The pier at Bonaire Dive is built for divers.  Rows of full air tanks stand waiting like bread loaves or schools of fishes. 

These metal bottles of nitrogen and oxygen are ours for the taking, just make a tick mark by your dive number on the clipboard. One, two or five bottles, take all you want. It's the "Unlimited Air Package." 

When I began diving, one was never enough. I would always run out like the opium smoker in the old boogie woogie song, Willie the Weeper, a chimney sweeper who “…had the dope habit, and he had it bad…”  His dream of sensuous glory was cut short at the end of the song when “bim, bam, the dope ran out!” But now, the air bottles, like magic vessels, seem to last as long as I need them to—whether fifty minutes or nearly ninety. 

I’ve gotten into the habit of diving alone almost everyday at Bari Reef, usually about an hour before sundown, the time when the reef is a tumult of end-of-day feeding and spawning activity.

When I dive alone, I sense time differently. Diving on a boat, with some rare exceptions, seems to involve a scramble to get in the water. While the dive master gives the briefing—a description of the site and the procedures for the dive—people are attaching hoses to tanks, pulling on wetsuits and cleaning masks.  Someone usually says  “The pool is open!” or “Let’s get wet!”  Even the Antillean dive master Etienne, young and full of laughter, a genius at finding seahorses and frogfish, puts on the pressure if I lag behind the others back-rolling off the boat.  “Are you ready, Corrrrey?” 

Alone, I exult in slow, methodical, loving preparation.  I please myself by remembering the complicated threading pattern of the strap that locks my tank and the smaller, spare “pony bottle” to my BC.  I make sure it’s buckled on as tightly as possible.  Having a tank get loose and float up behind me is a small problem if I have a companion to see it and reattach it for me. But alone, a loose tank could trigger a cascade of events—loss of buoyancy control, twisted hoses—that I don’t want to consider. 

I attach the first stage of my regulator to the tank and praise the apparatus that does the simple, essential job of reducing the unmanageable pressure of expanding gas to a level that’s breathable.  With a stainless steel clip, I secure the supple hose that carries the air to the second stage of the regulator.  This diaphragm enclosed in hard plastic has a mouthpiece shaped to my own teeth.  In the water, it’s as comfortable as a pair of well worn hiking boots, as familiar as a pair of glasses. Yet, until its invention, diving as we know it was not possible. Like the wheel, the stirrup, the sail and the compass, it’s a modest device that opened a vast world to human beings. And, like all these inventions, it has a demonic side. It has made the plunder of fish, coral and antiquities much easier. It has brought us with all our conflicting impulses toward stewardship or careless exploitation into a world that was once fairly safe from us. 

I start my dive next to the pier watching schools of silversides luminous in the shafts of late afternoon sun.  These fish have crystalline structures in their scales called iridophores that reflect light in all the colors of the spectrum.  They flow into brilliant clouds, ceaselessly changing shape. 

Below them, schools of goatfish, smaller in number, larger in size are rousing themselves from their midwater sleep, flexing the barbels that extend from their chins and give them their goatish look.  Soon, they’ll churning the sand bottom with these appendages, turning up their dinner.

Directly under the pier, a three foot long barracuda hangs motionless, resting or lying in wait for prey. As soon as I form the thought of trying to get closer, it slowly swims away.

A Yellowtail Parrotfish swims wide circles over a large concrete slab that was once part of a pier at the fire-ravaged Sunset Beach Resort,

Heading west toward the reef, I come to a long, narrow mound of coral rubble that was created by Hurricane Lenny’s surging waves in 1999.   Soon after the destruction, Jerry Ligon, the resident biologist at Bonaire Dive quietly began shaping the rubble into this small artificial reef. 

Scores of young grunts, striped in vivid yellow and blue, have claimed the structure along with 32 other species of fish and invertebrates.

I follow Jerry’s handiwork down to the shoulder of Bari Reef.  Thousands of creole wrasse are streaming through the water along the reef.  Purple and yellow males, large with more pronounced fin shapes, pursue females, swimming closely above them, sometimes placing a pectoral fin over the females’ back. 

