This is my first review so please be gentle with your comments
. It is a little long but I hope I have provided enough information for those who are thinking about going there. Personally, I would not hesitate to recommend this place for a dive vacation as long as you know some of the limits this resort can or cannot provide.
Trip Report:
Aug 2 – Aug 11, 2014
Reef House Resort (RHR), Roatan, Honduras
Let me start by introduce myself and my children. I have been diving since 1993 and have been to most of the Caribbean locations and Red Sea. I skipped diving after my 2 children was born but I raised them so they would be interested in swimming and diving. I certified my son when he was 10 and certified him AOW at 12. My daughter was certified at 11 and AOW at 12. I took my son to the Bahamas & Belize (both liveaboard) and last summer I took both to Cozumel and now my son is 15 with 100 dives and my daughter at 13 with 41 dives.
Initially, I was going to book CCV (as I had been there in 1994) for this trip but as I checked, they do not have any rooms for the week that all 3 of us can get away. My criteria for the trip is all inclusive with good diving/DM and as I am with 2 teenagers, no partying scene…
After checking Scubaboard & TripAdvisor, I decided on RHR, although there were not a lot of reviews of the place, what I read impress me especially of the dive team (Choco & Davit). There were a few –ve reviews but I will address those in my review below.
Travel – It was uneventful although it was a long day as travel from Ottawa Canada to Roatan requires 2 transfers (3 planes). We flew United from Ottawa to D.C., then Houston and finally Roatan. No delay and no problem which was extremely rare in all of my travel.
After arriving at Roatan airport and thru custom, we saw someone outside the custom area with a sign with RHR on it and when we approached him, he directed us to someone (taxi driver) and we were headed to RHR. The drive was longer than I expected as for whatever reason, I thought RHR was close to CCV but as it turns out, it took almost 50 minutes to get there. Once we were off the taxi, Davie the owner pays the taxi driver and we were off on a 2 minutes boat ride to the little cay that RHR was on.
Resort – The resort is small, very small compare to anything I had ever been to in the past. The only way I can describe it is you should think of it as a liveaboard on land. They can accommodate up to 30 people depending on the number of people in a room.
During the week we were there, we were the only guests they have so we basically have the whole place to ourselves and we have a private DM and Captain for our 8 dive days.
If you want to party, don’t book here. If you want a nice pool and/or beach, don’t book here. It is a family run small 60’s family style (as Davie puts it) resort that is dedicated to diving.
We stayed in Room 1 & 2 (no ocean view as it has a tree right in front that gets visited by several hummingbirds), the room is larger than I expected and it has 2 king size bed and lots of room to put your stuff in. The bathroom is NOT fancy but it is quite clean (I have only seen 2 ants for the 10 days we were there). The only thing we have to get used to is NO paper in the toilet, all paper go to the waste basket which was cleaned every day. Personally I have no complain whatsoever with the room or it’s location. To conserve power, we were recommended to turn off the AC during the day as we were diving and turn it on after the afternoon dive. We had no problem with the heat as there was always a breeze blowing. Air temp was in the high 80s (30C) with humidex in the high 90s (according to Weather Channel) but due to the breeze, we never felt extremely hot or uncomfortable. We were told the other side of the island gets very hot as they don’t have the breeze that we get.
Food – The food was very good, as other reviews mentioned, you don’t have a choice on what you eat as they will bring out a plate for you and you eat whatever they cook that day. Out of the 10 days we were there, only 1 lunch we did not like too much. There is always fresh fruit with our breakfast and vegetable with our dinner. The portion is not big but we were never hungry during our stay there. There are always snacks like cookies & cake and they have chips and stuff if you ask.
When we arrived at the resort, first thing Davie asked us is if there is anything we do not eat or anything particular we are allergic to and if there is anything we want to eat. I am thinking maybe some of the negative review regarding food is because they did not specify some of these specifics.
Wifi - They have their router in the common area, we usually gets wifi in our room but the signal is fair to weak, email and such is no problem but if you want to download/upload, it's better to get to the common room or bar area where the signal is strong.
Below are the food that we ate during our stay, note that there were a couple of dishes we don’t recognize and I just put in the name of something I know that is similar. The food are mostly seasoned properly, the only exception is the Spaghetti sauce and the bean soup I found too salty (IMHO).
There is always orange juice/drink during breakfast. Lemonade and iced tea during lunch and dinner. The number below is the date of the meal.
