Kingscrab
Registered
Hey SCUBA folks! Just got back a couple of days ago from my first trip to Roatan, and I thought I'd throw some words of advice out there. Where to start...?
Honduras diving totally lived up to my expectations!
My wife and I honeymooned at CoCo View Resort and I want to officially give this place two thumbs up. The trip got off to a rocky start thanks to the POS airline known as DELTA. DO NOT FLY DELTA. Seriously. Every. Single. Plane. Had mechanical issues of some sort. We missed the first whole day of our honeymoon due to missed connections.
Flight to Roatan = Captain announced over the loudspeaker he had to "reboot the plane" to get a certain censor to work. 30 min gone. Upon arrival in Atlanta (which is an enormous traffic CF - 30 min gone) the "door wasn't opening" so we sat at our gate while the clock ticked. 20 more minutes gone. RAN through the vast expanse of the Atlanta airport, actually got to our connecting Roatan flight gate 5 minutes before take off only to find out that the plane had pulled away early. Yeah. Got rerouted to Houston to catch a Continental flight the next day. (which BTW was quite nice. Continental seems to hame a nice modern fleet) So, night one of honeymoon = Hello Garden Inn at Houston.
Return Flight = Thinking a 4 hour layover was sufficient, we sat in the Roatan airport confident we wouldn't have to stay at another flea bag airport hotel. Right? Wrong. The incoming plane to Roatan that we were waiting for was, yup, 4 hours late. End of honeymoon in Altlanta hotel. I could go on, but alas, I digress.
Bah. Enough negative. Now the good stuff!
CoCo View resort was amazing. The people were all very friendly and it was the lowest maintenance diving I have ever done. As a backpacker, I'm not used to "resort vacations" so this was a new experience. Upon arrival, we met Mitch, the recent manager, who upon hearing our tale of woe, immediately took us out for a shore dive/orientation dive. The Prince Albert wreck is about 100 yards offshore and I have to tell ya, I could do this dive 5 times a day. It is BEAUTIFUL. There is so much to keep you busy down there!
Never once did I feel like anyone working at the resort was being schmoozy or cheesey. Our divemaster was Kirk and our Captain was Dave. You never really know what to expect from a dive guide. I've seen all sides of the spectrum, from the "know it all" yahoo to the quiet stoic type. Well, these guys were really great. Just the right mix of professionalism and easy going attitude. Kirk and Dave were very easy to get along with and could basically talk to anyone about anything. It felt very genuine. I was amazed at how knowledgeable Kirk was about the reef too. I mean, when he said something like "A seahorse lives on this rock right about here *point at map* and I will look for him" he meant it. The guy has eagle eyes.
Anyway, it's a slick operation and a well oiled machine. They made it SO easy to go diving.
Eat, go out on boat for first dive, drop off near wreck for second dive. Repeat.
Speaking of eating: The food was pretty damn good. The dinners were the best meals by far. I feel like the quality of the food trailed off by the end of the week, but I have to say, we had some STELLAR dinners at CoCo View. The breakfast meals were pretty average fare, but hey, neither of us got sick from the food or water so I'm not complaining. The vegetarian options were pretty lacking, or so I heard a couple people grumble, but I eat meat and was quite happy. I do wish they would have put tortillas out at every meal where they had rice and beans present, (makes sense, yeah?) but hey, minor gripe.
One thing that I really liked about CoCo View were the nice little touches. The area (garden, walkway, etc) was well maintained. Every morning when we got to breakfast, Jose the parrot was just waking up. He was nice enough to say "hello" to us everyday. (100 times or so!) The house resort poochies were always floating around looking for a pet and a bite of food. Little Gizmo was our fave! There were also a couple of humming bird feeders that were fun to watch. CoCo View had some non diving events that were a nice touch also. Fire dancers, Honduran kids doing traditional Honduran polkas, crab races, etc. Solid good fun to mix up the routine a little bit at night.
Back to diving. The water was great, and I'd say the VIS was better than average. I was a little worried about jellyfish before I went down there but it didn't even seem to be an issue at all. Not once did I hear about any recent stingings, etc. The coral was very vibrant and beautiful. LOTS of sea fans and barrel (?) coral. The wall dives were stunning. We saw schools of squid (my personal fave) tons of schooling fishes, seahorses (thank you Kirk!) eels, giant hermit crabs, garden eels, toad fish and (to the local's dismay) many lionfish.
SHARKDIVE: For those of you who are not yet jaded or have not done a dive like this, the Sharkdive is TOTALLY worth it. It's a little pricy ($100 or so) but it's fun. We did the one tank dive to watch the sharks eat and it was BAD ASS. The current was strong so the divers had to "climb" down the mooring line to get to the feeding area, but it was amazing. We had 10 or 11 sharks show up to the chum bucket. You sit with your back to a small wall and watch as the dive master opens the bucket. After we watched them eat, the guide let us free float and basically you're floating there and sharks are all over the place cruising around. It was cool as hell. If you wanna see sharks, you WILL see them on this dive.
