CCV (Roatan) Trip Report

[John_B]

So I got an email from a friend in late February that her shop had some sort of a late cancellation for their group Roatan trip to Coco View Resort in mid-March, which meant they had a last-minute opening. Included was airfare and the standard CCV all inclusive package (room, board, 4 boat dives per day, unlimited shore diving, etc.; drinks are extra and unlimited nitrox is $125/week or $8/tank, whichever is less).

I had already done a couple of dive trips in the last few months including CCV just last November and Catalina Island in January, and I have a three more dive trips scheduled through this fall. Basically using up most of my time off for the year. So naturally I said, "Of course I'll go!" (Note to self: Exactly how much vacation do I get again? ) Seriously, I doubt if I would've have gone if it had been any other resort, but CCV made it a "can't miss".

This shop is about an hours drive from where I work, but it turned out that I didn't know anyone in the group of 24 (which actually consisted of this shop and a group of spearfishers from an affiliated shop that hosts an annual freshwater spearfishing trip for the larger group). So basically two groups of very tight-knit divers that included several instructors and divecons, plus groups of friends and families and whatnot that had all done previous dive trips together recently. Almost all were fairly active warm water divers. Many of the divers had been certified by the instructors on this trip. I was the only diver who didn't know most if not all the others in their group.

Our group was assigned the entire yellow boat with Gringo as the captain and Mark as our DM, and the divers in the other group were all on the Reef Nut. A couple of the instructors on my boat had been to Roatan before, but everyone except me was new to CCV and had to do the obligatory orientation dive (which was rescheduled for Sunday morning after what can only be described as a comedy of errors on the part of Delta Airlines, and both the ATL and RTB airports). So I managed to find a Saturday afternoon buddy at the dock/locker area to get a shore dive on the Prince Albert wreck to practice shooting a bag. Video link of the Prince Albert dive shamelessly stolen from YooToob here (love the soundtrack on this one).

This was a really fun group, but I soon found out they there were there for a vacation while I was there to dive. Everyone's dive vacation should suit their needs and desires, personally I can relax and drink beer and lay in the sun at home some other time. There were plenty of divers in our group going out on the morning and afternoon boat dives, and many did the second drop-off dives. But finding dive buddies for dawn dives or night dives in my group proved difficult. Most afternoons found the group relaxing with a few beers before diner, which is fine for them but would rule out a night dive for me. So a really great group, but not a great fit for me and the number of dives I had planned to get in that week.

The standard procedure at CCV is a boat dive that leaves at 8:30 am for a mooring line-based dive (sometimes done as a sort of drift dive with a live boat following, depending on current), then after a surface interval they do a drop off dive on Newman's Wall that ends at the Prince Albert, and through markers in the eel grass back to the resort. Then an afternoon boat dive that leaves at 2:00 pm followed by a drop off dive on CCV Wall that also ends at the Prince Albert, etc. Which wall for the drop off has mostly to do with the time of day and how well sunlit the walls will be. Neither is set in stone, on request they will do the other wall, and by the end of the week a small group on my boat was able to talk the captain into dropping us quite a bit farther back on CCV than normal. Gringo and Mark took very good care of us.

The wall dives and the path back to the resort are the primary reason that divers new to CCV are required to do an orientation dive with one of the DMs. It's always good to be able to find your way back. This dive also includes performing a skills demonstration of a reg recovery and mask clear. The one complaint I hear from experienced divers about this is that they have [fill in the blank] dives and shouldn't need to perform skills for anyone. From my view, those two skills are one third of the Basic Six I learned as a UTD/DIR diver. And because I find nothing defogs a mask like warm saltwater, I've been known to just take my mask off underwater and rub my finger on the inside of the mask then replace and clear, which I think freaked out two of the teenagers on our boat the first time they saw me do that (but they had great buddy responses!). I also do a modified s-drill to start every dive. So it wasn't a big deal for me on my previous trip, but I do understand that some people feel like their honor has been challenged or something like that. And in every group there always seems to be some uberdiver on dry land that has no skills underwater. So I'm sure they take that into account. :shrug:

At the end of the week, I had done 28 dives over five and a half days. The south side of the island consists of mostly shallow reefs right off the island which are between 10' to sometimes 40' in depth for about 100 yards offshore before turning into wall dives that go well past 110'. If there is a standard profile on these dives, it's to start down the wall for 20 to 30 minutes and then ascend up to the top of the reef for about an hour of total dive time. These are my favorite dives. Unfortunately I discovered that I had a camera malfunction two days before leaving so I have no pictures to post.

