James Flenner's Dive Log

A beautiful dive site, this one is 'protected' from shore divers by a long expanse of shallow white sand that makes for a long kick. We dove this with scooters, that made short work of the trip. The sand is sparkling clean and pure white. This extends over the edge of the drop off into the fields of enormous Gorgonians in perfect health, and the reflectivity of the white sand makes everything bright and well-lit, adding to the amazing ambience. Make sure you grab a handful of sand off the bottom to feel just how soft it is! We dove during slack tide, and there still was an appreciable current. The scooters again made this a non-issue, but divers who were afoot reported it to be tiring. This was our top dive site for the week...until, that is, we dove Sweet Dreams.

After a week on Bonaire, we visited this because it was listed as a turtle sanctuary. We didn't find many turtles - but - we found the best dive site of the week! This dive site was in perfect health and appeared untouched. A short cruise over pure white sand at about 15' deep led to a 45 degree slope that dropped to about 130'. The slope is covered in an amazingly diverse variety of hard and soft corals. Wide fields of enormous Golden Sea Rods as well as other Gorgonians quite literally had us scribbling in our wetnotes about how amazing the view was. Good populations of fish, and the occasional pelagic topped this off to make this our #1 site of Bonaire.

I'm quite sure we dove the same site as all the other reviews, the yellow rock was clearly marked and the site was in the same order. Despite all the other glowing reports, we found a reef that was terribly unhealthy. Not much in the way of fish population, and the scenery was all the same: lots of remains of prior coral life, in many cases covered with red algae. It made us sad. The poor vis didn't help. We scootered this site extensively, headed out to the second reef, and despite exploring it to a depth of ~100' on the far side, only found a continuation of the devastation. The entry and exit was easy as was parking.