Diving Boca Samí Curaçao | The Shore Dive Collection | TropicLens - 4K

Boca Samí is a small fishing village, 10 minutes west of Willemstad that as a ton to offer. In addition to the diving, which we will get to shortly, there are hiking trails with some pretty good views, a flamingo habitat and the remains of a 200 year old colonial fort. It’s also home to Dive Wederfort, the oldest dive shop on the island.
Sitting outside their front door is a large shallow bay, dotted with the local fishing fleet. A few minutes of swimming after that gets you to the drop off and a gigantic mooring buoy for cargo ships. We saw lots of life hear from turtles and squid to large schools of scad and mullets. We even had two first time captures that included a lantern bass and a beaded sea star.
Check out the video to see what our experience was and let us know in the comments section below what your saw there.
We want to encourage more shore diving, so this video provides some guidance where the site is, how to dive it and what you may see there. If you want to skip to or review specific topics, the section timings are as follows.
FIRST TIME CAPTURE IDENTIFICATION
We primarily use two sources to validate our first time captures. The first is Florent's Guide To The Tropical Reefs which can be found at reefguide.org. Its free and has lots of pictures, but is not comprehensive. The second is “The Reef Set: Reef Fish, Reef Creature and Reef Coral (3 Volumes)”. The box set can be found on Amazon; however with all our travels, we also purchased the eBooks (fishid.com/store/product-categ...) so we don’t have to carry an extra five pounds of paper in our luggage. :-) We may also reference other sources from time to time as well.
Here are some links to this video’s first time captures.
Lantern Bass - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serranu...
Beaded Sea Star - sites.google.com/site/masonan...
CHAPTERS
0:00 Intro
0:30 Site Background/Description
3:31 Site Logistics
6:50 Dive Profile
10:12 Sea Life
12:36 Night Diving

[@jaimeroldan4567]

Great videos, keep up the good work

[@TropicLens]

Thanks Jaime! We had to take some time off, but are back at it now. New Bonaire videos start next Sunday with Corporal Meiss.

[@daanrijnenberg2873]

Again a great film! See you soon again for some more diving.

[@TropicLens]

Thank you Daan. Looking forward to more dives and video with you in the coming months! :-)

[@RobMorse]

"Smiley face" has become a household joke when we watch fish videos. A good use of drone shots to give an overview. Do you know why drones are banned/restricted on other islands?

[@TropicLens]

:-) for the smiley face comment! It is interesting as the ABC islands are all Dutch. One might think they follow the same policies, but each has its own relationship with the Netherlands and varying degrees of autonomy. Bonaire is definitely the strictest as the entire island is a marine park and doesn't allow drone flying at all. On Aruba, I could fly the drone, but had to pre-register flights/sites/dates/times with their civil aviation department. Curaçao has been the least burdensome with respect to process. Not sure why; but just like in the US, there are some places that are very restrictive and others that are much more drone friendly. Also, similar to the US, Grand Cayman's restrictions centered around an airport perimeter of a few miles. Unfortunately, that covers a lot of the dive sites on the west side.

[@bjarkerollmann8544]

Hi TropicLens, could you make a video about you camera equipment etc.?

[@TropicLens]

I get asked that quite a bit Bjarke and have struggled with how to make it. :-( I am not really comfortable with a "talking head" video. I am working on it, though. Short answer...iPhone 12/13, SeaLife SportDiver housing, Deep Photo (app), Kraken Hydra lights. Happy to elaborate on anything if you have questions. :-)

[@bjarkerollmann8544]

@@TropicLens thanks for the list of equipment, it puts it into perspective as your videos are very nice. I was kind of expecting a 20k setup.

[@NaturePicsFilms]

nice video - well done! like + sub √

[@TropicLens]

Thank you so much. Very nice compliment from a channel with your quality videos. :-)