Executive Summary:
Bonaire diving: Recommended (doh!)
Captain Don's Habitat (CDH): Recommended.
Buddy Dive National Park sites boat trip: Recommended
Maduro Travel Agency: Recommended.
Overview
My wife and I made our fourth visit to Bonaire last month, staying at Captain Don's again as we had for the previous three. We returned a week or so before Tomas passed nearby, and had mostly nice diving and vacation conditions. We had some rain and overcast along with some sunny hot days, but that also meant getting to see rainbows stretching from the northern hills to Klein Bonaire while eating breakfast.
Arrived Tuesday evening, left Thursday morning after a no-dive day on Wednesday. We did 17 dives over seven days of diving, including six boat trips to Klein Bonaire, the Hilma Hooker, the Salt Pier at night, five dives on the CDH house reef, another shore dive, another night dive, and the Buddy Dive three-tank boat trip to the north end national park sites.
My report for our previous trip in December 2008 is here: http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/abc-islands/264815-trip-report-bonaire-12-2-12-12-08-a.html. While having read that isn't assumed here, I'll try not to duplicate any of the information reported there except for some really important stuff, so Bonaire newbies looking for planning information might find that an instructive read.
We didn't have my sister and brother in law along this trip, they decided on Europe instead of diving this fall. Go figure. But this meant I only had my wife to convince to try some shore diving, and we managed to do two; Angel City and the Salt Pier. She can't handle the rubble entries with gear on, but I (or Leo on the Salt Pier dive) carried her scuba unit in and out of the water, and we made it work well enough that we'll probably try some more of it next trip.
This was our first time with my wife's new toy, an Ikelite housing for her Canon S95. By our definition it was a success, since she did 14 dives taking pictures, and even a movie, with it and it didn't flood. This is a significant step for underwater photo newbies that have never put a camera in a housing before. I took along a couple of our usual 50' Kodak disposables, but after comparing her shots, even before post-processing, I may not even bother in the future. Looks like I'm going to be a photographer's buddy going forward. We'll see how that works out.
Now she gets to play with the post processing software for color correction; she shot in raw+jpg per the valued advice here on scubaboard. With a steep learning curve and several hundred images to play with, that should keep her busy until our next dive trip. The attached images are just some unedited jpgs which I may need to compress further to upload, more for exposition than any attempt to impress wrt image quality.
Our Bonaire trip segued into a visit to my wife's family near Orlando, so we were gone for three weeks, and I only had my iPod touch with me; that's why this report is a little slow showing up.
Diving
My computer recorded all bottom temperatures as either 86 or 84 degF. My wife's usually reports slightly lower, she had a few 82's and a couple of 86's. Visibility was mostly 40-50 feet. We saw pretty much all the usual Bonaire creatures except octopus and turtles. Worth mentioning was a really huge green moray at the Salt Pier, maybe 7 feet long and a foot "high" counting fin. Biggest eel I've ever seen. He didn't care for being disturbed, but just swam away into the darkness. The sponges on the pier pilings were gorgeous shades of reds, oranges, yellows, greens and blacks. See photos.
On our other night dive, off the CDH dock, we were followed on the trip back by a pair of large 6' resident tarpon that swim very close, and use our lights to hunt with, although I didn't see them get anything. We've "hunted" with these guys before, on our last trip. On the same dive, what we think was either a gray or cubera snapper about 2' long was with us the entire dive, actively chasing our lights into holes and under ledges, like a hound dog. Saw him chase a few fish, but not actually catch anything. See photo.
Many of the sergeant majors were in their blue phase during our week, visibly guarding and fanning dark patches of eggs. A few lionfish. We found both Pederson and coral banded shrimp at cleaning stations. What we think was probably a scorpionfish under a coral ledge.
There really wasn't any dive that we didn't enjoy, some were maybe a bit more memorable than others, but I almost feel it would be unfair to the other sites to try to single any of them out. I'd happily do any of them twice again tomorrow if I could. But if I had to pick a top five from this trip, it would be Tailor Made, Angel City, Salt Pier, Carl's Hill, and Hands Off.
CDH Dive operation
The CDH dive staff was mostly unchanged from our last visit two years ago. I don't have enough experience to be sure, but I'd guess that that stability is a little unusual. We had the pleasure of re-aquainting with Leo Hoogenboom, our AOW instructor from our last visit, who was a DM on several of our boat trips, and who also arranged and led the Salt Pier night dive. We also got to meet his wife Suze, who is a videographer at CDH as well as other dive operations.
