nippurmagnum
Contributor
Just returned from my sixth trip to Bonaire, from January 3-10, 2025. My wife calls Bonaire her "happy place" and we enjoy the island's laid-back culture and freedom of diving. On this trip, we did 15 dives, from Red Slave in the south, to Tailor Made in the north, to the East Coast, and while we found much to enjoy, we came away feeling sad about the state of the corals. I thought I would share a few observations:
1. Throughout the island, the hard corals have gone from bad to worse, and from worse to dead. My previous trip was in January 2024, and there was widespread evidence of SCTLD and bleaching. This time around, there was much less sign of SCTLD and bleaching, but that's because there was just a lot of dead coral, covered in algae. We chatted with some first-time divers to the island who thought that corals seemed healthy, because they saw coral structures with no visible signs of bleaching -- but I think they were just equating "structure" with "alive." For instance, we chatted with a couple after a dive to Invisibles, who thought that the corals at the 50 foot level on that site were "not bad." My wife estimated that the hard corals were 80-90 percent dead.
2. The hard corals were particularly bad on the East Coast, which was heartbreaking, as corals on the East Coast were just pristine 7-8 years ago.
3. Staghorn corals, which were still very much thriving a year ago, are now mostly dead -- in the south, in the north, and the East. That was perhaps the saddest thing I saw this year.
4. In terms of animal life, the East Coast still provides some outstanding diving, with turtle cleaning stations, aggregations of tarpon, southern stingrays, seahorses, pelagics of various stripes, etc.
5. East Coast Divers has lost two of its longtime guides, Sid and Martin, who are still on the island but are now doing their own guided trips. But the company still provides pretty much the same service, with different guides. I would still recommend them. One thing the current guides mentioned on this trip is that while the turtle population on Bonaire is still very high, they are starting to eat up all the seagrass, which might put a limitation on their numbers.
6. On the west side, the southernmost sites still have some gorgeous soft corals, and the northernmost sites still have some relatively abundant live hard corals. They are more challenging to access and to dive, and not for beginners, but they are decidedly better than the dive sites in the middle of the island. Even in those better sites, the damage was impossible to ignore.
It's hard to complain about a place where we were able to do 15 dives, including two boat dives, at a cost of $300 a person, where we rented a truck for $300 a week, and stayed in comfortable accommodations for $80 a night, where we befriended fellow divers and enjoyed many laughs and good cheer, and where the weather was gloriously sunny pretty much the whole week, even during the Bonaire "winter." For my wife and me, Bonaire is one of the attractive and most accessible dive destinations, because we can fly essentially for free with frequent flyer miles, and catch an early morning flight and be diving the same day. WIth all that said, we really were taken aback by how much the corals have declined over the last two years, and that cast a sad cloud over an otherwise pleasant trip.
1. Throughout the island, the hard corals have gone from bad to worse, and from worse to dead. My previous trip was in January 2024, and there was widespread evidence of SCTLD and bleaching. This time around, there was much less sign of SCTLD and bleaching, but that's because there was just a lot of dead coral, covered in algae. We chatted with some first-time divers to the island who thought that corals seemed healthy, because they saw coral structures with no visible signs of bleaching -- but I think they were just equating "structure" with "alive." For instance, we chatted with a couple after a dive to Invisibles, who thought that the corals at the 50 foot level on that site were "not bad." My wife estimated that the hard corals were 80-90 percent dead.
2. The hard corals were particularly bad on the East Coast, which was heartbreaking, as corals on the East Coast were just pristine 7-8 years ago.
3. Staghorn corals, which were still very much thriving a year ago, are now mostly dead -- in the south, in the north, and the East. That was perhaps the saddest thing I saw this year.
4. In terms of animal life, the East Coast still provides some outstanding diving, with turtle cleaning stations, aggregations of tarpon, southern stingrays, seahorses, pelagics of various stripes, etc.
5. East Coast Divers has lost two of its longtime guides, Sid and Martin, who are still on the island but are now doing their own guided trips. But the company still provides pretty much the same service, with different guides. I would still recommend them. One thing the current guides mentioned on this trip is that while the turtle population on Bonaire is still very high, they are starting to eat up all the seagrass, which might put a limitation on their numbers.
6. On the west side, the southernmost sites still have some gorgeous soft corals, and the northernmost sites still have some relatively abundant live hard corals. They are more challenging to access and to dive, and not for beginners, but they are decidedly better than the dive sites in the middle of the island. Even in those better sites, the damage was impossible to ignore.
It's hard to complain about a place where we were able to do 15 dives, including two boat dives, at a cost of $300 a person, where we rented a truck for $300 a week, and stayed in comfortable accommodations for $80 a night, where we befriended fellow divers and enjoyed many laughs and good cheer, and where the weather was gloriously sunny pretty much the whole week, even during the Bonaire "winter." For my wife and me, Bonaire is one of the attractive and most accessible dive destinations, because we can fly essentially for free with frequent flyer miles, and catch an early morning flight and be diving the same day. WIth all that said, we really were taken aback by how much the corals have declined over the last two years, and that cast a sad cloud over an otherwise pleasant trip.