Breakfast | Lunch
3 Scrambled egg, sausage, toast.| Honduran Taco
4. Pancake, fresh fruits | Hamburger, fries
5. Omelet & fresh fruits | Pan fried chicken, pasta salad
6. Bacon, egg, tortilla, refried bean, cheese | Chicken wings, green salad
7. French toast, scrambled egg, sausage | Bean soup w/ pork rind, grill cheese sandwich
8. Scrambled egg, refried bean, fried puff, fruit | Honduran Empanada, Cole slaw
9. Scrambled egg, sausage, toast, fruit | Fish taco, raw tuna ceviche
10. Oatmeal | Quesadilla
11. Scrambled cheese egg, sausage, tortilla, fruit
Dinner
2 Chicken, mash potato, carrot, ice cream
3 Spaghetti, garlic bread, pecan pie
4. Whole Mangrove Snapper, green bean, ice cream
5. Jerk chicken, rice&bean, carrots, cinnamon bun
6. Lion fish, rice & pea, broccoli, ice cream
7. Pork fried rice & fried Plantain
8. King Crab, Tuna, rice, Yucca broth, ice cream
9. Lobster tail, garlic mash, vegetable, ice cream
10. Baby Back Ribs, butternut squash, pasta salad, ice cream
Note that the Lion Fish on the 6th, we (well Davit) caught it during the afternoon dive.
Also note that the tuna dish above is from a long term guest/friend of the owner staying there. He is doing some business locally and he brought us some fresh caught tuna and created a couple of dishes for us to try. He and several of Davie’s friends also joined us for several meals.
The Bar
Since none of us drink, I can’t comment on the bar itself but as others indicated, it is an honour system and you just write your name down on the book what you drink. I don’t know the variety but I do see 15-20 bottles there. There are also soda and beer and juice in the fridge.
The Diving
We have only seen 1 big dive boat that can accommodate 12 divers for 2 tank dives. The small boat that transport us from the dock to the key can probably accommodate 4-6 divers also.
During our 7 ½ days of diving, there were 2 days of slightly rough sea (white caps and rollers), the other days were nice and sunny and calm. The water temp is a consistent 84F according to our dive computers.
During the week, we have not seen any other dive boats if we headed east for our dives. When we headed west, the only other dive boat we saw were from CCV and that is only after we travel for 15 minutes or more. We did not see 1 single divers that is not from our boat all week except for the Prince Albert dive where we saw maybe 6 divers from CCV.
Dive schedule is simple, we have breakfast at 8am, then meet at the dive shop (1 minute walk from our room) at 8:44am and we usually get going before 9am. Travel time usually between 5 minutes to 40 minutes depends on where we are going. Do 1st dive, then travel to second dive site and Surface interval is usually 45-50 minutes, do 2nd dive. Come back to resort and have a quick shower. Lunch around 1pm and we go back to the dive shop at 2:22pm for the afternoon. There is 1 night dive while we were there and we skip the afternoon that day. So basically 3 days a day and we did 23 dives while we were there.
After the dive, you hand up your camera stuff, your weight belt and then take off your tank/bcd and Choco will take everything back to your seat area and you just pull yourself up to the small dive platform. Every morning, Choco will take your bcd/reg and put it on your tank and after your first dive, he will move your bcd/reg to the new tank for you. You do have to remove everything from the boat after the afternoon/night dive and rinse them in the tank and store them in the storage room.
All of our dives ended up to be around 53-62 minutes of bottom time. Since there were only the 3 of us for almost all of the dives, we can take our time when we see something and Michael can take all the time he needed to take the pictures that he wanted which was wonderful. After the first day and after he saw our diving ability, I never notice Davit watching us as he is always leading in front, but somehow when we stop to look at something or photographing something, I always find him to be 15 ft or so away from us and just waiting until we are done and then he continue to lead the dives.
As others mentioned, Davit (DM) and Choco (Captain) are very good at their job. Davit seems to know where everything is and he has no problem pointing out seahorses, moray and other creatures. The only disappointment was we only saw 1 turtle and 1 nurse shark. During 1 dive where Davie (owner) and some of his friends joined us, they reported seeing 2 reef sharks, I vaguely saw a shadow of 1 shark but it was quite far away and I cannot be 100% sure I saw what they saw.
But we did see 10 or 11 seahorses, almost 10 pipe-horses, around 10 spotted morays and 15 or so green moray with several of them free swimming and 1 even followed me from about 60ft of water up to 40 ft and then it turn away from me and swim after my son who is photographing some shrimp. He did not realize the moray was right under his fin watching him until I was making so much noise that it scared the moray away. It was hilarious!
