Diving in Roatan

Sounds like North America is having quite the winter. Just so you don’t think we’re just lotus-eaters down here in the tropics, I’ll report that your big strong cold fronts drag their tails down here, bringing squally showers, gusty winds and chilly blanket and baking weather. Right now we’ve both got colds.
But in the two halcyon days which followed Christmas, we did some actual SCUBA diving. What’s great about Roatan is how convenient this is – the shore is lined with dive sites easy to get to by dinghy. Some you can even walk to, like the wreck of the Prince Albert, which lies (was placed, actually) in the channel between the two nearest resorts, CocoView and Fantasy Island.
In towns like West End, dive shops are the mainstay of the main street.
In the giddy early days of a regular paycheck (thank you Fitz!), we bought a SuperSnorkel hookah rig, basically a lawnmower engine running a compressor feeding two 40-ft hoses with regulators. We haven’t used it nearly as much as we’d planned, since storage and access issues were insurmountable. In fact, it spent most of its life in our storage shed. Now in Roatan, it’s coming into its own (we store it in the cockpit), but it’s also for sale, and being replaced by our single new BC, dive tank and regulator. We’ll pay to rent the other stuff when a place like Mary’s Place comes along.

from Roatan Dive Guide, by Ignacio Gonzales
UPDATE: As you can see this is a nice dive guide, and a second edition expanded and updated is now available at
http://sites.google.com/site/m%E2%80%8Bardiveguides/
This crevice was formed by volcano, or earthquake? aeons ago and was only 5′ wide in places. We went down to 97 feet where the colors are generally gone but still, the cobalt void spread endlessly beyond.
Another dive took us to a wall, half of which had ‘slumped’ in last year’s earthquake. Probably, at 2AM, no one was there for that experience. And we saw a couple wrecks – Doug’s favorite because ‘there’s something to see, not just fish and coral over and over again.’

 
Or a pair of lobsters.
In case you wondered what the inside of a dive tank looks like: this one is engraved with a story about how it exploded – fire and the proximity of 35 other tanks were involved.

All underwater photos taken by Wally Larsen.

http://www.answers.com/topic/lotophagi for definition of lotus eater – more apt than I’d expected!

One thought on “Diving in Roatan

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *