What is a reasonable number of shore dives to get in a day?

[happy-diver]

I would like to have what you're all having

 

[SelfDiver]

I'll be heading to Bonaire in late June for 5 days of solo diving. My hope is that by picking sites in an area, I should be able to get in 4 shore dives per day. On two of the days, I also plan to get into town in time to do a night dive with VIP Diving.

As I'm putting down notes and watching videos for each site though, I'm starting to worry that all the extra time getting past the rocks and swimming out and back from the buoys where I start the dive may be cramping the number of dives per day.

What is your all's experience with this?

My open water trips are 3 day dives and one night dive every day. It depends on how aggressive the customers want to be.
Shallow Technical trips are two per day with 50-60 meters in the morning and 30 meters in the afternoon.

Depending on when the flight gets in, I aim to do a weight/gear/general aptitude/vibe check dive - to 8 meters on the first day.
The next morning, we do three dives in rapid succession with packed lunch only. After three dives, you already got more out of your day than a regular Caribbean 2 tank dive day.
We take a break until a dusk dive. For most people, this is the first or second night dive they have ever done so it is good to enter with some light out.
For the night, have two tanks per person- one for the night dive and one for the next morning dive without needing to wait for the dive shop to open. If you are diving with VIP, you can ask for tanks to be left in the overnight dive locker.

Note on Bonaire for first timers...I tell most casual Caribbean divers to not bother with Nitrox certifications. Availability, cost and decompression difference don't justify it. But, in Bonaire...Nitrox is available, cheap and increases your total bottom time.
Since you are diving solo, plan on a larger stage/pony tank. Take a 10L instead of an AL40 and don't be afraid to use it.

 

[rmorgan]

NJight dives? When? What lunar cycle?

Box jellies.

We’ve done many night dives on Bonaire and seen one box jelly, which was not a Tamoya Ohboya (there are three species in Bonaire’s environs; the Ohboya is rare, with only three reported stings; of course, the other species are also venomous, but not crazy awful like the Ohboya)

 

[Lorenzoid]

First, it depends on whether we are staying at lodging with a house reef. If we have a reef at our lodging, it's easy to work in another dive, and end up totalling as much as five dives some days. With a house reef, an early-morning dive before breakfast is doable, and of course it's great for a night dive. How many dives we try to pack in also depends on how many days in total our trip is. If we have more days, we don't feel a need to pack the dives in.

We have alternated between essentially two kinds of trips: just my wife and me, and a larger group of friends. When it's just the two of us for a week, we have done the 4-dive a day routine (or 3 plus a night dive or early-morning dive) for a couple of days in a row, then maybe a day in between when we trek up north to the park and make a day of it, having a leisurely lunch in Rincon, and ending our trip with a couple more days of 4 dives (or 3 plus a night dive) each.

To echo what other geezers here have said, we're in our 50s and 60s now and have found that four dives PLUS a night dive feels like a lot of work, so when we do a night dive we generally don't do more than three dives during the day. Now, when we have done those trips with the larger group of friends, they have have been much more into taking it easy and making it more of a true vacation than just a dive vacation. We book a large house with a pool, we play each day by ear, and some days we have dived only in the morning and hung out by the pool all afternoon. I have really come to enjoy mixing it up betwen the dive-dive-dive trips with just my wife and the vacation-dive trips with the group of friends.

If it's your first trip to Bonaire, you'll almost certainly be gung-ho about getting in all the dives you can. So the simplest answer is that four is easily doable. On our first trip to Bonaire, my wife and I did four a day, and it was our honeymoon!

 

[scubadada]

My wife and I are now in our young 70s. We talked about a 4th dive on a couple of days but decided not to. Staying in an oceanfront 1 bedroom in Den Laman, it was not difficult to spend the late afternoon sitting out on the balcony, watching the ocean in front of Klein Bonaire, sipping a cold beer.

Bari Reef is a fantastic house reef and being able to use the Sand Dollar/Den Laman pier sure makes it easy.

 

[NDL_Diver]

I guess it depends on your age and how many dives you have done. We used to strive for 4 to 5 (pack a small cooler for sandwiches and pop/water) when young and not so many dives logged. As we aged and got more dives under belt (over 800 nowmore or less) we tend to do less and less. 3 dives in a day now is max, 2 being the most often outcome but we also stay for 3 or 4 weeks. We like to stop and smell the coffee in AM and have an adult beverage in afternoon.

 

[tarponchik]

In Bonaire or Curacao I often did 5 when I was younger but now I limit to 3 or maybe 4 on a good day. In Hawaii I never did more than 3 (longer walks with the gear, longer surface swims, challenging entrance/exits grind me down).

