BONAIRE
PART ONE:
Prologue
My mother has been trying to get my father & I to go on a dive trip for a long while now. We both got out initially pool & school work done together when we got certified, & while I tried to get him to go with me to Hawaii to wrap his certification & Fiji just to dive, he couldn’t make it work. Back in December I started the process of beginning my stress & rescue course for SSI since it was the one thing standing between me & my master diver certification, & while my dad’s dive count resided in the single digits at the time, I asked if he wanted to join as, eventually, if he too wanted to qualify for the rank of master diver, he would need it. We breezed through the school & pool bits one weekend while I was back in Kansas for Christmas with the original plan being to wrap the rest of it in Hawaii during the month of march. Naturally, that didn't happen & as our six month deadline on the course approached we needed to find a place to go finish the open water portions of our certification before the time to do so expired. Enter Bonaire.
I had never been to Bonaire, hell, I had never been to any of the ABC islands belonging to the Caribbean Netherlands, but I had always heard divers talk about it. The group that I dive with frequently out of Kansas goes there annually, as does the local shop here in Nashville. Having only six days to work with of time available to travel we set out to make the decision on where we ended up to wrap the certification. Naturally, as you’re reading a post about Bonaire, we ended up there.
The choice came down to Maui or Bonaire, both ended up being similar amounts of travel & cost so I called Elaine, who was my dive buddy in Fiji, & she called around to get opinions on where all of her fellow diver friends would recommend that we go. They all came back with Bonaire, so Bonaire is where we decided to go!
Day One
The trip started out a complete & utter mess. I’m not going to pull punches or spare any details here, because you all know I keep it real with you. There are three flights a week to Bonaire through American Airlines; Monday, Wednesday, & Saturday, that’s it! I arrived at BNA an hour prior to my flight & immediately went to check in. I’ve grown accustomed to shorter arrival times since I now have TSA Pre-Check & Global Entry, but as soon as I got to the check-in machine it sounded an alarm at me. The lady helping the kiosks told me I needed to go stand in a line to the left where there were already about ten people waiting & only one person working. I immediately started to panic.
Thankfully the line grew & two more attendants came to help. I had just been dropped off by Evan whom I called first to tell to hang around the area in case I missed my flight. I also called my dad who had just boarded his Miami bound Kansas City flight after arriving to MCI forty-five minutes prior to departure with no issues, & he began asking whether or not he needed to get off of the plane. When I got up to the desk the attendant was no help. She exclaimed that since I was under an hour for an international flight (even though I was going to Miami first with a rather long layover) that I had to reschedule & couldn't check my bag. I asked her if I could split the flights up so that I could retrieve my bag in Miami & recheck it but she was completely unwilling to even try. So I simply asked “am I still able to make the flight with a carry-on?” To which she gave me an eye roll riddled “yes.”
With it now being about thirty-five minutes before my flight I called Evan back up & told him to meet me at the curb where he’d dropped me off so that I could give him my checked bag to take back home. I immediately went out to the curb & started emptying out my bags, throwing anything from my carry on that I didn’t deem crucial into my would have been checked back & throwing anything I could grab from my checked bag into my carry on. Evan swooped in & grabbed my bag & off I went through security not even really knowing what I had with me or didn’t have with me.
When I got onto the mostly empty flight to Miami I took inventory. All that I’d managed to grab was a jammer, two regular swim suits, two pairs of over shorts, two pairs of lined shorts, & three tank tops, for a six day trip, granted a lot of that time would be spent in or under the water, but I was still going to be scrapping by.
I got to Miami before my father but met him at his gate. Once I’d gathered him we went & got a little breakfast from a small kiosk; a cortadito & a guava & cheese empanada. After finding our Bonaire gate I left to go & find a few toiletries from the duty free shopping options. I managed to get deodorant, a toothbrush, & saline with a contact case. No where had reef safe sunscreen (which yes, you should be buying) or any of the other items I would have liked to have. Again, shout out to American Airlines…
Our flight to Bonaire was pretty full. We ended up sat next to a man who was headed to Curacao to build houses or some other mission work. Though I tried desperately to sleep, it alluded me, so the flight was filled with reading & music.
We arrived in Bonaire in the afternoon, the airport is a single strip of tarmac with a path leading to the main building on the grounds that serves as the terminal. You line up outside to complete the immigration process then head into the open building to the single baggage claim to collect your luggage, of which I had none thanks to American Airlines. My father collected his bag & we went across the lot to the rental car service we’d been linked up with by Tropical Divers. Once we had our pick-up we went around the bay to where we would be staying for the weekend.
