Bonaire Trip Report - May 2015

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Hintermann

Contributor
Messages
1,049
Reaction score
317
Location
Royal Wootton Bassett, Wiltshire, UK
# of dives
500 - 999
Since I caught the diving bug in 2006, I had heard about how good the diving was in Bonaire but for various reasons I had considered and abandoned the destination several times over the years. Certainly one of the reasons was an extremely annoying “sole official agent in the UK” for Bonaire who kept sending me unsolicited e-mails why I should arrange a Bonaire trip with him and so on. But when I booked a trip to Socorro for May 2015, I decided that I might add Bonaire to the second week of the trip. After checking various possibilities, I booked a dive package with VIP Diving and am very glad that I did so. I planned to stay for a week and do 20 dives in all, 18 with VIP and 2 morning dives with East Coast Diving. Not everything went to plan but still it turned out to be a nice trip.

I went to Bonaire on the back of an exhilarating liveaboard cruise to the Socorro Islands. From Los Cabos in Baja, I took the AA flight to DFW and connected to Miami. After staying overnight at MIA Hotel, I connected the following morning to an AA flight to Curacao and from there used Insel Air to reach Bonaire. Paradoxically, there were a few glitches and minor delays with AA while the Insel flight took off 10 minutes ahead of schedule.

I had booked accommodation with Blachi Koko Apartments on Bas Noij’s advice and this tirned out to be another excellent decision. The condo is very well appointed with the diver in mind and taking into account the security concerns. Laetitia and Matthieu are an extremely helpful couple and go a long way in making their guests comfortable. The apartments are clean, spacious, cosy and well appointed.

I rented a truck with AB Car Rentals and although I did not use it to go to the dive sites, it was necessary and convenient. As I have driven on the “wrong” side of the road in the US in several states, that presented no problems in Bonaire.

VIP Divers are superb and then some. I recommend them to ALL first timers to Bonaire, and also second and third timers. They are extremely professional, friendly, helpful and organised. After the very physical trip to Socorro, I had arrived with a few kit glitches, all of which they fixed within 24 hours. The guides are courteous, helpful and strive to take the guest to any reasonable diving itinerary. I gave them 6 out of 5 on Tripadvisor.

Although I had 472 dives going into Bonaire, I was relative newbie to shore diving, having done those only in the UK, Malta and Bali and not particularly liking it. Therefore, the “VIP Approach” was more than welcome. Even so, I was rather clumsy during entries and exits but once underwater, it was all a piece of cake. The water temperature was in the 27*C range and as I had already done 19 dives in Socorro the previous week, I sensibly abandoned the idea of diving in a 3mm shorty after the first few dices and settled on a 3+3 mm combo outfit. It worked well.

I had a different 1-to-o1 guide each day but they were all very good. Steven Versheuren the Belgian on the first day and thereafter Kevin O’Brien, Frank Eijking, Eric de Vries, Jon Oosterhof and Ilona Niewenberg. I did 2 dives on the opening afternoon and the plan was to do 4 dives a day including a night dive. The sites that I dived at were:

Day 1: Red Slave (Afternoon) and Alice in Wonderland (Night)
Day 2: Oil Slick Leap & Karpata before lunch; Hilma Hooker in the afternoon and Cha Cha Cha for the night dive.
Day 3: Sweet Dreams & Salt Pier before lunch; Tolo in the afternnon and a UV night dive at Something Special.
Day 4: Margate Bay & Angel City before lunch; Bachelor’s Beach in the afternoon and Windsock for the night dive.
Day 5:1000 Steps in the morning; we had to cancel the second dive as Jon was feeling unwell. Ilona replaced him and took me to La Danila’s Leap for the afternoon and Invisibles for the night dive.
Day 6: I heard that East Coast Diving’s boat was damaged and so they cancelled the trip on 3 days, including mine. VIP offered to compensate by offering 2 morning dives of their own in a couple of the “regular” sites, but I passed and decided to allow more time for the gear to dry out.

