Bonaire National Marine Park

Bonaire protected its entire coastline in 1979, from the high-water line down to 60 m, all the way round the island and round Klein Bonaire. That was decades before it was a normal thing to do, and it is the single reason the diving is what it is. Anchoring is banned; there are fixed moorings. Spearfishing is banned. Taking anything, living or dead, is banned. Every diver pays a nature fee and the fee is what funds the park — STINAPA, the parks foundation, runs on it.

The practical consequence is the yellow stones. Eighty-odd dive sites are marked with a painted yellow rock at the roadside, and you park, kit up on the tailgate and walk in. There is no boat and no schedule. Almost every shore site on the island is one of those.

The reef profile barely varies: a shallow terrace of coral rubble and staghorn to about 8 m, a drop -off, then a slope of hard coral, sponges and gorgonians running to 30 m and beyond. The leeward west coast is calm nearly every day of the year, which is the other half of the explanation.

Klein Bonaire, the uninhabited islet offshore, became a legally protected reserve in 2001. The east coast — Cai, White Hole — is exposed to the trades and only diveable on rare flat days.

The island's other history is written into the site names. Salt Pier is the loading jetty of the Cargill solar salt works. Red Slave is at the southern tip beside the salt pans, where four colour-coded obelisks were raised in 1837 as marks for the salt ships and rows of stone huts 1.5 m high were built in 1850 for the enslaved people who worked the pans and walked back to Rincon at the end of the week. Slavery was abolished in the Dutch Antilles in 1863. Karpata is named for the castor-oil plant, karpata in Papiamentu, that grows along that stretch of coast, and sits below the ruins of the Karpata plantation house.

Sources

• Wikipedia, Bonaire National Marine Park — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonaire_National_Marine_Park