Tropical Divers is an SSI affiliate dive resort just a few minutes from the airport. It sits along the road leading to Calabas Reef & features a number of suites & apartments along with two separate pools, the occasional bar, & a full service dive shop & school. Here we met Prisca, one of the shop owners whom I had been in contact for the weeks leading up to the trip. Prisca gave us a warm welcome before giving us the run down of the resort, how the shop at the resort worked, & when/where we’d be working on our rescue dive certification. She invited us to assemble our gear & showed us how their tank rental system worked, it was here that we ran into Lewis.
Lewis was a Welsh college professor who had been leading a group out of North Carolina over the previous week in a coral restoration effort at Calabas Reef. Though most of his students had already departed on the plane that we came in on, one remained along with himself just to do some fun diving around the island. He invited us to go along on a dive with the two of them.
It’s at this point that I’m going to thrown my father under the bus a little bit, you see, up until this point in time my dad had only ever been diving in lakes & swimming pools, never the ocean. He was also using rental gear that he’d never worn before so when it came time for us to pick weights to counteract our natural human buoyancy he was under the firm belief & impression that he would only need two pounds of extra weight. I use eight to ten. Twiggy, spindly me, uses eight to ten. I tried to tell him that two was not going to be nearly enough but it fell on deaf ears so he got to spend the whole dive fighting the surface.
The dive at Calabas was a nice easing back into the flow of things. Lewis & his student took us around to show us the many coral trees they’d planted of Staghorn Coral & we meandered our way around until it was time to return to shore. During this dive I tested out a SeaLife Underwater Smartphone Case but found that the app it required greatly diminished the quality of my phone’s camera.
Back at the resort we stowed our tanks, washed our gear, & hung it out to dry. Bonaire is currently fighting a stony coral disease that has been affecting the Caribbean at large. Bonaire was the last hold out that didn’t have the disease, but mid-last year it started cropping up around the port of Kralendijk. This has resulted in the dive sites around the national park being closed as well as the island of Klein Bonaire being closed for divers. Additionally Bonaire has adopted a traffic light system. On a map of the island you’ll find all of the dive sites, any sites in green can be hopped between freely, but once you go down the light you can’t go back up so if you dive a yellow reef which means there’s been sightings of the disease, you can’t dive a green again until you go completely sanitize & dry your gear. Red is the indicator for a reef with a lot of the disease present, which Calabas Reef is. The nice thing is that if you dive a red in the morning you can still dive any of the other reds throughout the day.
After we’d gotten dried off & changed we offered to take Lewis to dinner as a return of his hospitality to us. He recommended that we walk into town & see what our options were, so that’s exactly what we did!
The walk from the resort to downtown Kralendijk was only about fifteen minutes, but we hit it right about sunset which ended up being a beautiful capstone to a rather stressful day. For dinner we chose a place called La Cantina Ceveceria, which was giving very much Los Angeles vibes. The front half of the restaurant is a brewery with the back being an open concert dining space. Here my dad & I both got the Fish Chowder, which was incredible, the we each got an order of the Fish & Chips of the Day! Additionally I got a rather well balance hefeweizen.
After dinner we walked back to the resort, the rest of our night was short lived, however, on our way back we happened to pass by The Fat Dog, a brisket spot that the woman at the rental car site had recommended. We poked in to see if we could just pay for a sample of brisket but the owner said he was out for the evening & to come back tomorrow. We said goodnight to Lewis, showered off the day & were out around 9 or 10.
End Of Day One
Day Two
We had a morning meet-up with Jack planned, I believe we were to meet him at 9 AM. Jack was to be our instructor in the course. We met him in the conference room of the dive shop where we went over the plan for our course, reviewed the material, & broke down what the two days of our open water training would look like. Our first day was meant to cover more of the stress aspect of the stress & rescue course, with the second focusing more on the rescue. After briefing we loaded up tanks & gear & drove around the corner to Calabas Reef.
Calabas basically serves as the house reef for Tropical Divers, it’s where they do the vast majority of their open water training. Our focus on stress & identifying stress in ourselves & our fellow divers so after our on shore briefing Jack started randomly implementing different “stressed out” diver situations into our dive. He would prompt my dad or me to enact a stressed diver situation & then he would also occasionally do one at random. If was the responsibility of the other person to recognize the stressed situation & react accordingly. These ranged from out of air to ears not equalizing to water in the mask to afraid of wildlife & anything in between & outside of these parameters.
I will note here that during our dive training I did not have my camera so you shall see no images of wildlife &/or humans pantomiming stress throughout the next two days of blog.
After our morning sessions we were given a thirty to forty-five minute lunch break. I had on my agenda to go & find sunscreen during this break but time didn’t allow it. For lunch we returned to The Fat Dog for Brisket Tacos which were awesome! They were a mix of flavors that bordered traditional barbecue & tex mex. Like I said, ran out of time for the sun screen, forgot we were on island time so the food took longer than expected. I’ll live to regret that later. Returning from lunch we met back up with Jack where we once again loaded up gear & tanks to head to Calabas.
