Our second dive vacation! The largest of the Islas de Bahias (Bay Islands), Roatan is situated about 40 miles from the Honduran Coast. CoCo View Resort, like several others on the Bay Islands, is a purpose-built dive resort. To us, it was like summer camp for divers.Well run, with excellent staff, great food and knowledgeable dive crews, it was a great experience all around. Out of the assorted available accommodations, we opted for one of the cabanas, which stood in just a few feet of water on the house reef. We were forever discovering new creatures swimming around our little house and in the shallows. All of our meals were taken in the club house where we got to sample a wide variety of regional cuisine along with the various continental standards.
The wind had whipped up big waves for our entire stay and that affected visibility a bit. After Cozumel’s crystal clear dives it a was a little disappointing, but there was still a ton of things to see. Some unique items were the small school of Caribbean Reef Squid, Sea Horses I could barely see, and a hammerhead shark just cruising along 50 feet off the wall we were diving.
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We did the shark dive excursion as well. We kneeled on the sand at 70 feet to observe about a dozen Caribbean Reef Sharks as they were fed some fish scraps to bring them in near to us. After feeding, we were allowed to float up and let them swim around us.They were beautiful to watch as they cruised about. Shelli and I really got a whole new respect for an often maligned and misunderstood creature.
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Underwater Roatan was a great experience and we hope to hit the Bay Islands again sometime. Perhaps Utila or Guanaja.
Above the water, we took an afternoon off and got a very private tour of Roatan. Our friend Sarah, just happened to be in Roatan the same time as we were, so we arranged to meet her and a close friend who also runs tours on the island. The four of us piled into a car and explored a good chunk of central Roatan. We just happened to hit a festival day at a Garifuna Village, Punta Gorda, on the north side of the island.We had a local fried fish, rice and plantain lunch at the best place in town and watched festivities that included a lot of local song and dance.The Garifuna are descendants of slaves and Caribe Indians who settled mainly in the southwestern Caribbean and Central American coast.Their culture has strong African ties, mixed with a dose of western and Latin American native religion. After lunch, we headed to the southeast side of the island to Oakridge and took a boat tour of the mangrove tunnels to Jonesville and beyond. So much life in and around the thick mangroves. In places there were huge, what I believed to be ant or termite nests suspended in the branches, small fish everywhere in the water, interesting, unique birds in the trees.The only downside was the trash caught in the roots and branches that storms had brought in from the world’s oceans.
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All in all, it was a great trip. We met our friends and future dive-travel pals, Renae and Stacy Kearse, stayed at a cool dive resort, hung with some great people, both local and from abroad, and experienced 15 more dives to add to our logbooks.