Oil Slick Leap is Bonaire's best-known jump entry: from a limestone plateau you step more than three metres down into the water. You return by a steel ladder against the rock face. If you do not want to make the jump, do not enter here: there is no alternative entry.
Oil Slick Leap is an advanced shore dive on the west coast with a jump of over three metres as the only entry and a ladder as the only exit, feasible only in a flat sea.
Below the plateau a slope with healthy hard coral and large sponges begins immediately and runs past forty metres. Schools of grunts sit in the shallows; deeper, tarpon hang and eagle rays pass. The coral is in better condition than at the sites closer to town.
Only in a flat sea. If there is swell against the rock face the ladder becomes dangerous and the jump unpredictable; that is not a weather question but a stop criterion.
The jump is irreversible: once down, the ladder is the only way back. The ladder is narrow and slippery, heavy with tanks on your back. The plateau offers little room to rest and there is no shade, no water and no toilet.
Decisions on diveability, technique and health belong with STINAPA, a dive school or a doctor. This page only describes the conditions.
The name comes from an oil transfer facility once planned here that never arrived. The plateau is limestone eroded by the surf — the same formation that makes the ledges at Karpata further north.
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