I enjoyed Dive Hut, and wrote
a trip report from my stay. But if you're traveling with a buddy, both new to Bonaire and no group, I'd tend toward Buddy Dive. Truck rental is onsite, they get you from & return you to the airport, breakfast buffet is included, dive boats are there if you want to use them, and they've got a fine house reef which you can enter/exit easily using steps from their piers.
1.) Get thick-soled boots (not 'booties'). SeaSoft Sunrays are popular for this. Walking on rough, at times jagged, iron-shore while geared up can damage your feet. And it can hurt for weeks afterward, in my experience.
2.) To enter, run your arm through your fin straps and walk in to chest deep water before you put your fins on. To exit, do the reverse. Do not try to 'duck walk' in or out of a dive site in Bonaire.
3.) Rental trucks are manual transmission ('stick'). It costs around $150 extra for an automatic, and you'd better let them know if you want one in advance. Bonaire traffic isn't bad, but do you really want to drive a stick in a foreign country you're visiting for the first time,
if you're not used to driving a stick?
4.) Get nitrox certified before you go. A number of places offer nitrox as a free upgrade.
5.) 8 To 10 Dives? I'd be downcast if I only got 10 (like going to a buffet and eating half a sandwich). I aim for 16 to 22 dives on a Bonaire trip. Other activities include kite boarding, windsurfing (at Lac Bay), driving through Washington-Slagbaai Park taking photos, touring the donkey sanctuary, some other things, but Bonaire is famous for 'dive-dive-dive' vacations.
6.) Yes, you should do unguided shore dives; high viz., minimal current, diving very near shore and with shore exit it's fine at the right sites. Windsock (the site, not the resort) has a big pier sticking out into the water; if you pop up a hundred feet or so up or down the shore line, no big deal. I would aim for the southern dive sites at 1'rst, since the south is flatter and the odds of popping up someone you can't exit are less. Similarly, the house reefs at Buddy Dive, Captain Don's Habitat, Beach Comber Villas or Dive Hamlet (if the latter two use The Cliff, as I recall?) should be quite easy to handle, even if you're lousy at navigation.
Here's my typical Bonaire shore dive. Truck gets parked with the rear facing the water. Drop the tail gate, gear up, leave nothing in the truck, windows are down & the doors unlocked so vandals can see there's nothing to steal & don't break windows.
Walk in to chest deep, put on fins, swim out to the reef drop off; might be 20 or 30 feet deep. I'm looking at what looks like an underwater hillside, sloping down at maybe 45 degrees (give or take), with hard coral growth, gorgonians, etc...kinda like somebody planted bushes and flowers on a field of boulders.
I swim down around 40 feet deep, hover and try to figure out which way the current is flowing. It's slight, but I see particulates or gorgonians telling me the direction, so I turn and swim into it, heading parallel to the island at a fairly constant depth. With an AL 80, starting with maybe 2900 PSI, might get down to 1600 or so. Turn, swim up to around 30 feet deep, & head back. Along the way, I head up to around 15 feet, and do my 3 minute 15 foot safety stop as I swim back (shallower and faster than I headed back, so my gas lasts).
I'm one of those 'low situational awareness' types who can't recognize much of anything underwater, so unless there's a big pier like at Windsock to guide me, once I'm back around 900 PSI or so and shallow, I'll pop up and look around for the exit. I'm fairly close to shore; don't want to do this way out, since I'm not using an SMB and don't want a boat parting my hair. From here, I can see about where to go, and start making my way home.
There are dive sites were you need to nail the exit closer than that. At Aquarius, my wife got sea sick, and insisted on exiting the water
now. For reasons I still don't fully understand, that meant I had to exit, too (we had a friend with us). Which meant crawling over rough rock and scraping my leg badly. There was a nice, easy sand channel entry/exit, if you had time to hunt it.
My vote would be stay at a resort with a house reef such as Buddy Dive, do a few dives there, then go up the road a bit & dive The Cliff, and head a good ways south and dive Windsock. I don't think you need a guide for any of this.
At the end of the week, when you gas up your truck before turning it in, get ready for some pain. Last time I was there, $77.38, and that doesn't count the 3% international transaction fee my bank card tacks onto all my purchases there.
Oh, did you know about international transaction fees?
Richard.