During the week, we killed at least 40 lion fish and I feel better that because of us, a few more fish might survive to adulthood. At the night dive, Davit did not bring his spear (he has it in all the day dives) and we saw several lion fish out hunting. We stay and watch 1 lion fish for several minutes and during those times, it ate about 5 small 1-2 inches reef fishes and I can imagine if it hunt all night, how many fish it can eat. I tried to kick it with my fin but obviously it evaded my clumsy attempt to harass it.
Call me sentimental, but during a few dives, I was looking at the healthy reef and I feel like I am visiting a ghost town. All the structures are there, but there was no life (well, there are small reef fish hanging out around the corals but if you just looking at the whole scenery, you don’t see schools of fish like I remembered from 20 years ago.
Talking about corals, I had requested to dive the Price Albert at CCV as both of my kids hasn’t done any wrack yet. Even though it’s a long boat ride of 40 minutes, they have no problem spending all those gas and took just the 3 of us there. The visibility while we were there was bad, only about 10 feet or less, while we were there, we also did the Cocoview Wall and I was quite surprise that the wall was in pretty bad shape (compare to what I remember from 1994 when I was there). Davit told me CCV has over 60 guests there that week.
I cannot command of the reef condition near CCV or west of CCV but from the 20 minutes or so that we dove there. I was glad that CCV was full when I tried to book it, the reef near RHR, and especially when we head east, the coral are much healthy and there are several sites where you can literally see a forest of Black Corals, just absolutely beautiful.
Problem - There were a few minor issues we have while we were there. They lost electricity one day but it was back after about an hour. We lost water one day (bad pump) and it was fixed after about 2 hours. Our toilet was was working but it was fixed when we finish our dives. Other than that, nothing I can complain about except those pesky mosquito and no-see-um, but that is not the resort's fault.
Well, this turns out to be longer than I expected but I hope you enjoy reading as much as we enjoy diving at RHR. If you have any questions, PM me post it and I will try to answer as best I can.
Disclaimer: I am not related to Davie the owner or any other employee of RHR and I have not been paid to do this review. All the opinion are my own and yadi yada….
Oh, I forgot to mention they have 1 dog, 1 car and 1 parrot that roams the property, all are very friendly but if you don’t like friendly animal come close and say hi to you, maybe you shouldn’t leave your house, just my opinion of course. Have a nice day
Oh, one more thing. On the 1st day of the dive, my daughter ends up with around 500psi of air after the dives and the last several days, she always end up with 1200-1500psi in her tank. I am very happy for her improvement on her dive skill and breathing control.
. It is a little long but I hope I have provided enough information for those who are thinking about going there. Personally, I would not hesitate to recommend this place for a dive vacation as long as you know some of the limits this resort can or cannot provide.Trip Report:
Aug 2 – Aug 11, 2014
Reef House Resort (RHR), Roatan, Honduras
Let me start by introduce myself and my children. I have been diving since 1993 and have been to most of the Caribbean locations and Red Sea. I skipped diving after my 2 children was born but I raised them so they would be interested in swimming and diving. I certified my son when he was 10 and certified him AOW at 12. My daughter was certified at 11 and AOW at 12. I took my son to the Bahamas & Belize (both liveaboard) and last summer I took both to Cozumel and now my son is 15 with 100 dives and my daughter at 13 with 41 dives.
Initially, I was going to book CCV (as I had been there in 1994) for this trip but as I checked, they do not have any rooms for the week that all 3 of us can get away. My criteria for the trip is all inclusive with good diving/DM and as I am with 2 teenagers, no partying scene…
After checking Scubaboard & TripAdvisor, I decided on RHR, although there were not a lot of reviews of the place, what I read impress me especially of the dive team (Choco & Davit). There were a few –ve reviews but I will address those in my review below.
Travel – It was uneventful although it was a long day as travel from Ottawa Canada to Roatan requires 2 transfers (3 planes). We flew United from Ottawa to D.C., then Houston and finally Roatan. No delay and no problem which was extremely rare in all of my travel.
After arriving at Roatan airport and thru custom, we saw someone outside the custom area with a sign with RHR on it and when we approached him, he directed us to someone (taxi driver) and we were headed to RHR. The drive was longer than I expected as for whatever reason, I thought RHR was close to CCV but as it turns out, it took almost 50 minutes to get there. Once we were off the taxi, Davie the owner pays the taxi driver and we were off on a 2 minutes boat ride to the little cay that RHR was on.
Resort – The resort is small, very small compare to anything I had ever been to in the past. The only way I can describe it is you should think of it as a liveaboard on land. They can accommodate up to 30 people depending on the number of people in a room.
During the week we were there, we were the only guests they have so we basically have the whole place to ourselves and we have a private DM and Captain for our 8 dive days.
