Hello everyone, following is the trip report of my trip to Bonaire last week, hope you enjoy and find it usefull.
- Wednesday 4th:After a 6 hour delay on our flight to Curacao, we arrived in Bonaire at 8:30pm aprox and to Golden Reef Inn a little later. We were picked up at the airport and our truck was waiting for us at the hotel. The condo was a very nice one bedroom (#1 actually), it was clean and in the fridge there was a set of basic groceries (fruits,water,juice, ham and cheese and bread) that was a very nice touch since we did not want to go out to eat, since we had a long day in the airport.It had an equiped kitchen (we used it to cook some breakfasts ), ceiling fan on the living room and A/C in the bedroom. bathroom was clean also, with just minor details that were fixed the next morning. It has a backdoor that leads to a "hanging or drying area" for your equipment and into the pool area and main office. The Hotel has a rinsing area as well as an area to pick and drop off tanks, and center of town is like 5 minute drive or less, so IMHO no need to stay at a beachfront hotel (unless you have some money to burn . . . or just don´t care about it, not our case!), my wife summed it as "We have everything we need here, it´s quite confortable . . ", and if she feels like that, there´s no problem for me. We prefered to use the spare $$ to set up a Nitrox Certicication for myself and an AOW for my wife, which we did through Wannadive cause it´s the dive operator the Inn uses. Anyhow we went out to diner at Pasa bon Pizza and had the Fresh Fish pizza, wich was very good, but it did take quite a long time (about 45 min) to actually get the pizza served, and we were starving . . .Then went back to sleep . . . :sleeping_
- Thursday 5th: We woke up a little late and arrived a Wannadive at Eden Beach, and they told us that we should go to their city location wich we did at about 10:30AM. We were welcomed by Jeffrey, a very nice and easygoing guy, that arranged the dives for me and my wife´s certification.The dive shop is well stocked and you could get just about everything one could need.We collected my wife´s rental equipment, a couple of tanks and arranged the navigation dive for my wife at 2:00PM at Eden. We left then to Oil Slick, my wife enter the water using the stairs and I took the leap
.Somebody just leaving told us there was a little current, but did not feel any of the sort during our dive, water temp was very nice (we were using 3mm and 2mm shortys we no problems), around 27°C,swan to the deep blue area and descended: I must say I had not seen such a beautiful underwater scene ever! Visivility was very good, and we just felt like we were in a fish tank, I may be biased since it was our first dive ever in Bonaire, but after diving a few other sites this one remained my favourite, lots of beatiful fishes.We then exited and went back to wannadive. We arrived late again at 3:00PM at Eden, and dropped my wife for her nav dive, and I went to Fisheye Photo to pickup my rental 5MP camera, and went back to pick up my wife again about 4:20 pm. She said Eden was beatiful too, although being ocupied with the navigation did not take a good look around (She saw a peacock flounder nonetheless 
). Went the to city wannadive and picked up our respective course manuals, did some talking to Jeffrey about our courses. had dinner at CasaBlanca: I had the "lomito de cerdo" and my wife had the "Casablanca pasta", both dishes very nice and the cheesecake was awesome too . . . then got back to study for our courses. - Friday 6th: The busiest day for us, We scheduled the Deep AOW dive in the morning, we did it in Town Pier, Just the day before The Queen Mary 2 was docked, and it was a treat to see it . . . The dive went without incident, visivility was very good, not that fishes as Andrea II or Oil Slick, but we got to see the only seahorse of our trip on our ascend, courtesy of jeffrey who showed it to us . . . that alone plus the fact that I was using for the first time an underwater camera made this dive very worthwhile. In the afternoon we did The Wreck Dive of the AOW in the Hilma Hooker. This was our one and only dive in the south, and it was a very nice one,vis was again very good, easy entry, got to see a lot of fishes, what I beleive was a green eel moray (not certain about the color cas other divers had moved the sand around it) and three enormous tarpons, I was very surprised cause I did not realize before hand that this animals could be this big, they were really huge, at least for me, and one being against a complete darkness provided by the inner parts of the hull, it was exiciting/scary experience and ended with a lot of good pictures (at least for my standards), a very nice dive site, and a must if you ask me, BTW Town Pier and the Hilma Hooker were the two dives required for my Nitrox certification . . . Later was scheduled the Night dive of the AOW, and we did it at The Cliff, my wife is not into night diving, and this would be her first night one, we did it with Ed from wannadive, he´s another great guy with a very nice sense of humor. We entered trough a sandy path through the corals, and descended, A very nice dive, but visibility was not all that good (compared to other sites) but still the dive was enjoyable for me, a schoolmaster followed our lights throughout the dive and got itself a lot of food thx to us, got some good pics of sleeping parrotfishes, a spotted eel moray wandering, and a coral crab and one sort of shrimp quite close that got me a good picture as well. Later my wife´s light started to fade, which wasn´t good to her state of mind, and in spite of having a back up we turned back and surfaced a little later, and although she doesn´t read this forum I am very proud of her for having conquered her fear this time . . . :wave-smil Love you baby!
I would have liked to make some more night dives, but this time it wasn´t possible . . .Kudos to Ed for making this dive as enjoyable as possible for her and me too! 
- Saturday 7th:We had scheduled only The Search and Recovery AOW dive, the last one, We hit Eden Beach (my wife´s 2nd time and my first time here), We entered the water jumping from the pier, just for the fun of it, and followed her "U" pattern, "O" pattern and liftbag exercises, while I took some pictures: got me a peacock flounder, a squid squadron, a particular kind of porcupine fish, and a few others, site was very sandy but with a lot of life to it, We were supossed to dive a nearby wreck, but there was this really/weird/strong down current wich made it quite difficult and Jeffrey decided to abort it for security reasons . . .Having finished all of our scheduled course dives, Jeffrey told us to make another one on our own to return later to the dive shop for my certification exam and knowledge review of both, We then went to Andrea II, this is the best choice we could have made, since the site is spectacular, very easy entry, shallow site no more than 15-17 wich made it our longest dive of the trip, 55 min and still ascended with 1200psi my wife and I, but one buddy had 700 psi so we had toi ended. A few guys leaving as we arrived told us they just saw a turtle, but we didn´t, what we saw was: french angels, queen angels, a beautiful and huge midnight parrotfish a all sorts of smaller fishes, no currents whatsoever . . . My wife´s prefered site of the trip . . .very very nice . . .
. . . Later Did my exam (got 22 correct out of 25, not bad . . . ) and we were awarded with our certifications (the temp ones) !! very nice, we felt really good :monkeydan. We were then on our own, and since it was close to 5 PM, we decided to do the Yellowsubmarine (at the boulevard),a very nice dive, but vis wasn´t that good, is close to the Cliff so they´re similar, a good place with lots of fish activities going on, it looked actually like a feeding frenzy, but don´t know what was going on . . . Got a few pics of spotted trunks, shrimps, flute fish, banded butterflies, and a "rare" barrel coral . . .(it was actually an oil barrel covered by seeweeds and a few brain corals haha) - Sunday 8th: since we were flying, we decided to do some snorkeling
, and decided to do 1000 Steps, this was a very nice too, and I fine choice if you ask me, visivility was very nice, a little surf, but manageable, there were a few small groups of divers, we got to see our only octopus, and we were very excited, lots of other fishes, and must concluded that this dive has got bo be a good one, on the beach we saw the tiniest hermit crab we´ve seen, it was the size of a pinky finger nail, quite cute . . .Later that day we grab our stuff and headed home with the hope that we would return very soon . . .
