We went to Bonaire in June 1998 based on recommendations from some people we met the year before in the Caymans, plus other good feedback from someone on the scuba-uk mailing list. We were not disappointed. We arranged to stay at Captain Don's Habitat, which was originally set up way back in the late sixties when Capt Don arrived from California on his boat with some scuba gear. Captain Don is still around and gives lectures every week on the history of the place. The lecture is well worth attending as he has a dry sense of humour even though he is getting a bit doddery (well he is about 80). The accomodation consists of 'junior suites' as shown in the picture, which have a large bedroom with two double beds, a bathroom and a verandah. Or alternatively there are apartments with 1-3 rooms for larger groups. There is a restaurant serving predominantly American-style food, plus a bar which makes some great cocktails - try the Green Flash. Breakfast is $10.50 for a buffet with all you can eat; for lunch you can get e.g. a club sandwich for $6.25 or a BLT for $4.75 which is pretty filling. Evening meal was in the $10-20 range with some nice seafood on offer. If that sounds expensive the apartments have cooking facilities so you can always do your own.

To reach Bonaire from the UK we flew with KLM airlines. The route was a bit convoluted; you fly from Heathrow to Amsterdam, then stop at Aruba for refuelling, then to Curacao. Finally you get a short flight to Bonaire. The whole trip takes about 20 hours and would have been OK except that on arrival at Bonaire at 7PM we found our baggage had been lost. Now when you've arrived in a hot country after a long trip and have no change of clothes or even a swimsuit, it is no fun. Furthermore we did not get our luggage until about 10PM the following day, so it was a case of buying some emergency clothes and borrowing dive kit for the first day. KLM of course did not offer any compensation for this, and judging by the number of other bags when we collected ours it is a common thing, so pack some emergency things in hand luggage!

You have to attend a 30 minute briefing session with the usual stuff about not touching the coral, where to get tanks etc. You have to pay $10 for a marine park license, which goes to the upkeep of the diving sites (new ropes and buouys for example). They check your cert cards, amusingly I gave them my Rescue one and they still wanted to see an OW certification. If you are Nitrox certified you can then make use of nitrox fills - they do a fixed 32% mix only, which is OK for the sorts of depths of interest. The nitrox tanks are kept seperate, and you need to analyse your tank before use and record it in the log book as usual. It didn't seem like many people there were using Nitrox though. The nitrox fills cost $5 extra.

Once the paperwork is out the way, you are supposed to do a checkout dive. This just means you do a shore dive - you're not accompanied or anything. The reef starts about 30m from the dock in about 8-10m of water - around here a vast green moray about 2m long lives. There is a rope going from the top of the wall down to about 40m which makes a good navigation point for your return. The reef here is full of life - tarpon, yellow snappers, parrotfish, trunkfish plus several different kinds of morays. We did several shore dives as there was always lots to see, a good time was around 6PM when the morays started coming out for the night.

Boat dives go at 8:30, 11 and 1:30. Although it's possible to do 3 boat dives a day, you'd miss lunch if you did. Most nights there's a night dive at 6:45 just as the sun is setting too. There are several different types of boat - "Ocean Freedom is a Pro 42 jet boat which is fast and normally handles up to 20 divers. Then there is "New Joy" in the picture which is also fast, and although looking more cramped it is usually not so favoured by the US divers as it entails backward roll entries, something your UK diver is more used to. Also there was a singularly unreliable boat called "Green" plus another whose name I forget. The boats moor at the divesite buoys, and although the divemaster will tell you what you can do there, (s)he does not escort you - you are free to go and do what you want. If you want to go to 40m it's up to you. Most of the time we just dived on our own; navigation was straightforward and the currents usually light to nonexistant. One day I hired a Sea & Sea MX-10 from the dive shop which was $35/day including flash, with a reel of 36 exposure filem $6.40. The flash wasn't up to all that much but these pictures are the result.

One nice dive is the wreck of the Hilma Hooker, a 265ft long freighter in 30m water lying on her starboard. She was confiscated after the coastguard found a hidden cargo of cannabis on board, and deliberately sunk. This makes a nice dive on nitrox 32 for a longer bottom time to explore - in one section we found an enormouse green moray. With viz of 20-30m you get a real sense of the size of the wreck, whose highest point is in around 15m. All this southern section of the island has a double reef with a sandy region in between, home to thousands of garden eels who poke out of the sand looking decidedly odd.

A lot of the dive sites are off the island of Klein Bonaire, just 10-20 minutes away from Capt Don's, with names like Ebo's Special, Mi Dushi etc. They're all wall dives with probably most to see in the 10-30m range. As we were diving with our computers we were clocking up average dive times of 50-60 mins by going deep first then spending the latter half of the dive in the 10m range poking about. About 60% of the visitors were American, with about 30% Dutch and the rest Brits etc. Bonaire certainly has some spectacular diving, and is well worth a visit if you can afford it!