ZIPLINE: My wife got a cold one day so we did the Pirates of the Carribean zipline tour instead of diving. It was an hour of pure AWESOME. Scary as hell and every bit as fun. If you do this, do the EXTREME route. Again, pricy at $65 a head, but I'd do it again in a second.
As I said earlier, my wife and I are (traditionally) backpackers so resort vacations are usually not our thang. We like mixing with locals and seeing the reality of a place when we travel. Alas it was not to be this time. CoCo View is on a small island and getting back to the mainland just didn't occur to us. I'm sad to say that not once did we even see Honduran money, but we expected to be cloistered and focused on diving when we signed up for the trip. I admit, I was a little uncomfortable with the vast difference in standard of living in Honduras. The closest we got to experiencing the local scene was from our boat, I'm afraid. At times it was difficult to see people living in shanty towns on the water's edge as we tooled past in our fancy dive boat, but again... I digress. We tipped (EVERYONE) good so hopefully some of that will trickle back to the local economy. (small consolation, right...?)
If you are only interested in diving and chilling out, CoCo View is PERFECT.
The closest thing to a complaint about CCV is that it was a little difficult to get common items. The staff was good about trying, but still, there is no "local pharmacy" or corner store" to run to if you need something. For example, when my wife got a cold there was ONE packet of cold medicine at the gift shop. (Which was overpriced of course) Plan ahead! I will say that the staff was very helpful to us when we needed it. Example: We had no clock. Our phones had no service and usually we use our phones for the time. The staff sent someone to the mainland buy us a cheapo alarm clock though and we had one the next day!
Here is another fun tidbit for ya. We discovered that island wide power outages are planned and quite frequent on Roatan. A couple times that week, power totally dropped for about a minute. Fortunately, CCV is ready and has three huge power generators that kicked right in. Apparently they can run for about a month if they have enough fuel.
One thing that was really nice was hanging out on the sun deck. They have a sandy pathway that runs along side a long dock. The dock has a couple of "nodes" that stick out with sunning chairs on them. The end of the dock has a big shaded area with hammocks. It was SO relaxing sitting out there reading and watching divers trickle in and out of the shore line as they finished their drop off dives.
CCV has a very organized system for shore night dives as well. While we didn't do one, it was fun to sit at the bar with a boat drink and watch the glows from the night diver's lights out in the bay. Sigh.
I will add more to this later...
Honduras diving totally lived up to my expectations!
My wife and I honeymooned at CoCo View Resort and I want to officially give this place two thumbs up. The trip got off to a rocky start thanks to the POS airline known as DELTA. DO NOT FLY DELTA. Seriously. Every. Single. Plane. Had mechanical issues of some sort. We missed the first whole day of our honeymoon due to missed connections.
Flight to Roatan = Captain announced over the loudspeaker he had to "reboot the plane" to get a certain censor to work. 30 min gone. Upon arrival in Atlanta (which is an enormous traffic CF - 30 min gone) the "door wasn't opening" so we sat at our gate while the clock ticked. 20 more minutes gone. RAN through the vast expanse of the Atlanta airport, actually got to our connecting Roatan flight gate 5 minutes before take off only to find out that the plane had pulled away early. Yeah. Got rerouted to Houston to catch a Continental flight the next day. (which BTW was quite nice. Continental seems to hame a nice modern fleet) So, night one of honeymoon = Hello Garden Inn at Houston.
Return Flight = Thinking a 4 hour layover was sufficient, we sat in the Roatan airport confident we wouldn't have to stay at another flea bag airport hotel. Right? Wrong. The incoming plane to Roatan that we were waiting for was, yup, 4 hours late. End of honeymoon in Altlanta hotel. I could go on, but alas, I digress.
Bah. Enough negative. Now the good stuff!
CoCo View resort was amazing. The people were all very friendly and it was the lowest maintenance diving I have ever done. As a backpacker, I'm not used to "resort vacations" so this was a new experience. Upon arrival, we met Mitch, the recent manager, who upon hearing our tale of woe, immediately took us out for a shore dive/orientation dive. The Prince Albert wreck is about 100 yards offshore and I have to tell ya, I could do this dive 5 times a day. It is BEAUTIFUL. There is so much to keep you busy down there!
Never once did I feel like anyone working at the resort was being schmoozy or cheesey. Our divemaster was Kirk and our Captain was Dave. You never really know what to expect from a dive guide. I've seen all sides of the spectrum, from the "know it all" yahoo to the quiet stoic type. Well, these guys were really great. Just the right mix of professionalism and easy going attitude. Kirk and Dave were very easy to get along with and could basically talk to anyone about anything. It felt very genuine. I was amazed at how knowledgeable Kirk was about the reef too. I mean, when he said something like "A seahorse lives on this rock right about here *point at map* and I will look for him" he meant it. The guy has eagle eyes.
