Go West Diving, All West Apartments, Curaçao: Undercurrent 05/2023

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Dear Fellow Diver,

"You cannot miss a dive at the Aquarium," a friend told me. It's not often you travel across the world to dive in an aquarium.

Go West Diving's dive boat Caribbean 1 I didn't know what to expect, but I discovered it's not a dive site called "the aquarium." It's an underwater area with several fenced pens; in one were a couple of dolphins, and in another, a lonely reef shark. That's part of The Aquarium, a SeaWorld-like tourist attraction near the capital Willemstad, and the treatment of these animals is appalling.

We had jumped off the jetty and swum under a low bridge that served the Royal Sea Aquarium Resort, the Curaçao Sea Aquarium, and the Dolphin Academy, unwittingly passing a concentration camp for larger marine life. As we finned past, we became part of the attraction as paid aquarium visitors watched us through a viewing port. I was angry. My buddies and I wanted to free the sad captives, but how? Concealing a pair of bolt cutters inside your wetsuit would be hard. It's a dive worth missing unless you know how to conceal those bolt cutters.

With a little effort in a slight surge, we kicked to the ocean side, where eventually the coral was spectacular, and tropicals abounded. The dive center had a laid thick rope on the bottom to guide divers in and out, but returning, we got lost on the featureless sandy seabed, so we popped up to find our way back to the shore. We had driven to Ocean Encounters, a smart urban dive center, with our tanks, and for $10 each, we used their lockers and facilities to change clothes, shower, and rinse our gear.

We had booked our Curaçao trip through Go West Diving, on the western edge of the island's northernmost point, and their package included a rental truck. We could grab full tanks around the clock, so we made seven shore dives -- the longest swim to the reef was about 13 minutes, the shortest 5 -- diving as long as we liked and as deep as we liked. At Alice in Wonderland, Go West's house reef, we kicked out over healthy corals and sponges to the submerged statue of Chichi, shall we say, a well-rounded Caribbean woman crafted by local artisans at Serena's Art Factory. She was not alone. Around the island, I discovered several small statues of Christian and native deities sequestered in the reef. It made diving fun....

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