Scratch_Monkey
Registered
My wife and I met some friends down in Roatan, Honduras this past week and had an excellent time. We love Roatan and try to go once or twice every year as it's an easy flight from Houston where we live.
This was our first trip back since 2019, however, because "you know why". From a Covid perspective, you are not required to wear masks on US planes or in the US airports, but you do need to wear a mask in the Roatan airport and you have to provide either a negative test or your actual vaccine card to enter the country. As of a week or so ago, you no longer had to provide a negative Covid test to re-enter the US so we were spared that expense. In addition, you are supposed to fill out a pre-immigration form and health declaration on-line which we did. But I can't tell if that was ever used or not. We still had to fill out paper immigration forms and health declarations so who knows?
We stayed and dove with Splash Inn in the West End and we love that place. It's not fancy but the people who run it are great, they tend to have the same people year after year, it's got a great free breakfast for divers, and, overall, represents a great value. Basically you live at the dive shop so the dives are just outside your door.
The rooms at Splash Inn are basic but clean and the shower had practically unlimited hot water. Breakfast (free if you dive) was a buffet consisting of fruit, coffee cake, eggs, tortillas, beans, pancakes, French toast, sausage, etc...
The dive shop provides you with a locker to store your equipment (either your equipment or the rental gear they provide you with). The dives are generally "out and back" as the reef is super close so you do your surface interval at the shop. Most of the dives are along the lower, west side of the island, basically in front of the West End, West Bay Beach, or maybe up to the El Aguila wreck. While I have been up to the Odyssey with this shop in the past, they don't go that often because of how far it is.
My wife is a very new diver. She got certified in 2019 but hadn't dove up until March when we did a short trip (six dives) to Belize. In addition, she got a new BCD and we asked the shop if she could get some "easy" time in the water to try and get her weight correct and make sure she was comfortable in the BCD. Sebastian, our DM, was so nice. He spent time with my wife to make sure she was comfortable descending and then spent some time on the sandy bottom helping her with her breathing and evaluating her trim and weight. He made continuous recommendations over the week to help her get dialed in. For example, he suggested that she try the shop fins because he felt her booties (at 6.5mm) were too buoyant. That helped so we went to the Cressi store and purchased some 3mm short booties so she could go back to using her regular fins. By the end of the trip she went from 12 pounds to 10 pounds and Sebastian suggested that she could possibly go as low as 8 once she got more experienced using her breathing to control her buoyancy. By the later dives she was able to maintain buoyancy at 15 feet consistently. I think she will be able to use the other booties as well (if she wants) when she gets more experience as they weren't that much more buoyant. But when you are new, everything helps.
As for the diving, it was pretty good! The visibility in general was okay. Not the best I've seen but not terrible. We saw quite a few turtles, eels (moray, and spotted), typical reef fish like triggers, angels, flounders, tangs, blennies, puffers, sting rays, eagle rays, barracuda, etc... For non-fish stuff, we saw corkscrew anemones with the accompanying blue cleaner shrimp and Arrow crabs, "hidden" anemones, lobsters, large crabs, flamingo tongue, etc...
The reef itself looked okay. Much better than the reef right off Ambergris Caye where we were in March. But it still faces the challenges that all reefs face these days, especially when they experience a lot of divers. I did see a lot of new coral and not much bleached coral so that was good. The soft coral looked really good and we saw large schools of fish and a lot of decent coral on our dive at the West End Wall.
We also dove the El Aguila wreck and that was fun. That wreck bottoms at about 110 feet and my wife and three others got their deep dive adventure cert in. One of the new divers got low on air really fast so we ended up only spending 30 minutes on that dive so we didn't get to see much of the nearby reef but what else are you going to do in that circumstance?
We did a night dive and my wife and I (and one other guy) were fortunate to see an octopus. The best part of the night dive was seeing the "string of pearls". They were just amazing. Basically you turn off all your lights until your eyes adjust and then these creatures that are basically a series of blinking lights (that look strung together like pearls) just appear around you. There are hundreds of them. It's like being in a planetarium. I was so happy my wife saw that! I was also happy that she was perfectly fine on her first night dive!
We were there for a week and we got about 15 dives in each.
We had a great time with our friends, enjoying the West End, and just diving. The weather was mostly good with a few showers here and there (mainly towards the end of the week). While my wife and I didn't really do much outside of dive, eat, and sleep, some of the other people down there saw the dolphins at Anthony's Key, went horseback riding, saw the monkeys and sloths, etc.... I can't wait to get back!