The new dive shop complex has been completed since our last visit, when it was still under construction. A little roomier and nicer. The locker area is still kind of ramshackle, but better lit at night than I recall. Bring a small lock.
This was our first visit to CDH since getting nitrox certified, so I'll describe that. Nitrox at CDH requires a surcharge, we bought an unlimited use upgrade with our package. There is a cage outside the dive shop with filled nitrox tanks, maybe around 60 of them. It's locked except when the dive shop is open, 8 AM to 5 PM. This is in contrast to to air tanks, which are available 24/7. The cage has one analyzer, with a sign requesting that we don't try to calibrate it. I analyzed an air tank, which read exactly 21.0. The analyzer may be the reason the cage is locked. After analyzing a tank, we were instructed to log it, and mark it with tape with our name, dive number, %02, PSI, and if we were going to use it on a boat dive, the boat name and trip date & time. Alternatively, we could just mark it "shore". Then place it nearby, outside the cage. So you can dive nitrox 24/7, but you have to plan ahead.
When signing up for a boat dive by putting your dive number on the board, we were requested to add an 'N' if we would be using nitrox. Then the dive staff would find the appropriate marked tank in the area outside the cage and load it on the boat for you. There was no analyzer or spare nitrox tanks on the boats, but there were a few extra air tanks to save a dive if a problem was discovered at the dive site.
The %O2 mixes varied pretty widely. It's supposed to all be nominally 32%. We saw everything from 28 to 36, we usually just left the extreme outliers for someone else and tried another tank. I talked to one of the staff and was given a short tour of the nitrox fill station and process. They do in-tank partial pressure blending using large O2 cylinders that come from Curacao. They fill four at a time. There's a table on the wall that they use to guide the mix based on the starting pressure in the nominally empty tank. As an engineer, I'd say there's enough error built in to the granularity of their table, that they're filling four tanks at a time, and that they don't control for the %02 in the residue in the nominally empty tank, to see how they get can that much variability.
Maybe a bit sloppy, but it didn't really bother me as long as we could analyze what we were using. We're mostly using nitrox just for the subjective "feel-better" effect (which we both perceive as real), not for more bottom time, and we wouldn't have exceeded the MOD for even 36% on our dives, and we just didn't use the high %O2 outliers anyway. Looking at my log, I used everything from 30 to 33 %O2.
There were two boats in use, a typical 20-tank-rack dive boat "Ocean Freedom", and a larger flat-deck catamaran "Bonaire Diver" with a canopy. We were on both for our various boat trips. Two crew, one gets in the water, you can stay with the DM or not. All trips are one-tank dives, there are three trips a day, 8:00, 11:00, and 2:30, and sometimes both boats will be in use at the same time, to different sites.
They are very low key about tipping; the only thing that might be considered a request or reminder is a painted tank with a slot cut in it, discreetly out of the way against a wall in the shop. No signs with guidelines or suggestions. We inquired; they open and distribute it per written instructions, or share it evenly if there are none, at the end of the month. Cash is welcome, credit cards can be used but then there are taxes etc. that come into play. Envelopes for the purpose are available at the hotel desk. We tipped our various DMs directly for the most part, after we were done diving for the week, per the customary amounts I've seen described here on scubaboard, but added a little in the tank for the back room staff. We had brought cash for that.
An accounting of any rental or extra dive shop charges beyond the prepaid package was available for review after 3:00 PM on our no-dive day. We found it 100% correct wrt accounting. It attempted to list the sites of our boat trips, which many might find useful, but apparently when the captain decides to change that ad hoc because of conditions or whatever, that doesn't get reported back to the office, so I wouldn't trust it for log purposes.
Buddy Dive's "Washington Slagbaai Park Safari"
This is new this year, so obviously we hadn't done it before, and being limited shore divers, it was our first opportunity to dive any of the far northern sites. This is a three-tank trip; we had to be there at 7:30 AM and got back before 3:00 PM. Nitrox is included in the price if you're certified. There were two analyzers on board so we could check our tanks on the ride north. All 6 tanks my wife and I used were a uniform 30%. There's an unlocked gate between Captain Don's and Buddy Dive, so we just walked over with our gear. They asked us to bring our weights from CDH.