The first two days were quite windy (20-30 mph) and the dive sites for the boat dives were rescheduled to sites that were as protected and close as possible, but a few people still got nauseous even if they weren't full-on seasick. By Tuesday the winds layed down nicely and the seas were calm which made for great diving the rest of the week. As the seas were calm we did a rescheduled 30 minute boat trip Tuesday morning to Calvin's Crack. Calvin's is a swimthrough created thousands of years ago due to seismic activity that starts through a smallish hole in the top of the reef, and is is my second favorite reef dive of all time. The highlight of this trip was an optional all-day three dive boat trip to the West End on Thursday. The reef structure there is different from the south side of the island, and that meant chances to see different sea life; we saw 16 turtles (four hawksbills and twelve green sea turtles) and a nurse shark on this day trip. It also gave us a chance to spend an hour shopping on the kitschy West End after lunch on the surface interval between the second and third dives. All in all a great day diving! We also spent a couple of other surface intervals at a sand channel between a pair of Cays where an island monkey liked to play a sort of game with one of the teenaged boys in our group. The culmination of the week was a Friday morning trip to do swimthroughs (twice ) at the break in the reef at Mary's Place which is still my all time favorite reef dive. There was a friendly green moray eel on a ledge that seemed as interested in me as I was of him. Video link for Calvin's and Mary's shamelessly stolen from YooToob here.

There were a lot of other opportunities for activities. Rides on a three man ultralight seaplane around the island, ziplines, island tours, the infamous shark dive (I was told one person's Suunto dive computer went way into deco in the middle of their 70' shark dive), restaurant dinners out, etc. Great for those who were interested, but those of you who've been diving with me before know that I wasn't going to do any activities that would significantly take away from my underwater time. Before I left, I noticed that the resort next door was offering some sort free nitrox plus free beer package (apparently including some small print worth reading), while CCV was booked up full including the beach houses and is booked well into the future. This probably has to do with the resorts reputation as place that has been designed for divers and divers only. I'm told CCV gets more repeat business than all the other resorts combined, if that's true it wouldn't surprise me in the least. It definitely fits my mantra of "Let's Go Diving!"

All in all, I really enjoyed this trip to CCV and can't wait for the trip my LDS has organized in November. In the mean time, I've got a Coz trip I need to finish planning.

John_B

 

[John_B]

... after what can only be described as a comedy of errors on the part of Delta Airlines, and both the ATL and RTB airports...

So this story deserves it's own post.

I'm at the local airport at 3:40 am for a 5:40 am micro-Delta flight. This was one of those deals where the entire group of 24 had to be there to do the check-in. And you'd think this is where things would go wrong, but it was fine. Everyone is early. With 24 out of the 50 passengers on this one plane the actually gave us our own check-in line and things went pretty smoothly in the terminal. This is one of Delta's midget jets, where carry-on luggage that meets Delta standards won't fit in the overhead bins and has to be gate checked. On the runway, we sat at the gate with the door closed and the baggage loaded for a while, for reasons that weren't clear to anyone.

Once we approached Atlanta we circled for twenty minutes due to bad weather. For an airport that is "the busiest in the nation" and is regularly socked in due to visibility, you'd think they'd be smarter than to build a taller tower that can't see the ground when its raining. So when we were finally landing, our connecting flight was boarding (there was only 40 minutes between flights if everything had gone perfectly). We all do the mad dash from the tiny-plane terminal to the normal-plane terminal. We get to the gate and find they have closed the door to boarding. Remember, there are 24 people making this same Delta connection! But due to technical problems with the plane (and not because of the number of people who will have to be rebooked), they decide to reopen it. Re-read that, see if it makes any more sense to you than it did to me when I typed it! So they let all 24 in our group in, plus two other couples from other flights with the same problem. The other passengers tell us the equipment problem was that the back door would close but the light in the cockpit said it was still open, so they couldn't take off until that was resolved. They manage to somehow force the back door closed and we take off for Roatan.

We arrive to find out what a problem this is. The Delta flights into RTB are deplaned using one of those back ends to the plane that opens by swinging down to become a set of steps. Whatever they did to get the door to register "closed" in the cockpit at ATL prevents the door from opening in RTB. They wheel over one of Continental's portable stair units (IIRC there were three on the tarmac) to the "normal" door near the front of the plane that we boarded through in ATL only to realize that its about five or six feet too tall. Eventually they manage to jimmy the back door open and we deplane into the immigration area for the next hour.

Bad things can happen anywhere, but it really makes me question Delta's maintenance. It also make me question whether anyone at Delta is in charge of logistics. I mean, don't they know what a pain it's going to be to rebook 24 passengers on that route? Or what equipment they have or don't have when they get to their destination? (A competent welder could probably shorten one of Continental's extra portable stair units in an hour.)

I will say that the Delta flight attendants that tell the passengers they only need one Honduran immigration and customs form per family are equally as clueless as their Continental counterparts. This is a big reason why it takes so long for everyone to get through immigration in RTB and get their visas stamped, the immigration agents have to get each additional family member to fill out their own.

