Bonaire requires orientation and a checkout dive before divers can freely partake of the sites. We spent about 90 minutes in the orientation, most of it sitting and waiting while other divers slowly drifted in, as the Toucan Diving staff waited until the room was as full as possible. Once full, we watched the video, paid our $10 fee, and were issued our Park tags.
The checkout dive was at the house reef, Eighteen Palms on Plaza Resort Bonaire. The site is named after the 18 palms that once graced the Governor's Mansion on the property. Toucan keeps a dozen air tanks on the beach for divers, so it's easy to grab one and dive! They loaned us a locker to store our gear, so Eighteen Palms is an extremely convenient dive site - thus we dove it many times.
The Divemaster was in the water at one point, but we didn't see him - we wore our dive gear to the site and with his permission, were in the water well before anyone else. We'd discussed our entry technique, but we skipped our cameras for this first checkout dive. (Naturally, this guaranteed one of the best dives for photography!)
We swam out to the Eighteen Palms buoy and descended. There are two large square, aluminum squares, floating on the bottom in 20 feet of water. You can swim through these, and they are there for students to practice their buoyancy.
Excerpt from my logbook: Awesome dive! You forget about the incredible diversity of aquatic life here until you do that 1st dive! ... We were first out to the buoy in 20 feet of water. Trumpetfish, several drum, tarpons. Beth pointed out a small Eagle Ray playing (feeding?) in the sand! Great sighting!
Other divers claimed to have found a yellow Frogfish at about 30 feet. We were pumped - we'll have to go back and look for him!
After this dive - and every dive - we brought our gear back to Toucan. They had
four large rinse tanks to de-salinate our dive gear, including one reserved for
cameras, and several warm showers for removing sea water from your person.
Over the trip, we developed techniques for (1) watching our gear, (2) rinsing
the gear, (3) showering off, and (4) placing our gear back in the locker.