Bay Islands, Honduras: Guanaja, Roatan, and Utila
We have spent the past two+ weeks in Honduras visiting the 3 Bay Islands. The sail from San Andrés took us about 4 days but luckily there was a 16 hour overnight stop in the middle at the Vivario Cays. There we were able to anchor, eat, and sleep. The Vivario’s are a little reef 50 miles offshore where we found one fishing boat and traded a couple beers for the biggest lobster I have ever seen. Other than that the sail was uneventful in a good way with a steady breeze and relatively smooth conditions for the entire passage.
Guanaja is the quietest of these islands with very few tourist but we had one loud night there with some Germans who owned a bar which had a full set up of musical equipment for those passing through. There was a hilarious jam session that went into the early hours of the morning. The resident dolphin found us and swam by a few times a day. She likes hanging around the boats but swims away if you jump in the water to play with her.
Roatan is the biggest island and is a popular cruise-ship port. We worked our way down the island with stops at a few bays along the way. We avoided the big towns of Coxen Hole and French Harbour where all the cruise ships unload their passengers for a 4 hour walk about. We reached the West End Marine Park and it all looked so beautiful that Kostya and I signed up to do our open water diving course there. I’m really glad that we did the course. It was a great way to spend a few days and, although I don’t have much to compare it to, the diving was amazing with fish, rays, turtles, and walls and caves of corals. We even saw a hammerhead shark swim right over our heads on the last day. Judging from the excitement of our instructor and the jealousy of everyone else on shore this was obviously a rare occurrence. Roatan is a great place to go on vacation if you are a diver with 30 shops to choose from and about 100 named dive sites within a 15 minute boat ride of the one sandy beach road. If you don’t like diving, eating, and drinking then there isn’t too much here for you.
The same can be said for Utila. We arrived here a couple days ago and it seems to offer much the same as Roatan but it caters to a younger backpacker crowd. This means slightly cheaper diving, eating, and drinking but not much else. We found our way to the infamous ‘tree-bar’ and it was such an amazing place that I went back there in the day to take heaps of photos. This bar was started by a former art teacher who has been here building it for over 25 years. The architecture confuses and astounds you with no symmetry and millions of pieces of plain old stuff.
Kostya began a long bus ride back to his car in Southern Mex (Pacific side) two days ago. He is great crew and fun to have along but he is no better at fishing than I am, not that he could be any worse..
I went out for a couple dives this morning which were fun and then on the way back the boat stopped because we spotted a whale shark! A bunch of us grabbed masks and jumped in. I got the best look at him and even a shot of him on video. I think that I’ve got some beginners luck when it comes to rare sights when diving.
We are going to head to Southern Belize within the next few days. It will be about an 18 hr sail to Placencia to check-in. Then we will spend a week or more working our way north inside the reef.
Jamie
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