Bonaire. The buildings are four stories and might be the tallest buildings on the island. I read that they imported sand to expand the beach because the one there was very tiny. It turns out there was a reason that the beach was so small. The first time there was a storm all the new sand washed into the ocean and onto the reef. On this dive we could see for ourselves. Almost all the coral was dead. There were almost no fish. On a typical night dive we would have five or six tarpon following us. This time we had one, and he only stayed for a little while. I could have sworn I heard it mumble "well this place sucks" as it swam away. It was really sad. Although the resort looked fancy and new, no way would I ever stay there after seeing how they destroyed the reef.

During the second half of the trip I started to have significant problems with my feet. My fins were rubbing and I had several bad blisters. On Sunday, the first day we were planning to drive to do shore dives other than the house reef, I decided that I had to take a morning off. Tim and Mickey went by themselves and did two sites further to the north. I just took it easy. The most ambitious thing I did was to walk over to Buddy Dive to buy a tshirt. After Tim and Mickey came back and we had lunch, I was ready to try again, although we just stuck to the house reef. I spent some time in the shallows and experimented with different weights to try and adjust my buoyancy and trim. I wanted to avoid a repeat of the weight problem I had the other day. While I putzed around Tim and Mickey patiently waited in the shallows. When I had adjusted things as best I could, we dove the reef. It was better but I still need to improve more for my next dive trip.

Next day I had to skip diving completely. My feet were in bad shape. In the morning I tagged along while Tim and Mickey did their dives. They did two of the most famous dive sites on Bonaire - the Hilma Hooker and the Salt Pier. I was defintely envious. Afterwards we stopped for lunch at a food truck near the airport that is famous for Lionfish burgers. Lionfish are an invasive species that destroys the reef, so local divers hunt them. They are supposed to be very good eating and this was the only place where you could get them. I'm not an adventurous eater so I was content with a regular hamburger. Tim and Mickey tried the Lionfish burgers and said they were good. While we ate we chatted with TAFKAH - The Artist Formerly Known As Harry. It wasn't clear that he actually did any work getting the food ready but he did tell a lot of interesting stories. He also said he played guitar and sang in the evening in some local restaurants. He didn't serenade us during lunch though.

After lunch Tim and Mickey dropped me off in Kralendijk to do some shopping while they did two more dives. I got some nice jewelry as a Christmas present for Sandy and some more jewelry for her to go into my stash. Good thing she doesn't read these posts so she doesn't know it's coming.

That night I checked the internet about swim fins causing blisters. I found several scuba forums that discussed it. Quite a few people claimed that scuba socks really helped. I wanted to give it a try since the next day would be our last dive day before going home. I went out early and bought a pair. Sure enough, the socks really helped. That morning we did two dives on Bari Reef. For the first we hauled our gear way to the north, almost to Buddy Dive, where there was a stairway that provided easy access to the water. We just let the (mild) current take us back to the dock where we made our exit. Pretty lazy diving. Then we did another dive on the house reef just going off the dock. When we finished it was just about lunch time.

This would have been a good point to wrap up the diving for this trip. But I wasn't ready to admit that we were done yet. I lobbied for one more dive, suggesting that we drive somewhere. Mickey proposed Salt Pier, one of the dives I had missed the day before. He said it was his favorite site. That sounded great to me. We packed up quickly and drove out there.

There was no dive pier so we had to enter by walking over some rocky slabs. I tried to be careful getting in the water but a wave knocked me over. I was like turtle upside down - I couldn't get up. Finally Tim just grabbed me and hauled me into deeper water. So much for impressing the onlookers with my diving skill. After that mild embarassment, the dive was great. The pier footings were covered with coral and sponges. There were dense schools of fish sheltering under the pier. To top it off, we saw a beautiful Spotted Eagle Ray in the shallows just before we surfaced. A great way to end our dive trip.

After our last dive, we drove into Kralendijk and went to Karel's Beach Bar for a celebratory dinner by the water. It had been a fantastic trip. We did a lot of great diving and when we weren't in the water we had fun hanging out together. That was the end of the trip except for two days of travel back to Boise, which would be boring but easy. Or so I thought. It didn't turn out that way, but that is a subject for a post of its own.