Roatan Honduras, December 2008

You can get more information on where we went at these links:
www.cayoscochinos.org
www.cocoviewresort.com

If you want to jump right to the photos you can find the photo gallery here.

Scott and I had a wonderful time in Roatan. Our friends, Vicky and Pedro, invited us to join them and a few other friends for Christmas at Coco View Resort on Roatan. It was a really good time depsite being the rainy season. We dove every day and had some great conversation and a lot of laughs (who knew a dancing chicken would be such great entertainment?).

Cayos Cochinos

We checked out the local TNC (The Nature Concervancy) to see what they were doing in Roatan. We were lucky enough to find someone willing to take some time out of their holiday to take us on a tour. Calina took us out for the day to Cayos Cochinos. There we meet some researchers tagging and monitoring the pink boa. They were just about to release a batch of snakes, they had just tagged, when we got there. The scientists let us look at the snakes and told us about how they track them. The pink boas have adapted to daytime hunting on this island since their food source is active during the day.

After that we went out to the open ocean and searched for the Roatan sea mount. You need a GPS to find the exact spot to dive. The sea mount doesn't reach the surface. It is 45 feet down and the coral and sealife are incredible. The fish aren't afraid of humans (probably because they aren't hunted here) and whole schools swam around us. The coral is really healthy and lush. Lots of different sizes, shapes and colors. There were more large fish here than we are used to seeing on most of our dives.

After the dive we went to a local fishing village for a lunch of fried fish and beans & rice. The village was pretty bare bones. Some of the homes had electric from a generator. They had a few backpacker cabins for tourists.

Coco's View Resort

This was the first time we had gone to a place that was diving 24/7. They run two boat dives a day and you can do shore dives any time you want. The gear is all set up in garage-style bays at the dock. They have a neat system to track night divers so they know who is out there. We didn't do a night dive on this trip, but a few from our group did. They saw some of the night critters, and coral blooming.

We did about 11 dives and saw a lot of healthy coral and lots of fish. We recently went diving in Grand Cayman and were disappointed in how the reef has degraded in the last 6 years. Roatan has not had any bleaching events and the divers seem to keep their hands off the reef. Very few bare spots. Lots of coral on top of coral growing here. Great variety in size, color and shapes of the coral too.

The visability was a little murky at times, but that is because of the rain. A few people mentioned that in the dry season the visability is more like 100 feet or more. We saw several seahorses on this trip. A real treat since most of the places we dive they are rare. There was a pod of bottle nose dolphins in the area. We saw them from the boat and then later while we were diving they swam overhead. We heard the clicking and squeals before they came into view.

I took a photography class in this trip and got some tips on taking better underwater images. Now I know how to set my color balance. No more green/blue images that take forever to fix in Photoshop (and still don't look quit right). The trick is remembering to readjust it every 10 feet or so. If you set your white balance up at 60 feet and then take a photo at 10 everything will be red!

You can see photos from our trip here.