As I lived just down the road from VIP, the arrangement was that I would drive down each day, park my truck at their place and accompany the guide in the VIP truck. This allowed me breaks between dives according to my convenience and I was very impressed on how flexible the VIP staff were to suit my requirements.

Apart from limited visibility at Red Slave, all the dives were very good. I did not enjoy the entries and exits and bet that the crew would have had a quiet laugh behind my back at my clumsiness. But without exception they were helpful and made appropriate adjustments to assist me. Despite that I fell awkwardly during the entry at Angel City and landed with my coccyx on a lump of rock. It still hurts to sit, but standing and diving were no problem.

I was impressed by the lush and healthy coral at most sites, as well as the abundance of fish life. Once underwater, the diving conditions were very mild and quite often swimming with or against the mild current felt the same. Huge tarpon were present nearby during many day dives and all the night dives. They kept circling around out light beams, presumably using them to find prey. Plenty of queen angelfish, French angelfish, trumpet fish, parrotfish, jacks, snappers, parrotfish etc. I also saw a lot of arrowhead crabs, banded shrimps and lettuce nudibranchs during most dives. During night dive exits, millions of blue needle-like fish kept ‘bombarding’ us. There were plenty of lionfish and we saw at least one on every dive, sometimes several. Kevin and I penetrated the Hilma Hooker a few times, often swimming alongside the resident tarpon. The offbeat dive at Salt Pier was another very interesting exercise despite the fact that there were quite a few other divers about. The UV Night dive at Something Special was a new experience that I thoroughly enjoyed and it was sensible not to have taken the camera for that dive. Elsewhere I got a few good macro shots of Pederson’s cleaning shrimp and the other shrimp that lives within a sea anemone’s tentacles. There seemed to be a lot of spotted drums (juvenile and adult) as well in most dive sites. The current was very mild during the La Danila’s Leap drift dive and we had to ‘help’ by finning a bit.

A hilarious oddity in Bonaire was that there is a cookbook called “The New Caribbean Delicacy” doing the rounds and it is about catching and cooking lionfish. But at the same time, their latest fish guide sports a new attraction – lionfish! The impression that I got was that despite apparent reduction in numbers at the dive sites, the lionfish in the Caribbean are here to stay and in 20 to 30 years’ time will become a natural part of the underwater fauna. Already, there are rumours about some groupers starting to eat lionfish eggs and so the ‘balance’ has probably already started.

My overall impression – and I stress that it is my opinion only and not meant to be considered as a general comment – about diving in Bonaire is that it is good and relaxing but nothing really spectacular. In my case, the visit was made more memorable by the excellence of VIP Diving crew and without them the trip may well have been quite ordinary. The dive sites are all nice and healthy, but there was nothing really special about any of them, especially compared with some of the Indo-Pacific sites that I have visited. I can understand the repeated visits by Bonaire ‘regulars’ from USA and Canada because of the convenience of renting a truck and making up one’s own relaxed itinerary once one gets familiar with the place. But I saw nothing that would have persuaded me to spend time and money for repeated visits from further afield like the UK; it is a nice little place but IMO for one visit. I am pretty sure that if I was not retiring from diving next year, I would maybe have planned one more visit to Bonaire as part of a longer Caribbean trip, but certainly not more.

Here is a link to the pictures that I took: https://www.flickr.com/gp/25941505@N04/41uZuR
 
Great trip report and great photos! It looks like you had a great lineup of dive sites. I think you made a fair assessment of Bonaire diving in context to more exotic and expensive Indo-Pacific diving. It's a beautiful and relatively affordable "backyard" gem for North American divers, especially those that prefer to dive without assistance, supervision, or incremental cost associated with guided boat diving. That said, it's worth acknowledging that KLM's Airbus 330s and Arkefly's 787 Dreamliners regularly bring hundreds of divers to Bonaire from Europe. I have no idea how many of them are repeat visitors vs. one-trip bucket list divers like you, but there certainly seems to be a steady stream of European visitors to the island.
 
Great report. I've been waiting to see how it went for you after your planning cycle.

I think both you and wwguy have nailed it.