I determine current direction by noticing which way the gorgonians--colonies of soft corals--are bending and then swim in the opposite direction, against the current so my return, when I have less air, will be easier.

A young french angelfish, still showing the bright yellow bar of a juvenile among her golden scales is foraging for sponges. Angelfish are one of the few species that live on these indigestible, often toxic animals.  With her slightly turned up mouth, the fish tears off chunks of sponge and demurely swallows.  Her digestive system provides an instant coating of mucous to protect her stomach from the sponge’s less appealing qualities. I’ve seen this fish on several dives.  She ranges all the way from the caved-in pier in the shallows just south of Bari, to sixty feet down the reef. 

I stop at one of the many "cleaning stations" that exist on the reef.  These are small areas, often on top of a coral head or inside a portion of very old coral that has been eaten away over time, where shrimp, gobies and juvenile fish of various species make their living by eating small parasites, bacteria and dead or infected skin and flesh off of larger fish.  Predators like tiger groupers or spotted morays signal to the cleaners via position and movement that they're ready.  Cleaning stations are off limits for predatory activity. 

Many shrimp, including the spotted cleaner shrimp, are in this line of work.  The smallest is the dwarf cleaner shrimp, Thor.

The banded coral shrimp is one of the largest.

When I extend my thumb to a spotted cleaner, it slowly approaches and then reaches beneath my thumbnail with one of its antennae.  I feel a gentle, incredibly light touch, and then a fizz of electricity that surprises me and I instinctively draw back.  I extend my thumb again but the shrimp keeps its distance.

As  day gives way to dusk, everything on the reef changes. A colony of mountainous star coral slowly extends the tentacles of each of its polyps to feed on passing plankton.

Eels get ready to leave their crevices and go hunting.  Within the span of a few minutes, I see a large spotted moray undulating down the reef slope, a smaller goldentail moray still taking a deep breath and a sharptail eel accompanied by a blueheaded wrasse who hopes to benefit from the eel's keen sense of smell

Snappers, sea bass and grouper type fish like this graysby, this mahagony snapper sharing a hideout with a french grunt or this barred hamlet  are still hoping for a last meal before darkness falls

The nocturnal hunters start making an appearance. Glasseyed snappers, squirrelfish and blackbar soldierfish all have large, dark-adapted eyes and red pigmentation that renders them almost invisible in the depths of the night.

While some light remains, I turn and let myself drift slowly toward the pier, inclining myself upwards into shallower water. Here an endless variety of benthic feeders (fish who mine the sandy bottom for food) are still busy.

A large school of blue tang suddenly appears, flowing along the soft corals like a wave of pure hunger, going after algae wherever they can find it.

The algae feeders play an essential role in the ecology of the coral reef.  Parrotfish, damselfish, surgeonfish as well as invertebrates like sea urchins, all keep algal growth in check.  Without them, algae proliferates to a degree that new coral polyps can find no space on which to settle and over time, the coral, unrenewed, dies out.

Flattening myself on the sand, I wait for the tiny yellowheaded jawfish I've seen here before.  A flicker of movement in the corner of my eye announces the fishes emergence from its burrow.  Jawfish are amazing engineers, creating pebble-lined burrows in the sand, carrying the building material in their mouths.  The males also carry fertilized eggs in their mouths until they hatch.

A lizardfish also stays as close to the bottom as it can, waiting for prey

The trumpet fish carries camouflage hunting to an almost laughable extreme, pretending to be a gorgonian branch or just another harmless goatfish. Its rather benign face belies the lethal suction it uses to swallow small fish.

A secretary blennie whose head is hardly bigger than a letter on this page, appropriates a vacant wormhole from which it pops out to eat morsels of plankton

Back at the pier, tube corals are now extending their tentacles to feed on whatever comes their way. These corals are not the skleractinic variety, that is, they're not reef-builders. At the end of a late afternoon dive that extends to early evening, they glow in my light like a beacon fire marking my way home. But as I mount the stairs back up to the pier, it's the sea that feels more and more like home and the return to gravity that feels like a temporary condition.

July 15, 2003, Bonaire.