 

[wwguy]

I'll be heading to Bonaire in late June for 5 days of solo diving. My hope is that by picking sites in an area, I should be able to get in 4 shore dives per day. On two of the days, I also plan to get into town in time to do a night dive with VIP Diving.

As I'm putting down notes and watching videos for each site though, I'm starting to worry that all the extra time getting past the rocks and swimming out and back from the buoys where I start the dive may be cramping the number of dives per day.

What is your all's experience with this?

Today marks the 28th anniversary of our first visit to Bonaire as fairly inexperienced Open Water divers back in 1997. Since then we've returned 20+ times and have enjoyed spending over a year's worth of accumulated time living and diving on the island. At last tally my logbook showed I was nearing 500 hours of Bonairean bottom time, which I'll no doubt pass during the 3 week trip we've already booked for next winter.

We haven't felt the desire or need to dive from boats on Bonaire since 2003. That's not because boat diving on Bonaire isn't great, because it certainly is. It's simply because the flexibility and autonomy of self-guided shore diving on Bonaire is unlike any other dive destination in the world. Shore diving on Bonaire allows us to dive where we want (within marked BNMP boundaries), when we want, with whomever we want, and for as long as we want, or as long as we can within the limits of our gas supply, no deco limits, and tolerance to water temps that are 15 to 20 degrees F cooler than our body core temperatures etc.

With all that in mind, my experience—since you asked—has been that time in the water beats the number of times in the water hands down every time.

Put differently, I think the more practical question to ask is "How can I reasonably enjoy as much bottom time as possible during each diving day?" rather than "How many dives can I reasonably dive each day?"
The great thing about self-guided shore diving is that you get to choose your own dive profile, manage your own gas supply, and dive at the pace best suited for your own skills, physical condition, gas consumption rate, and dive objectives. I.e. unlike with boat diving, especially for newer divers, there's no pressure or requirement to follow a Dive Master, follow his/her profile, or terminate the dive early because somebody else in the group consumed their air too quickly etc.

With the exception of the novelty of diving the Hilma Hooker wreck and the nearby double-reef system in that area, I typically dive from the crest or shoulder of the reef at 20-30' down to around 70-80' max. According to my computer, my average depth while diving on Bonaire is usually in the 45'-55' range. Sure I can dive deeper profiles than that, and sometimes I do if there's a valid reason.

However, the deeper I dive, the faster my gas is consumed, and the shorter my bottom time. The same thing happens when I exert more energy during a dive, such as when diving into current, trying to keep up with other faster divers, diving with poor trim or inefficient kicking, or wearing insufficient thermal protection.

I'm 6'2" and 220 lbs. When I first started diving Bonaire all those years ago I wore a 3mm shorty wetsuit with 8lbs. or so of weight, and my average bottom time was 48 minutes per dive. Nowadays I wear a 5mm full suit with a neoprene beanie, 16 lbs. of lead weight, and average 85 minutes on an 80 cubic foot tank of nitrox when solo diving.

The trick is to dive slow enough to see everything, stay warm, dive a moderate profile (I usually try to stay above 70', especially when solo diving, which is easy to do on Bonaire,) and avoid unnecessary exertion.

Some simple example math:
4 dives x 60 minutes = 240 minutes.
3 dives x 80 minutes = 240 minutes
4 dives x 80 minutes = 320 minutes

It's also worth noting that fewer dives means less precious time spent on entries and exits, surface intervals and swapping tanks etc.

 

[BigDaddyGlad]

I just got back last week. We got 17 dives done over six diving days, and still had our evenings to enjoy some of the great dining available on the island. We could have done more, but we are all in our late 50s/early 60s, and waking up at 7:00 just to rush out to the dive site wasn't appealing to any of us. We got up naturally around 8, had a nice leisurely breakfast outside on our villa's deck, and typically got into the water for our morning dives by 10:00. Some days we did an afternoon dive, some days we did a night dive. Some days we took the afternoon off to explore the island. None of our group felt we missed out on any dives, or that we overdid it.

I think 3, 50+ minute dives every day is an easily achievable number of dives. As others have said, if you just want to pound dives, you could do 2 in the morning, 2 in the afternoon for 6 days and get in 24 dives over the week, more if you skip dinner and do night dives.

 

[dmaziuk]

It's worth remembering that DSAT folks bent one of their test subjects after 2 days of 6 dives per 08:00 to 21:00-day chamber dives. While that is unlikely to happen on typical Bonaire profiles and using a computer, I'd still keep it in mind when considering more than 5/day.