"good and relaxing" and "relatively affordable...for North American divers, especially those that prefer to dive without assistance..."

Last summer my young daughter missed the family Bon trip due to new graduation/employment (yay!!!). I told her I'd take her diving when she accrued vacation. I sorta had in mind the Fl panhandle or Keys, or like that. It quickly morphed into Bonaire. When I started doing the numbers the FL trip vs Bon is about the same (discounting airfare because I have Delta FF miles out the yang), so we're headed to Bon in 2 weeks.

And when my girls were both younger the "good and relaxing" part and the 'supervision' part played a bigger role than cost.

And I've noticed that the difficulty of entry/exit is directly proportional to number of birthday cakes.
 
. . . That said, it's worth acknowledging that KLM's Airbus 330s and Arkefly's 787 Dreamliners regularly bring hundreds of divers to Bonaire from Europe. I have no idea how many of them are repeat visitors vs. one-trip bucket list divers like you, but there certainly seems to be a steady stream of European visitors to the island.

I would suspect the majority are Dutch. The flight is convenient, and the low cost of shore diving might appeal to the stereotypically thrifty Dutch.
 
And I've noticed that the difficulty of entry/exit is directly proportional to number of birthday cakes.
LOL! Perhaps, but though almost 60, I am quite fit for my age. Also, Kevin O'Brien is 3 years older than I am.

Being an almost dedicated liveaboard diver, I do not get much opportunity to do shore diving. I do not like it anyway. I did a bit in the UK in 2006-7 as part of OW and AOW training, a few very easy shore dives in Malta the following year and 3 shore dives in Bali last year. That was about the size of it till Bonaire.

Also, I got better during the week with passing dives and I guess would have improved if I had been doing that regularly.
 
Great trip report.

I am sorry to hear that you are retiring from diving, you seem to enjoy it so much.

I'd try to talk you out of retiring but it's none of my business. Hopefully, it's not a forced retirement anyway.

boat
 
Thanks for the report (and pics!) Hintermann! We have been to Bonaire twice and as it is our backyard, I definitely see returning frequently over hopefully a long and healthy dive career. We just returned from our first "big" trip to the Philippines and were blown away by the diving. It was incredible and if you live as close or closer to SE Asia from your backyard it will of course knock Caribbean diving out of the water. I am excited to try other places in SE Asia, but will probably alternate trips with the more accessible Caribbean (particularly Bonaire). I am however, dying to try a liveaboard, as the thing that both Bonaire and our PI trip had in common that I loved was the opportunity to adopt that dive, dive, dive, dive mentality!

Thanks again for the pics! :D
 
Glad to see your report; I was interested to see how you'd like Bonaire, and it sounds like you had a good sampling of what it offers. Nice selection of dive sites. Sweet Dreams doesn't get as much press as some sites, but I found it quite lush.

Richard.
 
"[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Tahoma, Calibri, Geneva, sans-serif]Apart from limited visibility at Red Slave, all the dives were very good. I did not enjoy the entries and exits and bet that the crew would have had a quiet laugh behind my back at my clumsiness."

Yes, my wife and I have had some of those not so graceful entries and exits. I always get a good chuckle when I recall her exclamation when things go bad: "And down she goes!" Fortunately no one scores you on your entries and exists, it's your trim and buoyancy when you are under that is important. [/FONT]
 
I am sorry to hear that you are retiring from diving, you seem to enjoy it so much.

I'd try to talk you out of retiring but it's none of my business. Hopefully, it's not a forced retirement anyway.

boat
Yes, my last dive trip will be July 2016 to the Red Sea, where I have booked back to back liveaboard trips to the far north and central destinations.
The retirement was planned and not enforced. I do enjoy my diving a lot but I made a promise to my wife 9 years ago when I started diving. We put a lot of land based holidays on hold to satisfy my diving bug and it was agreed that I would dive for 10 years and retire. Afterwards, we plan to start going to all those other holdays - Inca Trail etc in Peru, Central Asian Silk Routes, Patagonia, Madagascar (not to dive), Transylvania, New Zealand etc
 
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