Bonaire, Dutch West Indies: Undercurrent 08/2026

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Dear Fellow Diver,

With more than 50 accessible shore diving sites, Bonaire is a serious diver's mecca. No need to join a dozen rookie divers on a crowded boat to sites that have been dived daily for half a century. Get a car, get a shore diving map, rent tanks, and do what the hundreds of diving expats do who live on Bonaire -- dive at your leisure, as this long-time Undercurrent travel writer has been doing each summer for three decades.

- Ben Davison

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View from Rum Runners The places to which we travel are always changing, but one hopes that beloved places retain the qualities that make them special. Bali, for example, has become crowded and touristy, but parts of the island remain quintessentially Balinese. The same is true of Bonaire, where I have a second home. The island has transformed, but its laid-back charm abides if you know where to look.

After 33 years, I still love diving in Bonaire. Most of my diving is with Captain Don's Habitat, a dive operation I love. But divers I know tell me good things about Divi Flamingo, Buddy Dive, Carib Inn, VIP Divers, Dive Friends, and Bonaire East Coast diving.

When lionfish first appeared in Bonaire around 2010, it looked to me like the general fish population went down. Now that lionfish are popular menu items, there seem to be fewer, a blessing since a single lionfish can eat 60 juvenile fishes per day.

Be prepared for some real variation in seasonal water temperatures. November-March can be chilly, as low as 74°F. When I arrived in mid-May, the water was 78°F, and I broke out an extra jacket and hooded vest to wear with my wetsuit; now it is late June, and it's 81°F. High summer into October usually sees the warmest waters, from 83-86°F. It is often cooler than you might expect for someplace so close to the equator.

Bonaire Map In addition to the usual suspects -- parrotfish, trumpetfish, Creole wrasse, tarpon -- there are plenty of the weird and wonderful. In the past few weeks, I have found a pair of striated, or hairy, frogfish (Antennarius striatus) at a shore dive site north of town (kept a secret by locals), as well as a few longlure frogfish. My dives at Joanna's Sunchi on Klein Bonaire, reached only by boat, seemed to have it all: huge sponges, large soft corals and sea fans waving in the surge, and an interesting array of Reef Renewal's "planted" aluminum trees growing elkhorn and staghorn corals in 20 feet. I watched slender filefish migrate from one soft coral to another as their colors changed to match the hues of their host. A tiny peacock flounder, snowy white save for its faint blue markings, eyed me from the sand. A visibly pregnant male seahorse curled its tail around a sponge, swaying back and forth. When a loggerhead turtle, encrusted with barnacles, swam by, I thought I had seen it all. But then my buddy signaled that she had found a red-lipped batfish hiding beneath a soft coral at 16 feet! Its triangular body blended perfectly with the sand, but its red lips and bright eyes gave it away. A small orange mantis shrimp glared at me from another coral head, not bothering to hide (in my log, I deemed it "saucy"), and nearby a pair of web burrfish nestled in a convex coral head, cuddled up like a pair of lovers....

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