Diving in Bonaire in 2009

In early March 2009, we went to Bonaire for a week of diving. We stayed at the Sand Dollar resort, where we rented an apartment. Part of the reason for the trip was to make video transects at Karpata for one of Angela’s research projects.

For diving, we rented tanks and weights from Bonaire Dive and Adventure, which was located just next to Sand Dollar and if I remember well, they had a very convenient tank drive through where we could go and exchange tanks multiple times a day. We would load up fresh ones on our rented white Toyota pickup truck and head off for another dive. Good times.

That year we did our Nitrox course with Marco Pel at Bonaire Dive and Adventure, and after starting breathing enriched air, we have never looked back.

I wore a 3mm wetsuit and used 14 lbs of lead. The bottom temperatures recorded by my Suunto dive computer ranged from 26 to 28 degrees Celsius. In my log book there are comments about being cold and miserable underwater in the dives where the temperature was 26 degrees. Overall the log entries from this trip are quite sparse as after three of four dives, often from shore, and having to deal with all our gear and preparing meals, there was just not enough energy left to write commentary. Even trying to get through the photos of the day, after dinner, was enough to put us all to sleep.

This time I brought two new lenses, a 12-24mm Nikkor and a 35mm, both of them to be used with the new Ikelite 8 inch acrylic dome I had recently acquired. The 35mm lens is unusual in underwater photography, in that it’s not quite wide angle enough to capture scenery, and it’s not quite long enough to close up on small subjects. I did find, though, that it was very good for those mid-size subjects like octopus, parrotfish, tarpon, and so on, which usually measure a couple of feet or more. It’s also good for diver portraits that include more than the mask and the regulator.

The 6 inch acrylic dome was, however, a fail when used with the 12-24mm wide angle lens. It causes a lot of distortion at the edges, which often required extensive cropping, thereby reducing the effective field to what you would get with the 35mm lens behind the same dome.

Photos from that trip: Best of Bonaire 2009