I came back to the room last night and sat out on the veranda, listening the ocean and watching the moon drift across the horizon. It was a cool night by Bonairean standards. Temperature was probably in the mid-seventies Fahrenheit.

I began thinking about what has happened to me in the twenty years that I have been coming to this island.

Way back then, I was absolutely petrified of diving. Scared out of my wits. My hands would literally go numb just before I would get into the water. I was so frightened at times that I literally cried. Tears-streaming-down-my-face crying! But something in me forced me to do it every time.

Mary Ellen would sometimes catch me crying and say things like, “We don’t have to do this!” But something inside of me told me that I should not be ruled by my fears. So, I would became an automaton, put my mind in neutral, and enter the water fully believing that I there was a good possibility that I was about to die. (No joke.)

The average scuba tank is filled with about 3,000 psi of air. The average dive for Mary and I now is about 45 to 50 minutes. However, when you’re scared to death, you breathe harder and faster. Looking at my dive logbook of twenty years ago, my very first dive here at Bonaire, off of Kaya Kachi, was eight minutes long! Now, that’s scared!

We came to Bonaire every year after that for eleven years, and each time my fear of diving came back at first, and then slowly dissipated as our dives grew in number. The fear never really went completely away until recently. (I mean, think about it! YOU COULD FREAKING DIE! Water is no longer our natural environment! It hasn’t been for millennia. We no longer have gills. We cannot breathe fluids, and yet, for the most part when diving, your nearest breath of real atmosphere is sixty to eighty feet over your head!

Things that live down in the water can kill you too. Sharks, eels, rays (remember Steve Irwin?) Trained, experienced divers die all the time! Your lines can get tangled in immovable debris and hold you down. You can get the bends. You can get nitrogen narcosis, become disoriented and get lost.

But almost always, the beauty of the dives took away a lot of that fear. Most of the dives, to be honest, were peaceful and uneventful.

For the first dive today, we went in between dive sites called Corporal Meiss and Wind Sock. We had to swim out among coral heads close to shore.  I tried hard not hit any of them. (Even though they look like rocks, the coral is filled with living creatures, and the slightest touch can kill them.) I think we succeeded in not doing any damage. There was a pretty strong current flowing from south the north, so we went south against the current for about 20 minutes, and then drifted back with the current. My maximum depth for this dive was 66 feet, and we stayed down for 46 minutes.

There were beautiful little brain coral on the entrance and exit, at about 15 feet. Vase sponges and purple tube sponges were at the lower depths.

Saw a couple butterfly fish, squirrel fish and parrot fish. Came across a school of a couple hundred yellowtail snappers, and we just sort of hung out with them for a while.

Nice and relaxing dive.

Second Dive today was again at Kaya Kachi, right in front of our apartment. Had a hard time with my mask for some reason on this dive. Water kept seeping into it, and I had to clear it about six times. Before, that would panic the hell out of me, but no big deal. (To “clear” a mask of water, you simply tilt the bottom of the mask away from your face and blow air through your nose. The air rises to the top of the mask, and forces all of the water out of the bottom. Then you quickly push the mask back up against your face, and let the suction take over again.)

Beautiful file fish greeted us upon our descent along with the usual assortment of colorful and playful tropical fish. Ran into a whole school of midnight parrot fish.

Every time we dove Kaya Kachi from this entrance point this year, two large and beautiful French angelfish have hosted our dive. Today was no exception. They swam right up to our masks when we descended, and stayed with us pretty much the whole trip. Completely tame and unafraid. (Something tells me that somebody is feeding them.)

I actually reached out and touched one of them with my finger. He scurried away for a moment, spun around and then came up to my mask again. His mouth opened and closed a few times, and I could swear I saw a pissed off scowl on his face. Then, after a few moments, all was well with the world again, and he was swimming between Mary and me like a dog on a leash.

The duration of this dive was 42 minutes. Our maximum depth was 60 feet.

Rob, the Manager of The Buddy Dive Shop came clean when I asked him about the friendly pair of French angelfish. He’s been feeding them out of his hand. (It’s against the Marine Park Rules to do that.)

The waters around Bonaire out to the dropoff and sixty feet down are protected by The Bonaire Marine Park. You have to register with Marine Park Authority before you can get air for scuba diving on Bonaire, and you have to pay one-time a visit fee of $25. You also have to prove that you can achieve neutral buoyancy underwater so as not to go crashing into the coral. The money goes to helping the Authority preserve and restore the natural beauty of the reefs that encircle the island of Bonaire.

When diving, you may not touch the coral or doing anything to disturb the marine life in or around the reef. You may not spear fish or dynamite fish. You may not wear diving gloves or knee pads. You’re not supposed to touch down on the reefs. You are to obtain neutral buoyancy when you first enter the water.

Neutral buoyancy means that you fill your B.C. – buoyancy control device – with enough air so that you stay suspended in the water at whatever depth you are at. This is a bit tricky, because, when you achieve neutral buoyancy at one depth, you have to readjust it at every other depth. Air compresses as you descend and expands are you ascend, therefore, you need more air in your B.C. at lower depths and less air at higher depths. (That is also why you should never hold your breath while scuba diving. If you take a lungful of air at, say, seventy feet and you hold it in as you ascend to, say, forty feet, the air in your lungs will expand and it could end up rupturing your lungs. Every thirty-three down is one atmosphere of pressure on and in your body.)

The Bonaire Marine Park Authority does wonderful work, but the rule about feeding the marine life is bit absurd, and, well, everybody does it.