Bonaire, December 2017
Posted: Tue Mar 13, 2018 6:36 pm
Since there has been a pretty epic run of trip reports the last few days, I figure I'd throw another out there from our trip this past December to Bonaire. We did the standard 6 days of diving + 1 day of sightseeing (and 2 full days of travel) the second week of the month, after finding fairly cheap flights from Vancouver. We stayed at an excellent Air BnB across the street from Captain Don's and did the weekly tank rental package through Goodive just down the street. I'm pretty sure that doing the ala carte routine didn't save us that much money over a standard resort shore dive package, so if (when) we return we will probably simplify and stay at Buddy Dive or something similar.
We ended up doing mostly 3 dives a day and totaled 18 total over the trip. This seemed to be a good balance between diving our faces off and still maintaining a relaxed pace to enjoy the tropical sun and the island life. The main highlight of the trip for me was seeing my wife have it "click" for her the 2nd day. She was certified years ago but has been diving so infrequently that she has never been able to actually relax and enjoy it. She also gets very nervous about sea sickness, and has never been motivated to dive more since so many great dive locales are accessed by boat. After we resolved some mask and mouthpiece issues from the first day, she found two seahorses at the start of diving on day 2 and proceeded to relax and enjoy every minute spent underwater!
My favorite sites we dove were Karpata (unbelievable reef structure), Invisibles (should be named Incredibles after so many epic creature sightings), Red Beryl North (seahorses!) and the Lighthouse (Shark! Moray! Another Moray!!!) at the south tip of the island. Other highlights included a nightdive on Buddy's house reef with the huge tarpon shadowing us, a morning dive at Andrea 2 chasing around beautiful hamlets and huge schools of blue tang, and having a giant rainbow parrot fish keep visiting us while exploring the Hilma Hooker. The only lowlight of the trip was leaving my backup camera battery in the charger.... on my wall at home...... so no photographic evidence of most of the highlights was produced!
We spent our last day doing the traditional drive up around Washington Slaagbai park, watching turtles get tossed around in the waves and cliff jumping at Boka Slaagbai.
This was my first tropical vacation centered around diving, and it couldn't have been any more fun. Being able to sleep in every morning and casually dive on our own schedule was pretty incredible. As most of you know, Bonaire is a required bucket list trip, and I'm sure that we will be returning again sooner than later.
We ended up doing mostly 3 dives a day and totaled 18 total over the trip. This seemed to be a good balance between diving our faces off and still maintaining a relaxed pace to enjoy the tropical sun and the island life. The main highlight of the trip for me was seeing my wife have it "click" for her the 2nd day. She was certified years ago but has been diving so infrequently that she has never been able to actually relax and enjoy it. She also gets very nervous about sea sickness, and has never been motivated to dive more since so many great dive locales are accessed by boat. After we resolved some mask and mouthpiece issues from the first day, she found two seahorses at the start of diving on day 2 and proceeded to relax and enjoy every minute spent underwater!
My favorite sites we dove were Karpata (unbelievable reef structure), Invisibles (should be named Incredibles after so many epic creature sightings), Red Beryl North (seahorses!) and the Lighthouse (Shark! Moray! Another Moray!!!) at the south tip of the island. Other highlights included a nightdive on Buddy's house reef with the huge tarpon shadowing us, a morning dive at Andrea 2 chasing around beautiful hamlets and huge schools of blue tang, and having a giant rainbow parrot fish keep visiting us while exploring the Hilma Hooker. The only lowlight of the trip was leaving my backup camera battery in the charger.... on my wall at home...... so no photographic evidence of most of the highlights was produced!
We spent our last day doing the traditional drive up around Washington Slaagbai park, watching turtles get tossed around in the waves and cliff jumping at Boka Slaagbai.
This was my first tropical vacation centered around diving, and it couldn't have been any more fun. Being able to sleep in every morning and casually dive on our own schedule was pretty incredible. As most of you know, Bonaire is a required bucket list trip, and I'm sure that we will be returning again sooner than later.