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First of all, let's keep this debate here and out of the BMP tag price increase posting. It's more appropriate given the title of this topic.pilot fish:
As I mentioned in my post on the other topic, I was going to let this rest but I feel that you're painting such a negative picture of how things are on Bonaire that I'm compelled to respond with the opposing viewpoint - and the State of the Union is boring anyway....Nothing personal though OK?
I concur with you that there could be collusion on the part of the police force. While I don't mean to malign them, I did see a posting on bonairetalk where the poster had his laptop stolen and then recovered by the Bonaire police, which was fine except that he looked at his browser cache and found they'd been "using" it for a couple days before they called him, so something's obviously not right there.
Did you rent a car/truck on your one trip to Divi? Or is most of what you're referencing second hand? When we rented a truck, the rental co. went out of their way to have someone stay late on Sunday night to meet us and rent us a truck, this individual missed the big DiveFest wrap-up party downtown to do so, I think everyone on the island was there. He warned us about leaving the windows down and the doors unlocked rather than having us find out the hard way(and costing us money) and it was inspected both at the rental and return.
Do you know for a fact that the spare tire funds come out of your deductible or is that more second hand gossip? In our case our dive travel agent covered 100% of the deductible(part of our deal since she made a mistake on the booking) she told us there was nothing we could do to the truck that wasn't covered, which was a concern since we thought we were going up to Slagbaai park and the roads there are marginal even with a 4x4. And all we had was a little Mitsu p/u.
I admit it was a little inconvenient to not leave stuff in the truck at first, but once you get the BMP tag you never need your C-Card again, and given the small size of Bonaire and the proximity of the shore dive sites, we passed our condo 1/2 dozen times a day anyway. Plus I carry cash and a credit card in a holder that goes around my neck with the truck key when we dive, so I don't see that there's such a big incovenience. Our divestore person even told us that if we somehow had been involved in an accident, it wasn't uncommon for the police, if called, to take you back to your hotel/condo so you can get your id if necessary.
Most dives we just threw our gear in the backseat of the truck, tanks in the back and went diving. So it wasn't in gearbags, so what, it was actually easier that way and dried faster as well. We accidentally left some stuff in the truck one afternoon in town while shopping and it was all still there a couple hours later.
Frankly I'm guessing that the people buying the hot gear are probably other foreign divers. There can't be that many local divers on Bonaire and as you mentioned it's not likely they're taking it to Curacao on the ferry (which I believe quit running last summer) so they wouldn't have a market for it locally. Plus we were told not to worry about tanks being taken since all the diveops have an agreement to not buy or fill any competitors tanks, so I'm sure they don't buy questionable gear either.
I can't believe that you even met any of the dive shop owners/operators on Bonaire for you to make those comments. It's PREPOSTEROUS that any of them are involved in any collusion. A couple of them are now friends of mine and I feel that they would be insulted that anyone even suggested that. We dove with Toucan divers this trip, and although they have 2 facilities, when we dove at either one all they asked us was for our condo # for any charges at either place. Including $125 worth of brand new equipment my buddy bought. At our condo, our room key also got us into the tank and gear storage area 24/7 so we could have walked off with lots of expensive gear, including an O2 analyzer, all their weights and rental suits etc. And they had just met us for the first time that morning. So imho you're way off with that inference.
Are there theft problems on Bonaire? Sure, but much less than most places I've been to in Mexico, Maui and other "dive" locations. I think part of the problem is that the diving is so simple and people do so much of it from isolated locations on Bonaire that the amount of theft gets blown out of proportion.
There's probably much less reported theft at places like Cozumel, but that's because everybody manages their gear to and from the boats and any shorediving is typically off the resorts, where there's resort security in place. And who knows, per diver per capita maybe it's worse, I don't have the statistics and I doubt the Mexico Tourist Board publishes them either.
I live in Arizona, I can't mention the number of times I've read that cars are stolen here and wind up in Mexico. And don't get me started about the theft along the border, people living there have razor wire on top of their fences to keep the illegals from helping themselves along the way.
On Bonaire, our condos had a night watchman, but I don't think he did a lot except to ensure that people parked far enough off the main road. We had some long conversations though(Anybody who knows Butchie at BelMar knows exactly what I'm talking about)
I was told by the car rental people on Maui not to leave anything valuable in the car at certain public beach areas where there were thousands of allegedly civilized people. My family was walking in downtown San Diego one afternoon when my brother noticed two disreputable looking individuals moving towards them to possibly grab a camera or purse, they backed off when he confronted them. So maybe we shouldn't dive in Hawaii or San Diego either.
my .02 for what it's worth. I welcome your response.
Steve
