DiveMaven
Contributor
We're off tomorrow on the early Continental flight after 2 wonderful weeks in Bonaire. We racked up 50 dives and did a 1/2 day photo refresher course with Tim at Fish Eye Photo. It amazes me how spending a few hours with Tim improves my husband's photos so much. :blinking:
I've done pretty extensive trip reports in the past, so won't bother with another one here, however will remark about a few new things.
Probably the biggest and best surprise was the incredible number of fish and marine life on the reefs. We saw fish in every phase of growth, healthy reef systems, including some good sized grouper on most dives. We also saw a lot of eels which was great after last year's eel killing disease, including 3 sightings of very LARGE green morays.
For "rareish" creatures (at least for us), we saw our first Bonaire Nudibranchs(5), 2 Leopard Flatworms, 2 Mantis Shrimp, an unidentified slug/worm/nudi (hopefully I'll ID it when I get home), 4 Midnight Parrotfish, and more different types of Blennies than I remember ever seeing. There were also a few fish I've never noticed before that I'll look up in my Humann Deloach books too.
We did all shore diving, so missed seeing seahorses or frogfish, though we know the DMs were talking about finding a new seahorse and the boats were taking divers daily to those sites with seahorses. Perhaps our regular trips to Hawaii where we see Frogfish nearly daily, and just having got back from Roatan where we saw many, many Seahorses kept us from making a big effort to do any boat diving.
We WILL definitely return to Bonaire and would definitely stay at Den Laman again. We really enjoy the 1-bedroom ocean front room where Klein is always within sight and we can almost literally roll out of bed into the water every day.
I've done pretty extensive trip reports in the past, so won't bother with another one here, however will remark about a few new things.
Probably the biggest and best surprise was the incredible number of fish and marine life on the reefs. We saw fish in every phase of growth, healthy reef systems, including some good sized grouper on most dives. We also saw a lot of eels which was great after last year's eel killing disease, including 3 sightings of very LARGE green morays.
For "rareish" creatures (at least for us), we saw our first Bonaire Nudibranchs(5), 2 Leopard Flatworms, 2 Mantis Shrimp, an unidentified slug/worm/nudi (hopefully I'll ID it when I get home), 4 Midnight Parrotfish, and more different types of Blennies than I remember ever seeing. There were also a few fish I've never noticed before that I'll look up in my Humann Deloach books too.We did all shore diving, so missed seeing seahorses or frogfish, though we know the DMs were talking about finding a new seahorse and the boats were taking divers daily to those sites with seahorses. Perhaps our regular trips to Hawaii where we see Frogfish nearly daily, and just having got back from Roatan where we saw many, many Seahorses kept us from making a big effort to do any boat diving.
We WILL definitely return to Bonaire and would definitely stay at Den Laman again. We really enjoy the 1-bedroom ocean front room where Klein is always within sight and we can almost literally roll out of bed into the water every day.
