Diving in Roatan (Bay Islands)

With our new friend Tamsyn from New Zealand we left the ferry both

seasick and ready for some serious vacation on the Bay Islands. The Bay

It´s raining....lets Dive!

Island consists of two (and some smaller) islands called Roatan and

Utila. Arriving in Roatan we´d expected to stay in a luxurious hotel at

the beach with white sandy beach, palm trees and ofcourse diving with

carribean fishes in the blue ocean. But instead we stayed in a budget place, after seeing one

nice private cabin and deciding it was a bit highly priced, we booked a

room in a house with a shared kitchen, showers and 2 other rooms. One

of the rooms was booked by Tamsyn and by sharing and cooking together

we could still have our own privacy and spend some extra time with our

new friend (who would have been lonely otherwise) So the next day we settle in our new house, stocked our fridge and

started cooking (pasta, both vegetarian and with ham, since Tamsyn is a

veggie) Then we checked out the town we were staying (Roatan is quite

big and has a couple of towns and many resorts and dive schools/shops).

We walked in a cozy and small but fun looking dive shop and decided to

take a refreshment course (for Kah-kin) and dive with them the next day

on the reef. If everything went well we could do 3 to 5 dives to finish

(Esmeralda already had done 2 of 5 required dives) the Advanced Open

Water course.

The next I sat together with my dive instructor Garry on the

bottom of the Carribean sea to go through all the basic steps of the

open water course and that afternoon we dived together at the dive site

Turtle Crossing. A fitting name because we encounted at least 3

different turtles (and one cute child turtle) swimming through the

reef-canal. We had good visibility and enjoyed the dive before the wind

started to increase and the water became too choppy. The weather wasn´t that great and the storms caused high waves on

the reefs and uncomfortable and not suitable dive environments. The

weather got worse during the week and we were forced to do most dives

at the south side of the Island, where the wind wasn´t affecting the

sea, and the water became almost like a lake. So after doing a navigation dive, peak buoyancy, underwater

naturalist, drift dive and a deep dive we were both certified Advanced

swimmers! The last dive was the Deep dive and with visibility higher

than 18 meters at 30meters dept it was my most fun dive ever, Seeing

loads of fish swimming up and down a coral wall and suffering slightly

from nitrogen narcosis it just couldn´t get much better.

Meanwhile we enjoyed staying at the house with Tamsyn, to be able

to cook our own breakfast and dinners, while simply enjoying a laid

back life with nothing else to do, besides diving, waiting for better

weather and playing games. Later on Matt and Brian from New Mexico

joined our cabin and we spend the last three nights together drinking

at the bar, eating in a restaurant and playing games like ¨Asshole¨ and

¨Shithead¨

Tamsyn booked a flight out of the Island on Sunday, and we thought

it was a good plan to fly from Roatan to Teguchigalpa (instead of

taking the gruesome ferry and long bus rides again)...actually we

forgot it was already a week ago since we landed on Roatan, so it was

time to move on towards Nicaragua.

To finish it up.... Roatan is really a nice place (even for

backpackers) it surely has its attractiveness and although the weather

kinda sucked (we got two great mornings were diving was a bliss) we

were simply having fun with new friends and enjoyed the island life

style (where electricity can be out all day, water is scarce and internet is too

expensive).