Final few weeks on Bonaire

We are leaving Bonaire for Tobago tomorrow so thought I should write a summary of what we've been up to in the last few weeks. Mostly we've been diving.

We have picked up a couple of dive buddies along the way. Lutz from Germany whose wife is a snorkeller and Eloy from Holland who is here alone. We dived with Lutz for about 2 weeks and explored various sites together. He was a pleasure to dive, drink and eat with!

A couple of weeks ago Hurricane Tomas passed by to the North and brought with it a lot of rain. The after effects changed the usual wind direction making the usually calm west coast dangerous to dive due to a lot of surge and unpredictable currents. The bigger waves also stirred up the sand making visibility much worse than usual, particularly in the shallows. However, the change in wind direction alos meant that the usually rough east coast was calm enough to dive. So we did several east coast dives. These dives had a very different underwater landscape and distribution of life than the west coast.

We saw many more eagle rays than on the west coast and also some Southern stingrays that we hadn't seen before. There were also large schools of grunts, goatfish, margate and chub which do not appear on the west coast. At Sorobon dive site many turtles live and we did 3 dives on which we lost count of the turtles we saw. Fantastic!

We also had the opportunity to dive the far north dive sites on the island, Candyland and Tailormade. This seems to be the only part of the island where the hard coral still grows right up to the coast (everywhere else storms have destroyed it) and there are huge towers of hard coral. We saw many barracuda here and also less common fish such as ocean and queen triggerfish.

Another interesting thing about Bonaire is that it is a cruise ship stop. Every few days the island's small population swells by several thousand when a cruise pulls into port. These ships can be seen from almost anywhere on the island and are far taller than any building!

In total I have done about 25 days diving on Bonaire and about 70 dives. We definitely haven't seen everything and would love to come back and do more diving here. Bonaire really is "diving freedom". Pick up some tanks, throw them in the truck, drive to a dive site and get in the water!