Thanks everyone. We did end up using Bonaire Dive and Adventure (BDA) just because they were the shortest walking distance to where we were staying. I'm not sure if I would use them again. I didn't find that they had very good customer service. Their posted hours for Nitrox are 8:30a - 4:30p. My wife and I showed up the first day at 4:15 to pick up our nitrox tanks, and they were locking up the tanks. We asked if we could get Nitrox tanks and we were actually scolded by the person that we needed to be there by 4:00pm to get our tanks because "it takes a while to lock up the facility." No one ever mention this to us when we paid for the air/nitrox package. Then, she was rushing us to analyze the tanks. After I grabbed 2 tanks she locked up the nitrox tanks while I was testing them. I calibrated the analyzer and measured the first tank which came out to 32%. When I analyzed the second tank, it displayed 37%. She said that this was because the analyzer needed to be recalibrated. Rather than unlocking the tanks or recalibrating the analyzer, she told me just to write down 32% for the mix. I did so and then just put the tank in a locker and re-analyzed it the next morning. It came out to 32.x%. While the Nitrox system that they have is very good and keeps the mixture between 31-32% (at least that was true for all 62 tanks we used), I’m not going to bet my life that this system will never fail. What’s the purpose of analyzing a tank if you are going to circumvent the analyzer’s reading?
This was a single incident from a single individual. While I feel that it was careless (and potentially reckless) for her to take this shortcut just to leave a minute or two earlier, I don’t judge the entire dive op based on one individual. Overall, I just got the feeling that they focused more on making sure that the “Closed” sign was displayed on the dive shop door at 4:30pm than they did on customer service. A few others I spoke to had similar experiences. There were some exceptions and a few of the people were nice and helpful. Waldo does a great job of repairing equipment and Jerry Ligon’s Naturalist course was excellent! I wouldn’t say that they are a bad dive op, but they definitely have some room for improvement. If you are going to use them, here are some tips and things to consider.
1. Bring your own O-rings and a removal/replacement tool. Twice I had to miss a dive because the tank O-rings wouldn’t seal and they were leaking too much to dive with. I wasn’t able to hear the leak during the pressure check because the compressors were running. The dive shop was closed by the time we got back to it so I had to wait until the next day to get the O-ring replaced.
2. If you live by their 2-tank per person rule, it severely limits your diving. We go to Bonaire because of the diving freedom it provides with the excellent shore diving. We want to be able to dive on our schedule. We tried to abide by this rule at first, but we did a significant amount of diving on the south side of the island. It’s not a huge island, but it was a hassle having to drive back 30 minutes each way to swap out tanks, not to mention a waste of fuel. By the end of the week, we noticed that they were not running low on Nitrox tanks so we always grabbed some extras for the truck and stashed some in the lockers for our evening/night dives. No one ever said anything to us about it, but it would be interesting to know if anyone else has ever been confronted about taking more than 2 tanks from BDA.
I got in 31 dives over 12 diving days, so I didn’t do too bad considering that we had a few equipment issues during the trip that we had to fix. I hope these tips help others to maximize their dive trips.
