Underwater Bonaire

Diving is why most people visit Bonaire. The island is fringed by a coral reef and the seas around the island are home to more 350 species of fish and 60 species of coral.

The reefs, the beaches and the on island reserves located on Bonaire and its smaller sister island, Klein Bonaire, are under the protection of the Bonaire National Marine Park and are managed by STINAPA (Stiching Nationale Parken Bonaire).

The main island and Klein Bonaire have over 85 dive sites, mainly on the more protected west coast. Whilst a small number of these sites are accessible only by boat, most of them are just a walk in from the shore.

The sites are well documented and STINAPA produce a location map. They also indicate the sites by yellow rocks on the roadside. Whilst there, we also used an excellent guide book – Bonaire: Scuba Dive Snorkel, Surf by Reef Smart Guides (www.reefsmartguides.com). This gives clear descriptions of the sites including location, entry/exit advice and even dive plans for many of the sites.

Although there are many companies to take you diving, the island is well set up for independent diving. It is easy to hire a truck and buy tanks refills. All you do is load up your gear and drive to your chosen site. There you can kit up, enter the water and enjoy.

Over our month in Bonaire, we dived 34 times at 25 of the sites and we found that many of the sites are similar. Once in the water, there was usually a 25-100m  swim, over a flat, white sand bottom covered with small brain coral and sea plumes. Here we often saw juevenille fish, blue tang and doctor or surgeon fish. We also spotted yellow mojarra, Caribbean box crabs and, on one occasion, a feeding spotted eagle ray. Reaching the reef, the sea bed dropped away down to 30 -50m enabling divers to swim along walls of lettuce, star and plate coral.

On all of our dives, the fish life was astounding. We saw 1000s fish of hundreds of varieties – my identification skills have improved no end. We swam amongst shoals of blue and brown chromis, yellow goatfish and mahogany snapper. Everywhere we looked, there were various damsel fish, fairy baslet and more types of parrotfish than we could count. On every dive we saw large schoolmaster snapper, black margate, bar jacks, and angel fish (both French and queen).

As well as all of these, we saw more unusual looking fish – honeycomb cowfish, smooth trunkfish, scrawled filefish and, my personal favourite, the friendly porcupine fish.

After a few dives, we were eager to discover less common creatures. We were fortunate enough to see were numerous eels (spotted moray, sharp tail eel, even large green eels). There were large, inquisitive tarpons, lazy turtles, graceful spotted eagle rays and a super fast Caribbean reef shark. One careful spot was a seahorse. Every dive became like a game of underwater I Spy! The only thing that we didn’t spot was a frog fish. I am sure they were there, but they are very well camouflaged and hard to spot.