Lac Bay
"Every kite in the sky is someone's expression of a wind they didn't choose but learned to use."
Getting to Lac Bay requires commitment. From Kralendijk you head south past the salt pans and then turn left on a dirt track that winds for several kilometres through scrub and cactus, occasionally passing houses that look like they’re on the edge of something unresolved. The road corrugates the truck’s chassis and raises a plume of rust-coloured dust. And then the bay opens up and you forget the road entirely. The contrast is so sudden it feels staged: the harsh scrubland, the rough track, and then this vast flat expanse of turquoise lagoon, the trade winds drawing white lines across the surface, and the kites already up in the air before you’ve even parked.
Lac Bay is Bonaire’s windward side — the sheltered lagoon that the trade winds funnel into from the east, making the surface both agitated and weirdly flat at the same time. From the beach, which is narrow and strewn with conch shells bleached white in the sun, you can see the kiters working the wind. They come here from everywhere, serious athletes and beginners, because the shallow water means a fall is rarely dangerous and the wind is as reliable as anything I’ve experienced in nature. On a good afternoon there might be forty or fifty kites in the air simultaneously, in all colours, crossing and uncrossing in slow patterns governed by physics and personal style.
What I found most affecting about Lac Bay was what you see when you wade in and look down. The bay is one of the Caribbean’s last functioning queen conch nurseries — those heavyweight molluscs with the flared pink lips that used to be common throughout the region and are now severely depleted elsewhere. I waded out to my knees in water so clear I could count individual pieces of sand, and conch shells of all sizes simply lay around me in the seagrass. Picked up and examined, the juvenile ones were translucent and small as a fist; the large adults were heavy and spiralled and old. Bonaire protects them absolutely — removing one carries a serious fine — and you can feel the result of that protection in the sheer number of them. It is one of the few places in the Caribbean where environmental protection has made something measurably more abundant than it was before.
The mangroves ring the eastern and southern edges of the bay, and they are magnificent in the way that mangroves only are when they’ve been left alone long enough to grow into themselves. The roots form complex submarine architectures that shelter juvenile fish — needlefish, small snappers, the occasional sea turtle resting between dives. There’s a small restaurant at the beach where I ate fried fish with rice and listened to the wind in the rigging of a moored catamaran, and I thought about how different this coast felt from Kralendijk’s calm leeward side. Same island, entirely different temperament — rougher, more honest, less accommodating.
When to go: Lac Bay’s winds peak between December and August, making it the classic kitesurfing season. Mangrove kayaking and snorkelling in the shallows work year-round, though visibility is best in the calmer months of October and November. Go in the late afternoon when the kite traffic peaks and the light comes from the west, turning the lagoon a shade of gold the morning doesn’t have.