 

[parrotheaddiver]

Thanks for the great report John....I love CCV it is my home away from home....can't wait to get back there in June....we have space in our group if you want to go again we will have some CCV newbies with us too it is always fun to show them around the "Front Yard"

 

[robint]

Wow! Glad you had a great time despite all the miscues. We just got back from Cozumel this week and it truly pales in comparison to Roatan and CCV. It was okay diving, but not what it used to be by a longshot and having just been to Roatan last year, we kept comparing the two...... I really would go back to CCV in a heartbeat but I doubt I will ever go back to Coz. The best diving we did all week was over at the cenotes or the shore dive (shallow, 10-20' depth) right in front of ScubaClub where we stayed.
Right now, CocoView Resort, Roatan is my GOLD STANDARD for great dive vacations, topside and underwater - from the cozy little resort, to the staff, to the dive boats, to the gear storage area, to the ease of shore diving, to the food, to the night shore dives..... A close second for me are Bonaire and Nekton Bahamas.

robin

 

[charlesml3]

Hey John,

Excellent writeup. My gripe with the orientation dive is not really about "I've done xxx many dives why should I have to show you?" It's more like, "We're here at 2:30pm on a Saturday, why do we have to sit around all afternoon when we could be doing an afternoon and night dive?"

That's really my only gripe with Cocoview. I've discussed it with Doc both in person and online. It seems to me that they should make allowances for people arriving fairly early Saturday afternoon and do the orientation dive then instead of Sunday morning.

-Charles

 

[robint]

Hey John,

Excellent writeup. My gripe with the orientation dive is not really about "I've done xxx many dives why should I have to show you?" It's more like, "We're here at 2:30pm on a Saturday, why do we have to sit around all afternoon when we could be doing an afternoon and night dive?"

That's really my only gripe with Cocoview. I've discussed it with Doc both in person and online. It seems to me that they should make allowances for people arriving fairly early Saturday afternoon and do the orientation dive then instead of Sunday morning.

-Charles

yeah, I was a bit annoyed by it but also glad after we did it that first time. It was good to see the layout of the shore diving with a guide. Now that we have done it, we never have to do it again. Next trip we will be getting on the boat when the new-to-CCV people are doing the Orientation dive.

 

[Byte Me]

John, thanks for the writeup! Good information on immigration!! We're leaving Saturday to join week 2 of dive camp w/ Bruce, Kate and Doc. Can't wait - it'll be our first time too so the orientation dive is a must do. And, while I'd love to get in the water right away you never know, maybe it'll work out that we can get that in Saturday, otherwise, I'll get to hang out w/ my wife - who doesn't dive - and maybe get her snorkeling or sign up for the shark dive and other things.

 

[D_O_H]

Thanks for the great report and for taking me back to CCV for a few minutes. I really need to get back down there...

 

[deeper thoughts]

Thnx for the reports

 

[John_B]

FWIW, for this trip our group arrived too late for the new-to-CCV crowd to do a standard orientation dive on Saturday, though we should've been able to (gotta love Delta!) However, they did do the main walkthrough (resort info, tour of the docks and lockers, weights and c-cards, etc.) on Saturday which made their Sunday orientation dive into just the shore dive.

Charles, from the information posted it seems like a group could pay a DM ($50 for the group?) to do a private orientation dive but I didn't see anyone doing that this trip. The caveat was that they had to have enough available daylight. We were so late by the time we got to the resort in November (due to the customs/immigration thing taking two hours) that it wasn't an option. Have someone track down Jesse, he's in charge of the dockside part of the operation (boats, DMs, compressors, etc.) in addition to being the DM for the blue boat. He's definitely the guy who could make it happen.

Robin, I'm not sure that gearing up for a shore dive on Saturday afternoon when everyone else was doing the dock walk endeared me to anyone on my boat. Or maybe it was doing the boat dive Sunday morning while they were all doing the shore dive? I reminded them that, on their next trip, they'd be in my shoes. (Or is that my neoprene boots? My fins?)

Parrothead, that'd be awfully tempting, but I'd have to cancel my Coz plans to do that. Which, OBTW, Robin has me half talked into already.

Byte_Me, the shark dive signup is on the pegboards next to the office, with the day trips, zipline trips, Thursday night restaurant trips, etc.

What you really want to try and do is have enough people sign up for the all-day West End dive trip (IIRC, min. of 6 divers). Three dives on very differently structured reefs than what you'd otherwise see on the south side of the island, with very different sealife. But do not schedule an all-day trip for the days that your boat is going to Mary's Place or Calvin's Crack, as those dives are not to be missed. The signup sheet for the West End dive trip (and the boat night dive on Minagerhea's Reef) are over at the docks, across from the large blackboard with the planned dive site assignments for each boat.

Can't wait to go back!