Family Diving in Bonaire (We Took the Kids Diving!)

Next, Jonathan visits the amazing island of Bonaire to dive with his whole family in the first ever Bird Family Dive Adventure! Welcome to Jonathan Bird's Blue World! Scuba diving has defined my life for 30 years. You could say that I am in love with the ocean and the creatures that live there. I am at home in the underwater world. My wife Christine and I have been diving together since we met at a dive club meeting. Ever since our kids were born, we have longed to share this underwater world with them. In 2013, our daughter Elise was old enough to get certified to dive. She took her class with instructor Kat Apps, the same instructor who taught Jake to dive in our episode from 2012. In 2017, our son Liam got certified to dive with instructor Scott Reed. Both of them learned to dive in the cold waters of New England, where we have thick wetsuits, big weight belts, and very limited visibility. So this winter, it's time for a family diving trip. When it comes to family diving, there is no place better than Buddy Dive Resort in Bonaire. Bonaire is a territory of the Netherlands, located in the southern Caribbean Sea, just off the coast of Venezuela. It's known as one of the best scuba diving destinations in the Caribbean. With warm, clear water, healthy reefs and almost no current, Bonaire is the perfect place to take our kids on their first tropical diving trip. February school vacation is an awesome time to hit the airport to escape winter. Through the miracle of air travel, we soon land in tropical Bonaire. Then we head on over to Buddy Dive, an oceanfront luxury resort catering specifically to scuba divers. The view from our balcony is gorgeous. There is even a wild parrot in a tree just outside the window! Our first morning, we get a quick introduction to the facilities from Dive Operations Manager Augusto Montbrun. Soon we'll be diving. But first things first. We review the Marine Park rules, the most important of which is to not touch anything or break any coral. Buoyancy, buoyancy, buoyancy. You won't break anything if your buoyancy is under control. And with buoyancy in mind, our first dive will be a checkout dive. We're heading to the dive shop! Time to do some diving! All right you guys, so what we're going to do is for our first dive, we're just going to go out in the shallows here over the sand, like 15 feet deep. We're just going to practice our buoyancy skills so that we have our buoyancy and our weight all worked out before we go out on the coral. Okay? All right, let's do it! The dive shop is right on the water, so we can do a dive right off the end of the dock. The kids haven't been diving in a couple months, so I'm curious to see if they can remember how to assemble all their gear correctly. I'm impressed, they do it like pros! Once we're sure that all their stuff is right, Christine and I get our gear set up. And now for the fun part! You guys giant striding? Yup! Okay. A giant stride off the end of the dock is a super fun way to start any dive. Elise goes first. You okay? Okay Liam. After Liam, Christine hits the water and we're off. Sinking 20 feet down to the sandy bottom, I first demonstrate a buoyancy exercise for the kids to practice. They adjust the amount of air in their buoyancy compensators to get neutrally buoyant. When you're really good at it, you can hover without using your hands or feet. With our buoyancy exercises complete, we decide to spend the rest of the dive having a look around in the shallows at the edge of the reef. There's a flounder in the sand, a fish wonderfully adapted to hide in plain sight. A colony of garden eels poke out of their holes, plucking plankton from the water as it passes. And near an isolated brain coral, a Barracuda is just hanging out with its toothy mouth wide open. This is a very special brain coral, and as I will discover in the days to come, this Barracuda comes to this brain coral every morning. Elise is fascinated watching the action, and once the big fish gets used to us, it opens its mouth again. Tiny cleaner fish are swimming into the Barracuda's mouth and gills, picking off parasites and dead skin. They give the Barracuda a good grooming. The cleaner fish live around this brain coral, providing a cleaning station for any fish that might need their services. Soon the kids are getting chilly, so we turn and swim back to the dive shop. Cold or not, a couple more jumps off the end of the dock are necessary. In the afternoon, we join a boat dive to explore a reef on Klein Bonaire. This is the coming aboard cam. It's only a 10 minute ride from the dock to reach Klein Bonaire, a small uninhabited island which is a protected national park. The reefs are pristine. We suit up for a dive on a beautiful reef right below the boat. Boat diving is so convenient! All right you guys, are you ready? Ready! All right, well let's have fun and remember, watch the buoyancy! Okay! All right! All right you guys, let's do it! Finally, the bird family is scuba diving on a gorgeous Caribbean reef together. First there's some hamming it up for the camera. Then it's time to go see what kind of marine life we can find. We pass the mooring block. All the dive sites use permanent moorings, so there are no anchors thrown on the reef. That means the reef is in beautiful shape, with lots of healthy coral. There are ginormous