Dive Trip Report by suzbo on 11/12/01 Utila, Bay Islands of Honduras

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Cozumel Trip Report
Posted by suzbo on 11/12/01

Utila, Bay Islands of Honduras
October 21-29, 2001

I learned about this trip from “wetcaver,”

who posts on the Travelnotes board and the Wednesday night chat. It was set up by Nautical Adventures, the dive shop he uses in Cookson OK, and he told me they had extra spots available. Not one to be intimidated by a bunch of Okies, or the fact that the only person in the group that I “knew” was only a cyber-friend, I said “Sign me up!” It turned out to be a great group to travel with, congenial just like I’ve found divers everywhere to be, so I fit right in. (It may have also helped that I’d once lived in Oklahoma for about 5 years...) I flew to Tulsa to meet the rest of the group, and from there we flew Continental to Houston, spent the night, then flew out to Honduras the following morning.

The Island
We arrived on Utila by way of a commuter-sized plane which brings you from San Pedro Sula, an inland town in Honduras. We were supposed to make a stop in the coastal town of La Ceiba, but since the plane held 15 passengers, and there were only 11 of us, all going to the same resort on Utila, we not only skipped the stop in La Ceiba, we also left San Pedro Sula early - as soon as the pilot was there and ready to go!

The airport on Utila is just a short dirt strip (with rocks), which the pilot negotiated smoothly and quickly - a better landing than some I’ve had in big jets on long paved runways.

The island of Utila is oriented in an east-west direction, with all development being on the south side. Utila town is on a bay, and is a classic Caribbean town - small, just a few streets (but paved); brightly painted buildings, some with murals on the walls, mostly a bit dilapidated; dogs and people on bicycles everywhere; a different pace to life.

Just a few – very rustic - bars, multiple dive operations but only one other dive resort (Utila Lodge - in town), several tiny grocery stores, lots of small houses with rooms for rent, and really only one “gift” shop that we found. The island was an early pirate stronghold, and the people do not have much Spanish heritage; they mostly are a combination of Paya or Miskito Indians, and British (either pirate or more recent English ancestors), and speak a distinct patois of English, native, and original slang that has a lilt to it like Jamaicans have, and sometimes you can’t understand them at all! I thought the island was strictly a dive destination, but apparently it’s also a popular spot for backpackers, because it’s so cheap and there’s a once-a-week ferry from the mainland; so not there were a lot of non-diving tourists in town.

The Resort: Laguna Beach Resort
This is a pretty new resort, built in 1995. Fantastic place, possibly the best setup I’ve been to for divers in the Caribbean. A lazy, idyllic spot, just what paradise should look like!

It accommodates 28 guests maximum; our group of 9 was the only group booked that week, and we were joined by a couple from California and a single from New Jersey, so there were only 12 people there for the whole week. One other couple from California came in for only 3 days mid-week, so we didn’t really get to know them. They pretty much kept to themselves and didn’t talk to anyone - my theory was they were just scared by all the Okie accents, and didn’t realize what a sophisticated bunch of people we really were!

To get to the resort, you have to take a boat from town, because the roads only go a few blocks. The resort sits on a sandy peninsula forming the western edge at the opening of a lagoon,

so you enter the channel into the lagoon and approach from the back (lagoon) side, where you see a number of wooden bungalows

and then the docks and dive shop area.

They have 2 fairly good sized (35ft) dive boats, a really nice dock area with showers, rinse tanks, and gear storage area. Every day after your boat dives, you take care of rinsing and storing all of your gear except your BCs and regs, which the crew rinses and stores for you next to your other gear before they lock it all up for the night in the gear room.

The resort is a compound of bungalows,

with a separate “club house” for drinking, dining and just hanging around,

and another building which is a combined office and gift shop (extremely limited gift selection - it’s more there for things like extra defog, or sudafed, or flip-flops), and the dive operation in a separate building. All the buildings are made out of unfinished Honduran pine, which they say is a much harder wood than the pine we’re used to here. Very nicely designed, tongue-and-groove ceilings which are high, cathedral-type with exposed beams. Good a/c, ceiling fans, and HOT water in every bungalow. Each bungalow has its own dock going out into the water on the lagoon side.