This was our first trip back since 2019, however, because "you know why". From a Covid perspective, you are not required to wear masks on US planes or in the US airports, but you do need to wear a mask in the Roatan airport and you have to provide either a negative test or your actual vaccine card to enter the country. As of a week or so ago, you no longer had to provide a negative Covid test to re-enter the US so we were spared that expense. In addition, you are supposed to fill out a pre-immigration form and health declaration on-line which we did. But I can't tell if that was ever used or not. We still had to fill out paper immigration forms and health declarations so who knows?
We stayed and dove with Splash Inn in the West End and we love that place. It's not fancy but the people who run it are great, they tend to have the same people year after year, it's got a great free breakfast for divers, and, overall, represents a great value. Basically you live at the dive shop so the dives are just outside your door.
The rooms at Splash Inn are basic but clean and the shower had practically unlimited hot water. Breakfast (free if you dive) was a buffet consisting of fruit, coffee cake, eggs, tortillas, beans, pancakes, French toast, sausage, etc...
The dive shop provides you with a locker to store your equipment (either your equipment or the rental gear they provide you with). The dives are generally "out and back" as the reef is super close so you do your surface interval at the shop. Most of the dives are along the lower, west side of the island, basically in front of the West End, West Bay Beach, or maybe up to the El Aguila wreck. While I have been up to the Odyssey with this shop in the past, they don't go that often because of how far it is.
My wife is a very new diver. She got certified in 2019 but hadn't dove up until March when we did a short trip (six dives) to Belize. In addition, she got a new BCD and we asked the shop if she could get some "easy" time in the water to try and get her weight correct and make sure she was comfortable in the BCD. Sebastian, our DM, was so nice. He spent time with my wife to make sure she was comfortable descending and then spent some time on the sandy bottom helping her with her breathing and evaluating her trim and weight. He made continuous recommendations over the week to help her get dialed in. For example, he suggested that she try the shop fins because he felt her booties (at 6.5mm) were too buoyant. That helped so we went to the Cressi store and purchased some 3mm short booties so she could go back to using her regular fins. By the end of the trip she went from 12 pounds to 10 pounds and Sebastian suggested that she could possibly go as low as 8 once she got more experienced using her breathing to control her buoyancy. By the later dives she was able to maintain buoyancy at 15 feet consistently. I think she will be able to use the other booties as well (if she wants) when she gets more experience as they weren't that much more buoyant. But when you are new, everything helps.
As for the diving, it was pretty good! The visibility in general was okay. Not the best I've seen but not terrible. We saw quite a few turtles, eels (moray, and spotted), typical reef fish like triggers, angels, flounders, tangs, blennies, puffers, sting rays, eagle rays, barracuda, etc... For non-fish stuff, we saw corkscrew anemones with the accompanying blue cleaner shrimp and Arrow crabs, "hidden" anemones, lobsters, large crabs, flamingo tongue, etc...
The reef itself looked okay. Much better than the reef right off Ambergris Caye where we were in March. But it still faces the challenges that all reefs face these days, especially when they experience a lot of divers. I did see a lot of new coral and not much bleached coral so that was good. The soft coral looked really good and we saw large schools of fish and a lot of decent coral on our dive at the West End Wall.
We also dove the El Aguila wreck and that was fun. That wreck bottoms at about 110 feet and my wife and three others got their deep dive adventure cert in. One of the new divers got low on air really fast so we ended up only spending 30 minutes on that dive so we didn't get to see much of the nearby reef but what else are you going to do in that circumstance?
We did a night dive and my wife and I (and one other guy) were fortunate to see an octopus. The best part of the night dive was seeing the "string of pearls". They were just amazing. Basically you turn off all your lights until your eyes adjust and then these creatures that are basically a series of blinking lights (that look strung together like pearls) just appear around you. There are hundreds of them. It's like being in a planetarium. I was so happy my wife saw that! I was also happy that she was perfectly fine on her first night dive!
We were there for a week and we got about 15 dives in each.
We had a great time with our friends, enjoying the West End, and just diving. The weather was mostly good with a few showers here and there (mainly towards the end of the week). While my wife and I didn't really do much outside of dive, eat, and sleep, some of the other people down there saw the dolphins at Anthony's Key, went horseback riding, saw the monkeys and sloths, etc.... I can't wait to get back!
