A shore thing in Bonaire

By Jad Davenport

updated 2:31 p.m. ET April 21, 2008

It was a romantic October night on the pier at Buddy Dive Resort, a PADI Five-Star Gold Palm Resort in Bonaire. A hunter’s moon was up; the lights of nearby Kralendijk Harbor winked between the coconut palms; and the Caribbean Sea was a sultry 84 degrees. And a small crowd had already gathered around the schedule for the live sex shows that had just been posted next to the equipment rental office. It was a simple spreadsheet that listed the five acts and their starting times. Leave it to this little Dutch territory, I thought, to inject a bit of Hanseatic organization into the wild thing.

I’d come to Bonaire — a sliver of land shaped like a batfish dashing from the coast of Venezuela for the open Atlantic — to sample what was rumored to be a diver’s paradise. In fact, it says so right on their cute little yellow license plates: “Bonaire, N.A. — Divers Paradise.” Instead I’d stumbled into the greatest free-love event in the world.

I’m talking, of course, about the annual coral spawn. Twice every autumn when the tides and moon and water temperatures are stirred into the perfect aphrodisiac cocktail, the southern Caribbean Sea becomes one of the sexiest places on the planet as hard corals, soft corals, echinoderms, worms and even sponges let their exoskeletons down (no, not literally) and have a little fun.

And so, as the other divers made their plans, I glanced at my watch and ran a finger down the chart. It was just past 9 p.m. The large cup star corals were due to go on stage at 9:30. Perfect. I grabbed a tank, kitted up and duck-walked down the pier steps into water as black as any Amsterdam nightclub. I was back in an hour. Sadly — and despite their name — the star corals failed to perform. So I rinsed off my gear and headed back to my room, as frustrated as a West Point freshman.

They saved paradise
A crooning Joni Mitchell joined me the next morning after a restless sleep. The Caribbean was dull and flat and breakfast was hours off, so I decided to make a loop around the northern half of the island to try and spot some of the pink flamingos that outnumber the 12,000 Dutch and Papiamento-speaking locals. I hopped in the dual-cab Toyota pickup (the tank rack in back came standard) and clicked on the radio. Shortly after the outskirts of town gave way to an ironshore coast crusted with a 5 o’clock mesquite-brush shadow, I was singing along to Mitchell’s 1970 environmentally defeatist hit, “Big Yellow Taxi,” and pondering paradise.

Bonaire listings Kids Sea Camp at Buddy Dive Resort Tourism of Bonaire Dive Centers Bonaire Dive and Adventure Toucan Diving Yellow Submarine Dive Resorts/Hotels Belmar Diving Bruce Bowker’s Carib Inn Buddy Dive Resort Captain Don’s Habitat Caribbean Club Bonaire Divi Flamingo Beach Resort & Casino Plaza Resort Bonaire Sand Dollar Condominium Resort

“Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. They paved paradise and put up a parking lot …”

In Bonaire, I learned, they really did save, rather than pave, their paradise. Eight years before Mitchell sang about paradise lost in Hawaii, a 37-year-old California sea gypsy named Don Stewart dropped anchor off Bonaire and was inspired to pen a few lyrics in the log of his twin-masted schooner the Valerie Queen.

“Bay like glass, a spectrum of shimmering blues, extraordinarily clear. To the north a craggy silhouette of small mountains sloping southward to a flat spit of coral-rimmed beach,” he wrote. “Brilliant tropical fish of all varieties. Looks to be a fantastic underwater island.”

Conservation hadn’t come calling in the Caribbean yet; divers slung spearguns and snapped off elkhorn coral souvenirs. But Captain Don had fallen hard for Bonaire. He set up a dive resort — Captain Don’s Habitat — and began advocating reef protection. A serendipitous meeting with Dutch KLM executive Carel Steensma, an avid diver and a personal friend of His Royal Highness Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, snowballed into the creation in 1979 of the Bonaire National Marine Park.

Jad Davenport / Sport Diver A watercolor sunset off the salt pans.

Today, all 6,671 acres of beach, reef and sand from the high-tide line to the 196-foot depth mark are completely protected. There are 86 official snorkeling and dive sites, virtually all accessible from shore. All but two fringe Bonaire’s west coast and surround the islet of Klein Bonaire, just half a kilometer west of Kralendijk.

Everybody who touches the water here pays the annual Nature Fee — $25 for divers, $10 for snorkelers and swimmers. Scuba divers are required to sit through an orientation class and do a checkout dive to make sure their buoyancy is under control. There are no gloves permitted. And spearguns? They’re not even allowed in the country.

Slide show   A Mermaid’s Playground Presented by Sport Diver Magazine. more photos

Flamingos eluded me on my loop along the salt marshes and up through the cactus-crinkled hills of the Washington Slagbaai National Park, home to
790-foot Brandaris Hill, the highest point on the island. I did, however, encounter a couple of wild donkeys, feral descendants of the beasts of burden that once toiled in the sun-baked salt flats in the south. When I slowed down to take a photo, they trotted over, jammed their heads in the pickup cab and brayed, disappointed I didn’t have any food.

Hot and steamy
Back at the resort, I grabbed a quick burrito breakfast and joined the Kennedy Space Center Barracudas, a Florida dive club made up of rocket scientists — really — for a morning dive out at Klein Bonaire. We were headed to a site called Mi Dushi (Papiamento for “my sweetheart”).

We stepped into the blue within a sand-dollar skip of shore, and drifted down to the 26-foot mooring before fanning out over a series of terraced coral canyons. There was something odd about the sponges there, and as I glided down for a closer look I realized they were smoldering. A dozen aquatic forest fires were raging at 20 meters.

It took me a second to realize what was going on. I flashed back to the night before when I joined several other divers for a free REEF (Reef Environmental Education Foundation) talk in the cushy offices of Capture Photo, a photographic school at the Divi Flamingo Beach Resort & Casino. Resident fish expert Linda Ridley, a veteran of more than 1,000 fish-ID surveys, was explaining why we had picked — intentionally or not — the single best time to dive Bonaire.

Jad Davenport / Sport Diver A juvenile spotted drum on the snorkel trail.

“For most divers, a spawning is a once-in-a-lifetime event,” she said. “Do we know the exact time? No. The spawn starts up in Florida and moves down to the Caribbean. It’s triggered by a combination of factors from water temperature to the moon cycle.”

When the magic code is dialed in, said Linda, the coral and sponges release eggs and sperm into the water to drift with the currents.

“Synchronized mass spawning events allow stationary animals like corals and sponges to mix and disperse over great distances. They release millions and millions of egg packets or sperm, so much that predators just can’t eat it all.”

And, she said, it doesn’t all take place at night.

“Each species has its own timetable. You’ll see touch-me-not sponges and sea urchins spawning in the middle of the day.” 

Which is exactly what I was seeing. The toxic touch-me-not sponges were billowing out clouds of sperm.

A chipmunk-cheeked porcupinefish shared my interest in the spewing sponges and so did a curious great barracuda. Divemaster Tina, however, waved me off. I thought she was just worried about me getting stung by the sponges. But it had to do with sexual hygiene, she informed me when we surfaced.

“You don’t want to get covered with sponge sperm,” she said with a straight face. “I’ve known people whose wetsuits stunk so much of fish they had to throw them away.”

I did not know that.

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