It wasn't peak season yet, so they were doing this trip twice a week; I assume they'll do it more often if the demand is there. We went over and did all the releases and C-card checks and payment a few days before, then just showed up and got on the boat. The boat, "Dive Buddy", is comparatively huge, I counted racks for 66 tanks in four rows. No head. We had ten divers and three crew on the trip, so it was quite roomy. The crew took turns, one in the water with us each dive. There was about a one hour SI between dives, with watermelon slices between the first and second, and lunch between the second and third. Lunch was a choice of sandwiches (enough for two each). No snacks, or drinks other than water. I had asked about that in advance, and brought my Official Captain Don's water bottle full of cold coffee, so life was good.
We traveled up to Playa Funchi, the first site, then worked our way south to Boka Slagbaai and Tailor Made. Tailor Made isn't on the official dive site map, but it is in BSDME as just south of Nukove. It was overcast (even rained a little) and a little choppy; I gather that in calmer conditions they might go to even further north sites, but we very much enjoyed what we did. Coincidentally, we had been to Playa Funchi before, but not as divers; we stopped for lunch there on our driving tour of the park on our no-fly day last trip. That was pleasant, but diving it was better.
Playa Funchi and Tailor Made were done as drift dives, and there was a noticeable current. We've done drift dives before, but never in Bonaire. Boka Slagbaai was out-and-back, from the map it's in a little bight that I guess protects it from the current.
All three dives were pleasant and interesting. Nothing out of the usual creature-wise. But Tailor Made had some spectacular large hard coral formations, like melting mushrooms, or Disney on acid. The photo is the best we had, but it doesn't do it justice because it doesn't capture the size of the landscape covered by the mushroom shapes, and I don't want to wait until my wife figures out how to post process for color correction.
I would definitely recommend this trip as something a little different for Bonaire, and could see doing the trip again on a future visit. But the boat crew mentioned something about a change of plans for this big boat, to do dives at the south end of Bonaire. I didn't get the full story, and/or they didn't know it, but it's possible that this northern trip will cease to be available at some point. I don't want to be alarmist, but thought it worth mentioning.
Bonaire diving: Recommended (doh!)
Captain Don's Habitat (CDH): Recommended.
Buddy Dive National Park sites boat trip: Recommended
Maduro Travel Agency: Recommended.
Overview
My wife and I made our fourth visit to Bonaire last month, staying at Captain Don's again as we had for the previous three. We returned a week or so before Tomas passed nearby, and had mostly nice diving and vacation conditions. We had some rain and overcast along with some sunny hot days, but that also meant getting to see rainbows stretching from the northern hills to Klein Bonaire while eating breakfast.
Arrived Tuesday evening, left Thursday morning after a no-dive day on Wednesday. We did 17 dives over seven days of diving, including six boat trips to Klein Bonaire, the Hilma Hooker, the Salt Pier at night, five dives on the CDH house reef, another shore dive, another night dive, and the Buddy Dive three-tank boat trip to the north end national park sites.
My report for our previous trip in December 2008 is here: http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/abc-islands/264815-trip-report-bonaire-12-2-12-12-08-a.html. While having read that isn't assumed here, I'll try not to duplicate any of the information reported there except for some really important stuff, so Bonaire newbies looking for planning information might find that an instructive read.
We didn't have my sister and brother in law along this trip, they decided on Europe instead of diving this fall. Go figure. But this meant I only had my wife to convince to try some shore diving, and we managed to do two; Angel City and the Salt Pier. She can't handle the rubble entries with gear on, but I (or Leo on the Salt Pier dive) carried her scuba unit in and out of the water, and we made it work well enough that we'll probably try some more of it next trip.
This was our first time with my wife's new toy, an Ikelite housing for her Canon S95. By our definition it was a success, since she did 14 dives taking pictures, and even a movie, with it and it didn't flood. This is a significant step for underwater photo newbies that have never put a camera in a housing before. I took along a couple of our usual 50' Kodak disposables, but after comparing her shots, even before post-processing, I may not even bother in the future. Looks like I'm going to be a photographer's buddy going forward. We'll see how that works out.