Anyway, it's a slick operation and a well oiled machine. They made it SO easy to go diving.
Eat, go out on boat for first dive, drop off near wreck for second dive. Repeat.
Speaking of eating: The food was pretty damn good. The dinners were the best meals by far. I feel like the quality of the food trailed off by the end of the week, but I have to say, we had some STELLAR dinners at CoCo View. The breakfast meals were pretty average fare, but hey, neither of us got sick from the food or water so I'm not complaining.
The vegetarian options were pretty lacking, or so I heard a couple people grumble, but I eat meat and was quite happy. I do wish they would have put tortillas out at every meal where they had rice and beans present, (makes sense, yeah?) but hey, minor gripe.One thing that I really liked about CoCo View were the nice little touches. The area (garden, walkway, etc) was well maintained. Every morning when we got to breakfast, Jose the parrot was just waking up. He was nice enough to say "hello" to us everyday. (100 times or so!) The house resort poochies were always floating around looking for a pet and a bite of food. Little Gizmo was our fave!
There were also a couple of humming bird feeders that were fun to watch. CoCo View had some non diving events that were a nice touch also. Fire dancers, Honduran kids doing traditional Honduran polkas, crab races, etc. Solid good fun to mix up the routine a little bit at night.Back to diving. The water was great, and I'd say the VIS was better than average. I was a little worried about jellyfish before I went down there but it didn't even seem to be an issue at all. Not once did I hear about any recent stingings, etc. The coral was very vibrant and beautiful. LOTS of sea fans and barrel (?) coral. The wall dives were stunning. We saw schools of squid (my personal fave) tons of schooling fishes, seahorses (thank you Kirk!) eels, giant hermit crabs, garden eels, toad fish and (to the local's dismay) many lionfish.
SHARKDIVE: For those of you who are not yet jaded or have not done a dive like this, the Sharkdive is TOTALLY worth it. It's a little pricy ($100 or so) but it's fun. We did the one tank dive to watch the sharks eat and it was BAD ASS. The current was strong so the divers had to "climb" down the mooring line to get to the feeding area, but it was amazing. We had 10 or 11 sharks show up to the chum bucket. You sit with your back to a small wall and watch as the dive master opens the bucket. After we watched them eat, the guide let us free float and basically you're floating there and sharks are all over the place cruising around. It was cool as hell. If you wanna see sharks, you WILL see them on this dive.
ZIPLINE: My wife got a cold one day so we did the Pirates of the Carribean zipline tour instead of diving. It was an hour of pure AWESOME. Scary as hell and every bit as fun. If you do this, do the EXTREME route. Again, pricy at $65 a head, but I'd do it again in a second.
As I said earlier, my wife and I are (traditionally) backpackers so resort vacations are usually not our thang. We like mixing with locals and seeing the reality of a place when we travel. Alas it was not to be this time. CoCo View is on a small island and getting back to the mainland just didn't occur to us. I'm sad to say that not once did we even see Honduran money, but we expected to be cloistered and focused on diving when we signed up for the trip. I admit, I was a little uncomfortable with the vast difference in standard of living in Honduras. The closest we got to experiencing the local scene was from our boat, I'm afraid. At times it was difficult to see people living in shanty towns on the water's edge as we tooled past in our fancy dive boat, but again... I digress. We tipped (EVERYONE) good so hopefully some of that will trickle back to the local economy. (small consolation, right...?)
If you are only interested in diving and chilling out, CoCo View is PERFECT.
The closest thing to a complaint about CCV is that it was a little difficult to get common items. The staff was good about trying, but still, there is no "local pharmacy" or corner store" to run to if you need something. For example, when my wife got a cold there was ONE packet of cold medicine at the gift shop. (Which was overpriced of course) Plan ahead! I will say that the staff was very helpful to us when we needed it. Example: We had no clock. Our phones had no service and usually we use our phones for the time. The staff sent someone to the mainland buy us a cheapo alarm clock though and we had one the next day!
Here is another fun tidbit for ya. We discovered that island wide power outages are planned and quite frequent on Roatan. A couple times that week, power totally dropped for about a minute. Fortunately, CCV is ready and has three huge power generators that kicked right in. Apparently they can run for about a month if they have enough fuel.
One thing that was really nice was hanging out on the sun deck. They have a sandy pathway that runs along side a long dock. The dock has a couple of "nodes" that stick out with sunning chairs on them. The end of the dock has a big shaded area with hammocks. It was SO relaxing sitting out there reading and watching divers trickle in and out of the shore line as they finished their drop off dives.
CCV has a very organized system for shore night dives as well. While we didn't do one, it was fun to sit at the bar with a boat drink and watch the glows from the night diver's lights out in the bay. Sigh.
I will add more to this later...
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