Sitting here overlooking Airport Flats in Exuma I knew I should crank out a last report on the overall experience in Bonaire. I just find it difficult to decide between writing and fishing. Woa…..wait a minute it isn’t a difficult decision at all……….which of course is why the final report on Bonaire is two weeks late. I will post reports from Exuma as the days slip by. But we have been here a week and the fishing has been superb. I forgot what an ideal place Exuma is for the DIY angler. Not sure why, but the fish we are seeing are larger than normal, plenty over ten pounds spotted, one hooked. Back to Bonaire. As you know I spent a month on Bonaire with my wife and another couple. I decided to try this small island as I had heard rumors and read sporadic reports that there were bonefish, so what the heck, it was worth a try. Located just off the coast of Venezuela, it is a Special Municipality of the Netherlands. Tourism is the #1 industry, with plenty of cruise ships docking daily. It is a scuba divers, kite boarders and wind surfers paradise, bar none. For the kite boarders (Atlantis Beach) and wind surfers (Lac Bay) the wind blows all of the time. On only two days of fishing did the wind fall below 30 mph. That will put most fishermen off, but we sure improved our casting. The divers love Bonaire since you simply drive to all of the dive sites (must be 100) park the car, put on your gear and walk into the water. Some days we saw a hundred divers in some stage of entering or leaving their cars. I’m not a diver but the conditions looked ideal. Overall, my sense is this place is for the “active” vacationer. Sports minded, lots of bicycle riding, everyone looks fit and always on the look out for the next water related activity. With the Dutch influence you sense a bit of European flair mixed with the Caribbean weather. Dutch is spoken everywhere, English is prominent mixed in with Spanish and the local language Papiamentu. Many of the locals we met spoke all four languages fluently. My two languages, Canadian and American seem pathetic in comparison. Bonaire is outside the hurricane belt which means you can safely plan your travel there any time during the year and because of its very southerly location the weather is spectacular almost all of the time. Unlike many of the places I travel to, the infrastructure in Bonaire is first class. There are nice villas, apartments and condos to rent. Plenty of resorts if you choose a more all-inclusive arrangement. A couple of casinos. More fully stocked grocery stores than you can shake a stick at. The rental cars look like they are off a show room floor. And enough restaurants to choose from to make your mind spin. As a visitor you will lack for nothing on Bonaire. Since there is a coral reef that surrounds the entire island (fantastic for divers) there are virtually no sandy beaches. There are a few that have been carved out but nothing like some of the other Caribbean islands with long stretches of sand. Wouldn’t be fair for me to leave out the wildlife, since they make up such an interesting part of the Bonaire experience. There are wild donkeys everywhere. There is a donkey preserve (you should go). Goats wandering freely, beautiful parrots, if you don’t see five hundred lizards and twenty large Iguanas in a day, you are spending too much time on a chair and spectacular flamingos on both the northern and southern ends. Interesting note that there are no sharks or rays, apparently these were fished out years ago. Before I talk about fishing, here is the cautionary note. For those of you who read my Blog, you know our fully fenced, locked Villa was broken into. Our computers, phones, eReaders, camera accessories and a wallet were stolen. Replacement value in excess of $12,000 plus the pain and headache of trying to be operational again. It turns out that crime on Bonaire is bad…………..statistically it is horrible. For the tiny island they have 127 police officers, yet the crime is rampant. You cannot find a local that has not been impacted. The bottom line is your accommodation must contain a safe where everything can be secured. You cannot have anything in your car, leave the windows rolled down and car wide open. This precaution may not even help, as someone we know had their tires taken off their car while diving. It is a dichotomy I can’t come to grips with. It is a tiny geographic territory, relatively small population, predominantly Dutch influence, well run, new infrastructure with lots of high-end development, everything works, no broken windows, totally devoted to the tourist trade and attracting people from around the world. And yet a decrepit underbelly bubbles just below the freshly painted facade. Our home was broken into on Sunday during the middle of the day when we were fishing. Our friend who receives the daily police reports could not even tell which break in was ours because there had been so many on that day, stealing exactly the same things we lost. It of course puts an entirely different spin on an otherwise positive experience. Now to the fishing —in a nutshell, way better than I expected. We had a number of days where my buddy and I each caught ten plus bones and I think he had more than twenty fish landed one day. That being said it is an unusual fishery and not easy to figure out. There is virtually no fishing on the northern end of the island, though some of the locals fish around the bays in Washington Slagbaai National Park. There is a small creek system with direct access to the ocean at Lagun. Apparently there are bones there though we […]
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