Now she gets to play with the post processing software for color correction; she shot in raw+jpg per the valued advice here on scubaboard. With a steep learning curve and several hundred images to play with, that should keep her busy until our next dive trip. The attached images are just some unedited jpgs which I may need to compress further to upload, more for exposition than any attempt to impress wrt image quality.
Our Bonaire trip segued into a visit to my wife's family near Orlando, so we were gone for three weeks, and I only had my iPod touch with me; that's why this report is a little slow showing up.
Diving
My computer recorded all bottom temperatures as either 86 or 84 degF. My wife's usually reports slightly lower, she had a few 82's and a couple of 86's. Visibility was mostly 40-50 feet. We saw pretty much all the usual Bonaire creatures except octopus and turtles. Worth mentioning was a really huge green moray at the Salt Pier, maybe 7 feet long and a foot "high" counting fin. Biggest eel I've ever seen. He didn't care for being disturbed, but just swam away into the darkness. The sponges on the pier pilings were gorgeous shades of reds, oranges, yellows, greens and blacks. See photos.
On our other night dive, off the CDH dock, we were followed on the trip back by a pair of large 6' resident tarpon that swim very close, and use our lights to hunt with, although I didn't see them get anything. We've "hunted" with these guys before, on our last trip. On the same dive, what we think was either a gray or cubera snapper about 2' long was with us the entire dive, actively chasing our lights into holes and under ledges, like a hound dog. Saw him chase a few fish, but not actually catch anything. See photo.
Many of the sergeant majors were in their blue phase during our week, visibly guarding and fanning dark patches of eggs. A few lionfish. We found both Pederson and coral banded shrimp at cleaning stations. What we think was probably a scorpionfish under a coral ledge.
There really wasn't any dive that we didn't enjoy, some were maybe a bit more memorable than others, but I almost feel it would be unfair to the other sites to try to single any of them out. I'd happily do any of them twice again tomorrow if I could. But if I had to pick a top five from this trip, it would be Tailor Made, Angel City, Salt Pier, Carl's Hill, and Hands Off.
CDH Dive operation
The CDH dive staff was mostly unchanged from our last visit two years ago. I don't have enough experience to be sure, but I'd guess that that stability is a little unusual. We had the pleasure of re-aquainting with Leo Hoogenboom, our AOW instructor from our last visit, who was a DM on several of our boat trips, and who also arranged and led the Salt Pier night dive. We also got to meet his wife Suze, who is a videographer at CDH as well as other dive operations.
The new dive shop complex has been completed since our last visit, when it was still under construction. A little roomier and nicer. The locker area is still kind of ramshackle, but better lit at night than I recall. Bring a small lock.
This was our first visit to CDH since getting nitrox certified, so I'll describe that. Nitrox at CDH requires a surcharge, we bought an unlimited use upgrade with our package. There is a cage outside the dive shop with filled nitrox tanks, maybe around 60 of them. It's locked except when the dive shop is open, 8 AM to 5 PM. This is in contrast to to air tanks, which are available 24/7. The cage has one analyzer, with a sign requesting that we don't try to calibrate it. I analyzed an air tank, which read exactly 21.0. The analyzer may be the reason the cage is locked. After analyzing a tank, we were instructed to log it, and mark it with tape with our name, dive number, %02, PSI, and if we were going to use it on a boat dive, the boat name and trip date & time. Alternatively, we could just mark it "shore". Then place it nearby, outside the cage. So you can dive nitrox 24/7, but you have to plan ahead.
When signing up for a boat dive by putting your dive number on the board, we were requested to add an 'N' if we would be using nitrox. Then the dive staff would find the appropriate marked tank in the area outside the cage and load it on the boat for you. There was no analyzer or spare nitrox tanks on the boats, but there were a few extra air tanks to save a dive if a problem was discovered at the dive site.
The %O2 mixes varied pretty widely. It's supposed to all be nominally 32%. We saw everything from 28 to 36, we usually just left the extreme outliers for someone else and tried another tank. I talked to one of the staff and was given a short tour of the nitrox fill station and process. They do in-tank partial pressure blending using large O2 cylinders that come from Curacao. They fill four at a time. There's a table on the wall that they use to guide the mix based on the starting pressure in the nominally empty tank. As an engineer, I'd say there's enough error built in to the granularity of their table, that they're filling four tanks at a time, and that they don't control for the %02 in the residue in the nominally empty tank, to see how they get can that much variability.