If you want to party, don’t book here. If you want a nice pool and/or beach, don’t book here. It is a family run small 60’s family style (as Davie puts it) resort that is dedicated to diving.
We stayed in Room 1 & 2 (no ocean view as it has a tree right in front that gets visited by several hummingbirds), the room is larger than I expected and it has 2 king size bed and lots of room to put your stuff in. The bathroom is NOT fancy but it is quite clean (I have only seen 2 ants for the 10 days we were there). The only thing we have to get used to is NO paper in the toilet, all paper go to the waste basket which was cleaned every day. Personally I have no complain whatsoever with the room or it’s location. To conserve power, we were recommended to turn off the AC during the day as we were diving and turn it on after the afternoon dive. We had no problem with the heat as there was always a breeze blowing. Air temp was in the high 80s (30C) with humidex in the high 90s (according to Weather Channel) but due to the breeze, we never felt extremely hot or uncomfortable. We were told the other side of the island gets very hot as they don’t have the breeze that we get.
Food – The food was very good, as other reviews mentioned, you don’t have a choice on what you eat as they will bring out a plate for you and you eat whatever they cook that day. Out of the 10 days we were there, only 1 lunch we did not like too much. There is always fresh fruit with our breakfast and vegetable with our dinner. The portion is not big but we were never hungry during our stay there. There are always snacks like cookies & cake and they have chips and stuff if you ask.
When we arrived at the resort, first thing Davie asked us is if there is anything we do not eat or anything particular we are allergic to and if there is anything we want to eat. I am thinking maybe some of the negative review regarding food is because they did not specify some of these specifics.
Wifi - They have their router in the common area, we usually gets wifi in our room but the signal is fair to weak, email and such is no problem but if you want to download/upload, it's better to get to the common room or bar area where the signal is strong.
Below are the food that we ate during our stay, note that there were a couple of dishes we don’t recognize and I just put in the name of something I know that is similar. The food are mostly seasoned properly, the only exception is the Spaghetti sauce and the bean soup I found too salty (IMHO).
There is always orange juice/drink during breakfast. Lemonade and iced tea during lunch and dinner. The number below is the date of the meal.
Breakfast | Lunch
3 Scrambled egg, sausage, toast.| Honduran Taco
4. Pancake, fresh fruits | Hamburger, fries
5. Omelet & fresh fruits | Pan fried chicken, pasta salad
6. Bacon, egg, tortilla, refried bean, cheese | Chicken wings, green salad
7. French toast, scrambled egg, sausage | Bean soup w/ pork rind, grill cheese sandwich
8. Scrambled egg, refried bean, fried puff, fruit | Honduran Empanada, Cole slaw
9. Scrambled egg, sausage, toast, fruit | Fish taco, raw tuna ceviche
10. Oatmeal | Quesadilla
11. Scrambled cheese egg, sausage, tortilla, fruit
Dinner
2 Chicken, mash potato, carrot, ice cream
3 Spaghetti, garlic bread, pecan pie
4. Whole Mangrove Snapper, green bean, ice cream
5. Jerk chicken, rice&bean, carrots, cinnamon bun
6. Lion fish, rice & pea, broccoli, ice cream
7. Pork fried rice & fried Plantain
8. King Crab, Tuna, rice, Yucca broth, ice cream
9. Lobster tail, garlic mash, vegetable, ice cream
10. Baby Back Ribs, butternut squash, pasta salad, ice cream
Note that the Lion Fish on the 6th, we (well Davit) caught it during the afternoon dive.
Also note that the tuna dish above is from a long term guest/friend of the owner staying there. He is doing some business locally and he brought us some fresh caught tuna and created a couple of dishes for us to try. He and several of Davie’s friends also joined us for several meals.
The Bar
Since none of us drink, I can’t comment on the bar itself but as others indicated, it is an honour system and you just write your name down on the book what you drink. I don’t know the variety but I do see 15-20 bottles there. There are also soda and beer and juice in the fridge.
The Diving
We have only seen 1 big dive boat that can accommodate 12 divers for 2 tank dives. The small boat that transport us from the dock to the key can probably accommodate 4-6 divers also.
During our 7 ½ days of diving, there were 2 days of slightly rough sea (white caps and rollers), the other days were nice and sunny and calm. The water temp is a consistent 84F according to our dive computers.
During the week, we have not seen any other dive boats if we headed east for our dives. When we headed west, the only other dive boat we saw were from CCV and that is only after we travel for 15 minutes or more. We did not see 1 single divers that is not from our boat all week except for the Prince Albert dive where we saw maybe 6 divers from CCV.
