Page 18 - The Dutch Caribbean Isles

Captain Don Stewart
Captain Don Stewart is widely recongized as
the founder of scuba divng on Bonaire. This eB-
ook is in memory of him. Sadly he passed away
in June of 2014 at the age of 90. God Bless him.
O n this island is a man that over a fifty year
period transformed from a beer-drinking,
bar brawler, rebel rouser to leading the effort
to establish reef protection and conservation
protocols that have been adopted throughout
the Caribbean and the world. This scuba diving
Mecca with a license plate that reads “Divers
Paradise” has become his beloved home. The
individual credited with establishing Bonaire as
a scuba diving Mecca is Captain Don Stewart.
Captain Don Stewart is the visionary who con-
ceived the idea of protecting the Bonaire reef, a still bears his name “Captain Don’s Habitat”.
concept now copied around the world. Captain
Don made it happen and he did it long before
hugging trees became fashionable.
Captain Don led efforts to establish what
many consider to be unsurpassed recrea-
Captain Don’s Habitat
tional scuba diving and in the process trans-
formed both Bonaire and himself. The transfor-
mation of Bonaire and Captain Don go hand and
hand. The story of Bonaire and its present day
economy centered around and dependent on
scuba diving and this story cannot be told unless
both sides of the coin are flipped. It is the story gauges, without any kind of gauge for that mat-
of a man that decided to live life “his way” and a
path through life resulting in the establishment
of coral reef conservation protocols and one of
the most famous dive resorts in the world that
The day Captain Don arrived on Bonaire in
1962. He was 37 with 63 cents in his pocket
and ship’s papers in the safe. Spear fishing and
the exporting of small tropical fish became a
new way of life.
started out as a small
resort and grew into a
fully inegrated scuba
diving destination, It is
considered one of the
top 20 dive resorts in
the world.
With the six tanks he brought with him, Don
started the first official dive operation
on Bonaire. It was located at the newly opened
Flamingo Beach Hotel - formerly Bonaire’s camp
for detainees during the Second World War. All
of his early diving activity was without depth
ter. So Don invented his own. When he needed
to measure depth, Captain Don would simply tie
a red ribbon to his mask strap. As the red turned
darker the color gauge in his head would tell him
when to turn back. Bonaire’s first “dive boats”
were whatever old trucks were available. These
rusty vehicles would rattle over the rutted dirt
roads that led to Bonaire’s famous, close-in dive
sites. Later he got three dive boats - but only one
motor.