At Calabas we sat by the entry & briefed on what the following dive would look like. Here is where I think the sun got me the worst. Our dive was meant to be similar in fashion to our morning dives only this time we would cap it with the beginning stages of rescue. We would get to an area in which Jack had hidden part of his dive set on the bottom & we would each lead a sweep to find & retrieve the lost items. At the point of retrieval the person who was not the leader would become the unconscious diver & we would break down the steps of retrieval. We started with the activities that occur under the water, up to bringing the diver to the surface, then next we’d do the surface to shore portion, & finally we ended with bringing the diver up onto the shore.
To be quite frank we left the day feeling a little under accomplished & a little uncertain, not from a training stand point, Jack was doing a great job, it just felt a little like the skills weren’t entirely sticking which I feel that Jack felt as well.
We stripped down our gear, cleaned it, & made off for dinner fairly beat from the day & hella sunburnt.
Dinner was a Jamaican place that Prisca recommended called Irie. Located off the side of a park & sandwiched between two other stall style restaurants, Irie offers an extensive menu of traditional Jamaican food. I got a plate of Ribs & Chicken with Rice, Plantains, & Salad, along with a fresh Ginger Beer & a shared plate of Jerk Chicken Wings. All of it was tender & outstanding & the barbecue sauce had a lovely touch of allspice to it.
Our evening was once again short lived as we were exhausted from our training. It mostly comprised of hanging gear to dry, showering, & reviewing for the next day, of which Jack had promised would be even more physically taxing.
End Of Day Two
Day Three
Jack wasn’t lying, the second day of training was rough. I got up a little before our 10 AM call to go out in search of some long overdue sunscreen. I went down the street to Carib Inn, a PADI dive resort, their dive shop had an assortment of reef safe sunscreens. Our morning dive lasted from our call time right up to lunch. During that time we did the entirety of retrieval, hauling to shore, & onto shore swapping between who was the unconscious diver & who was the rescuer. It was a workout & a half. Once you’re up on the surface you have to swim the diver to shore all while holding onto their head in place to keep their airway open, giving rescue breaths, & removing gear all while under strict timing & order.
Lunch was a recommendation from Jack called Rumba Cafe. At Rumba I got a Mango/Peach Smoothie & an Uruguayan dish called Cheviot Al Guillermo which is essentially a bunless hamburger made with Hanger Steak, a Fried Egg, & Green Olives. After lunch we ran through a few more refreshers on the stress side of the course before briefing what the last portion of the course would look like.
The last bit was meant to simulate the entire thing; getting the call for a lost diver from the dive sight, grabbing the O2 kit, getting gear together as fast as possible, arriving at the scene to interrogate the person reporting the lost diver while suiting up, finding the lost diver, bringing them to the surface, bringing them to shore, pulling them onto shore, administering CPR & oxygen, & getting things squared away with emergency services when they arrive. My dad went first taking command of the situation, assigning roles, leading the search proceeders, & doing the diver retrieval.
After we went through what went right & wrong on my dad’s turn, Jack went back out to hide the “lost diver” & immediately started my turn as he was coming back up out of the water. We both passed, though my dad had to go back through & practice a few skills before getting fully signed off on.
My one regret in not being able to have my camera during the training dives was that we came upon a Spotted Eagle Ray feasting on something in the sand. In all of my fifty plus dives I have never had the privilege of seeing an Eagle Ray in the wild, much less on so close & with such little regard to us as divers. It was on our way out to finish my final certification dive & we literally stopped the mock rescue to take in the ray for a good minute before it swam off.
As a thank you to Jack we took him out to dinner. He suggested Rum Runners because you can sit cliffside & watch the Tarpon hunt in the lights that the resort broadcasts into the water below.
While we were waiting for our table I got a King Rincon, which is a drink on their menu that apparently won best rum drink back in 2018. It features Rincon Rum, Mango, White Chocolate, a Secret Syrup, & is topped with Merengues. It smacked, kinda giving a mango white cake vibe.
The restaurant sat us right on the edge where we could watch the fish. I got the Ceviche of the Day & a Pizza Rum Runner which caught my attention because it featured Passionfruit amongst the many other ingredients on the pie. After dinner we dropped Jack at a gig he was going to with some mates & went to get Gelato.
If you couldn't have guess by the details of the day we once again had a short lived night. We slid off to bed ready to greet the next two days of diving for fun, both of us newly certified Stress & Rescue divers & myself a newly minted Master Diver!
End Of Day Three
End Of Part One