tube sponges. A French angelfish is one of the few fish that can digest the tough tissue of sponges. A big school of blue tangs is moving across the reef, feeding on algae. They are critical to the health of the coral, because without them, the algae would take over and smother the coral. A parrotfish is also snacking on the algae. We head down the reef behind the divemaster, and soon he has found us a special treat—a yellow blob sitting on an orange sponge. That blob is a frogfish. It stays perfectly still, acting like a sponge itself, flicking a lure to attract smaller fish to eat. Soon it's time to head back to the boat. At 15 feet, we do a safety stop for 3 minutes. The purpose of this is to reduce the pressure on our bodies slowly, so nobody develops decompression sickness. Then it's up the ladder to the boat. That was awesome! What he said! And if jumping off the dock is fun, jumping off the boat is more fun! Don't go away! The Bird Family adventure will continue with a spooky night dive. Bonaire is an arid place, with the terrain dominated by cactuses. My friend Rolando Marin, from Bonaire's tourism board, offered us a personalized tour of the island. He drives us to some of the special places that make Bonaire unique. We take a curvy, single-lane road across the island to the windy eastern shore, where strong trade winds create powerful waves that crash onto the rocks. It's rare for this side of the island to be calm enough for divers. The western side of the island, away from the wind, has calm conditions. But some people love that wind. Bonaire is a top destination for windsurfing. In the middle of the island is Lake Gautamere, a brackish water lagoon which is home to a protected population of pink flamingos. They feed on shrimp and get their pink color from their food. Popular places for shore diving are marked with a yellow rock, indicating the name of the dive site. Shore diving is really popular on Bonaire, so we decide to give it a try. Dive master Tina Wall from Buddy Dive takes us down south to a dive site called Invisibles. And as we get closer, once it's deep enough and we know where the buoy is, we'll descend, because that's our best marker for our entry and exit point. We have to be very careful getting in. The rocks are uneven and slippery. We swim out until the water is deep enough to submerge. Then we head across the sand to reach the reef. Tina leads the way, and with that shirt, she's very hard to lose. We find a venomous scorpionfish sitting very still. My camera lights make it look really colorful, but without lights, it blends in and looks like a rock. Hiding near a soft coral, there is a trumpetfish. They hang vertically head down in the water, to look like part of the coral. It's an effective way to ambush prey. But when it realizes that it's been spotted, the fish abandons its position and makes a break for it. Only to try to fool me again. We turn our dive and start meandering back towards the beach. Along the way we come across a couple intense characters. On one side of a rock, a male sailfin blenny, furiously putting on a display designed to impress a female. Less than a meter away, another male, also intent on getting that female's attention. As they both put on their best moves, the female comes to check them both out. And frankly, she's not very impressed. They both get the cold fin. But that only causes them to intensify their competition, with each male trying to out-display the other one. I leave the sailfin blennies to their antics and follow a goatfish for a while. Goatfish have two whiskers called barbels under the chin, which provides a goat-like appearance. These barbels are chemically sensitive. They can basically smell things like worms in the sand. When it smells something yummy, the goatfish dives right in for a snack. We've made our way back to the beach and surfaced to swim to shore. After the dive, we pile back into the van and head back to buddy dive. We have one more adventure for the day. The sun is setting over Kleinbahn Air, but we're not getting ready for bed. Once the sun has gone down, it's time for a night dive. And this will be Liam's first night dive ever! If he's nervous, he's hiding it well. We jump off the dock into the dark water. With our dive lights blazing, we set off to the reef. At night, the colors are brighter without the strong blue cast from the water. Purple tube sponges look like something out of a science fiction movie. And on the sponges, an alien-looking arrow crab. Nearby, a parrotfish is sleeping inside a bubble. It blows the bubble to disguise its scent from nocturnal predators like moray eels. Suddenly a large shadow, and then a pair of fish more than a meter long. These are tarpon. Normally they would not come this close to divers. But the tarpon here at Buddy Dive have learned to hunt using the divers' flashlights. So they follow us around for the whole dive. The fish are so shiny that they look like they are made of aluminum foil. A night dive in the company of these huge fish is a real treat. Our trip to Bonaire has been epic. Our whole family dove together for the week, and my kids got to experience a little bit of why I love the ocean so much. We dove from the shore and from a boat, during the day and at night, in the divers' paradise of Bonaire. And the question isn't, did we have fun? The question is, when are we coming back?