Dive schedule is simple, we have breakfast at 8am, then meet at the dive shop (1 minute walk from our room) at 8:44am and we usually get going before 9am. Travel time usually between 5 minutes to 40 minutes depends on where we are going. Do 1st dive, then travel to second dive site and Surface interval is usually 45-50 minutes, do 2nd dive. Come back to resort and have a quick shower. Lunch around 1pm and we go back to the dive shop at 2:22pm for the afternoon. There is 1 night dive while we were there and we skip the afternoon that day. So basically 3 days a day and we did 23 dives while we were there.
After the dive, you hand up your camera stuff, your weight belt and then take off your tank/bcd and Choco will take everything back to your seat area and you just pull yourself up to the small dive platform. Every morning, Choco will take your bcd/reg and put it on your tank and after your first dive, he will move your bcd/reg to the new tank for you. You do have to remove everything from the boat after the afternoon/night dive and rinse them in the tank and store them in the storage room.
All of our dives ended up to be around 53-62 minutes of bottom time. Since there were only the 3 of us for almost all of the dives, we can take our time when we see something and Michael can take all the time he needed to take the pictures that he wanted which was wonderful. After the first day and after he saw our diving ability, I never notice Davit watching us as he is always leading in front, but somehow when we stop to look at something or photographing something, I always find him to be 15 ft or so away from us and just waiting until we are done and then he continue to lead the dives.
As others mentioned, Davit (DM) and Choco (Captain) are very good at their job. Davit seems to know where everything is and he has no problem pointing out seahorses, moray and other creatures. The only disappointment was we only saw 1 turtle and 1 nurse shark. During 1 dive where Davie (owner) and some of his friends joined us, they reported seeing 2 reef sharks, I vaguely saw a shadow of 1 shark but it was quite far away and I cannot be 100% sure I saw what they saw.
But we did see 10 or 11 seahorses, almost 10 pipe-horses, around 10 spotted morays and 15 or so green moray with several of them free swimming and 1 even followed me from about 60ft of water up to 40 ft and then it turn away from me and swim after my son who is photographing some shrimp. He did not realize the moray was right under his fin watching him until I was making so much noise that it scared the moray away. It was hilarious!
During the week, we killed at least 40 lion fish and I feel better that because of us, a few more fish might survive to adulthood. At the night dive, Davit did not bring his spear (he has it in all the day dives) and we saw several lion fish out hunting. We stay and watch 1 lion fish for several minutes and during those times, it ate about 5 small 1-2 inches reef fishes and I can imagine if it hunt all night, how many fish it can eat. I tried to kick it with my fin but obviously it evaded my clumsy attempt to harass it.
Call me sentimental, but during a few dives, I was looking at the healthy reef and I feel like I am visiting a ghost town. All the structures are there, but there was no life (well, there are small reef fish hanging out around the corals but if you just looking at the whole scenery, you don’t see schools of fish like I remembered from 20 years ago.
Talking about corals, I had requested to dive the Price Albert at CCV as both of my kids hasn’t done any wrack yet. Even though it’s a long boat ride of 40 minutes, they have no problem spending all those gas and took just the 3 of us there. The visibility while we were there was bad, only about 10 feet or less, while we were there, we also did the Cocoview Wall and I was quite surprise that the wall was in pretty bad shape (compare to what I remember from 1994 when I was there). Davit told me CCV has over 60 guests there that week.
I cannot command of the reef condition near CCV or west of CCV but from the 20 minutes or so that we dove there. I was glad that CCV was full when I tried to book it, the reef near RHR, and especially when we head east, the coral are much healthy and there are several sites where you can literally see a forest of Black Corals, just absolutely beautiful.
Problem - There were a few minor issues we have while we were there. They lost electricity one day but it was back after about an hour. We lost water one day (bad pump) and it was fixed after about 2 hours. Our toilet was was working but it was fixed when we finish our dives. Other than that, nothing I can complain about except those pesky mosquito and no-see-um, but that is not the resort's fault.
Well, this turns out to be longer than I expected but I hope you enjoy reading as much as we enjoy diving at RHR. If you have any questions, PM me post it and I will try to answer as best I can.
Disclaimer: I am not related to Davie the owner or any other employee of RHR and I have not been paid to do this review. All the opinion are my own and yadi yada….
Oh, I forgot to mention they have 1 dog, 1 car and 1 parrot that roams the property, all are very friendly but if you don’t like friendly animal come close and say hi to you, maybe you shouldn’t leave your house, just my opinion of course. Have a nice day
Oh, one more thing. On the 1st day of the dive, my daughter ends up with around 500psi of air after the dives and the last several days, she always end up with 1200-1500psi in her tank. I am very happy for her improvement on her dive skill and breathing control.
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