Maybe a bit sloppy, but it didn't really bother me as long as we could analyze what we were using. We're mostly using nitrox just for the subjective "feel-better" effect (which we both perceive as real), not for more bottom time, and we wouldn't have exceeded the MOD for even 36% on our dives, and we just didn't use the high %O2 outliers anyway. Looking at my log, I used everything from 30 to 33 %O2.
There were two boats in use, a typical 20-tank-rack dive boat "Ocean Freedom", and a larger flat-deck catamaran "Bonaire Diver" with a canopy. We were on both for our various boat trips. Two crew, one gets in the water, you can stay with the DM or not. All trips are one-tank dives, there are three trips a day, 8:00, 11:00, and 2:30, and sometimes both boats will be in use at the same time, to different sites.
They are very low key about tipping; the only thing that might be considered a request or reminder is a painted tank with a slot cut in it, discreetly out of the way against a wall in the shop. No signs with guidelines or suggestions. We inquired; they open and distribute it per written instructions, or share it evenly if there are none, at the end of the month. Cash is welcome, credit cards can be used but then there are taxes etc. that come into play. Envelopes for the purpose are available at the hotel desk. We tipped our various DMs directly for the most part, after we were done diving for the week, per the customary amounts I've seen described here on scubaboard, but added a little in the tank for the back room staff. We had brought cash for that.
An accounting of any rental or extra dive shop charges beyond the prepaid package was available for review after 3:00 PM on our no-dive day. We found it 100% correct wrt accounting. It attempted to list the sites of our boat trips, which many might find useful, but apparently when the captain decides to change that ad hoc because of conditions or whatever, that doesn't get reported back to the office, so I wouldn't trust it for log purposes.
Buddy Dive's "Washington Slagbaai Park Safari"
This is new this year, so obviously we hadn't done it before, and being limited shore divers, it was our first opportunity to dive any of the far northern sites. This is a three-tank trip; we had to be there at 7:30 AM and got back before 3:00 PM. Nitrox is included in the price if you're certified. There were two analyzers on board so we could check our tanks on the ride north. All 6 tanks my wife and I used were a uniform 30%. There's an unlocked gate between Captain Don's and Buddy Dive, so we just walked over with our gear. They asked us to bring our weights from CDH.
It wasn't peak season yet, so they were doing this trip twice a week; I assume they'll do it more often if the demand is there. We went over and did all the releases and C-card checks and payment a few days before, then just showed up and got on the boat. The boat, "Dive Buddy", is comparatively huge, I counted racks for 66 tanks in four rows. No head. We had ten divers and three crew on the trip, so it was quite roomy. The crew took turns, one in the water with us each dive. There was about a one hour SI between dives, with watermelon slices between the first and second, and lunch between the second and third. Lunch was a choice of sandwiches (enough for two each). No snacks, or drinks other than water. I had asked about that in advance, and brought my Official Captain Don's water bottle full of cold coffee, so life was good.
We traveled up to Playa Funchi, the first site, then worked our way south to Boka Slagbaai and Tailor Made. Tailor Made isn't on the official dive site map, but it is in BSDME as just south of Nukove. It was overcast (even rained a little) and a little choppy; I gather that in calmer conditions they might go to even further north sites, but we very much enjoyed what we did. Coincidentally, we had been to Playa Funchi before, but not as divers; we stopped for lunch there on our driving tour of the park on our no-fly day last trip. That was pleasant, but diving it was better.
Playa Funchi and Tailor Made were done as drift dives, and there was a noticeable current. We've done drift dives before, but never in Bonaire. Boka Slagbaai was out-and-back, from the map it's in a little bight that I guess protects it from the current.
All three dives were pleasant and interesting. Nothing out of the usual creature-wise. But Tailor Made had some spectacular large hard coral formations, like melting mushrooms, or Disney on acid. The photo is the best we had, but it doesn't do it justice because it doesn't capture the size of the landscape covered by the mushroom shapes, and I don't want to wait until my wife figures out how to post process for color correction.
I would definitely recommend this trip as something a little different for Bonaire, and could see doing the trip again on a future visit. But the boat crew mentioned something about a change of plans for this big boat, to do dives at the south end of Bonaire. I didn't get the full story, and/or they didn't know it, but it's possible that this northern trip will cease to be available at some point. I don't want to be alarmist, but thought it worth mentioning.
