What’s up at Dive Friends? The latest news
Right, you all want to hear about the critter sightings first, so here goes…. A short-nosed batfish has pretty much taken up residence in the confined water in front of Yellow Sub. There’s been recent reports of a seahorse in the shallows, so hopefully he or she will stick around and bring friends. There have been quite a few reports of manta sightings – fingers crossed that we’ll have another summer of Manta Madness!
We wish a warm welcome to Jesika, a PADI and SSI instructor from the Yukon, by way of the Netherlands.
Huge congratulations are in order to our certified PADI Divemasters Oscar, Edward, Charlie, Milan, Luis, Tonia and Jace!
We have the honor of hosting a few visiting instructors: Amy from Iowa, Picasso from Îles de la Madeleine, Quebec, Professor Chris and Duffy from Minnesota.
One of the best parts of working in the dive industry is that you can move around the world and find work wherever there’s water! Unfortunately, that means that we have to have a lot of going away parties. In the past few months we’ve wished a fond farewell to: Ingrid, Parag, Pepijn and Kevin. We’re looking forward to hearing about their new adventures.
Renovations are underway at Port Bonaire so please excuse our mess. We’re hard at work on our new facilities and they are going to be amazing. We’ve already added the feature of night dive lockers, so our diving guests will be able to store their gear there and have after-hours access.
By popular demand, our morning two tank boat will be going to visit dive sites in the North on Saturdays as well as Wednesdays.
We’ve been officially declared 100% Awesome by Project AWARE for our environmental work. We think that this is a pretty cool certification and accept it proudly on behalf of all of you – the Dive Friends that support us! Our next clean up dive will be on April 9th and rumor has it that we will have a celebrity guest….be there or be square!
Hope to see you underwater soon!
Recent Blog Posts
January 2016 Clean Up Dive Largest clean up dive ever
Dive Friends Bonaire has been hosting our world famous quarterly underwater clean-up for over 10 years. January 23, 2016 we’re proud to say that we had the biggest turnout EVER with 135 volunteer divers!
IAHD International Association for Handicapped Divers
There are very few disabilities which actually prevent one from diving. Dive Friends Bonaire is proud to have on staff 4 IAHD Instructors to better serve our guests with disabilities and help everyone to experience the underwater world.
2015 Cleanup Dives Year in review
In 2015, Dive Friends Bonaire hosted four Clean Up dives at various sites around the island. Thanks to our 442 volunteers, a whopping 5,782 piece of marine debris were removed from the marine environment of Bonaire. And we’d like to thank our volunteers for each and every piece!
Preserving a Diver’s Paradise through Dive Against Debris Project AWARE
Project AWARE featured The Dive Friends Bonaire Quarterly Cleanup Dive in a great article. “Project AWARE scuba divers, instructors and dive centers around the world are doing their part to fight back against the negative effects of trash in underwater environments through grassroots action. One dive center, Dive Friends Bonaire, has gone above and beyond to do their part.”
PADI IDC Bonaire 2015 Instructor Development Course
1 Course Director + 5 Instructor Candidates + 1 IDC Staff Instructor Candidate + 1 IDC Staff Instructor + 1 mascot = Tons of FUN (and lots of hard work in between).
Happy Retirement Jan and Pascal
Jan Kloos will be stepping down from his position of Company Director and Pascal is moving into semi-retirement and no longer the General Manager. The Board of Dive Friends Bonaire has named Carolyn Caporusso as his successor.