On the other (Caribbean) side, there is a nice curving white sand beach, with hammocks strung between palm trees all along the shoreline until you get to a covered picnic/barbecue area, and then a nice long main dock which goes out into the water and is great for shore diving or tarpon fishing.

Meals are pretty much family-style; great quantity, nothing gourmet, but good and a decent variety. There is a bar in the center of the clubhouse, but no bartender... you just keep track of your own tab on the honor system, and pay up at the end of your stay. Good purified drinking water and ice available at all times in the club house, and jugs of the water in your rooms.

The Diving
We were set up to do 2 morning and 1 afternoon boat dives each day, with 2 scheduled night dives by boat during the week. We weren’t scheduled for any diving on the day of our arrival (Saturday), but since we got to the resort a good 1½ -2 hours early, most of us hurried up and did a shore dive from the resort dock that afternoon. The group did sacrifice the afternoon boat dive on Monday afternoon to go into town and explore, but otherwise, most of us were there to divedivedive! I did 21 dives for the week, and logged my 100th dive during the week (finally! I guess when you only dive on vacation, it can take 5 years to get to 100 dives...)

Our group dove with the same divemaster all week, a young guy from Scotland named Neil Ross. We loved his dive briefings, which I think pretty much took into account that there were 2 instructors, 3 divemasters, and one divemaster-in-training in our group. He’d say: “ok, if you want to do a shallow dive, there are lots of nice hard and soft corals under the boat at about 25-30 feet, then for a good intermediate dive there are sand channels going out that slope down to 50 feet or so, and if you want to go deep the wall starts from there and goes down as deep as you want to go. You can see this and that (insert a variety of critters here). Any questions? Ok, see you back here!” Actually, his dive briefings were plenty informative, they just weren’t loaded with a lot of rules or restrictions. Only a few times did he even give us a time limit, once when we did a drift dive with the dive boat following, so on that one he told us to try to keep it to 45-50 minutes so it would be easier for the boat captain to find us. Sometimes he dove with us and was great at pointing things out to us, but we were pretty much free to dive as we preferred.

Another plus was the resort manager, Liz Wayne. She’s a retired (must be early retirement!) schoolteacher from Houston, also a scuba instructor, and she’s very interested in identifying and teaching you about all the little critters there. She dove with us sometimes, and it was great fun to have her point out things you’ve never seen, or might not have noticed if she hadn’t known where to look.

The dive schedule took us to the North side of the island every morning for our first dive, where it was deeper and there were more walls. It took about 45 minutes to get to the north side (bigger and therefore slower boats than you are all used to in Cozumel), so we had time to relax and get tan (sunburned) on deck. Then during the surface interval, we would head to an area where whale sharks are most likely to be found feeding (more on this in a minute), then go to the south side of the island for our shallower 2nd dive. The visibility was much less on this side of the island, likely always this way, but they also told us that things were a bit stirred up from the tropical depression which had been hovering to the south during the previous week; maybe the viz is normally greater here. The boat would take us in for lunch at the resort, then we’d go back out to the south side for another boat dive at 2 or 3 p.m. Water temp all week was 82-84°F, according to my gauges. I had a nice new dive skin that is one of those 0.5mm neoprene ones (thats HALF a mm, not 5mm!!), and it was just perfect for my needs.

Critters
I know I have heard Dee say that Roatan is the place to do macro photography, and I’d have to say its sister island of Utila is the same. You have to be prepared to go slow and look closely. There were almost no really big fish, or big schools of fish. Fish seemed to be fewer in number than what everyone expected, and it was tempting to say: “there’s nothing here!” The answer to that, of course, is: oh, yes there is, you just have to look. So be prepared to revise your thinking on what constitutes abundant life on a reef. The coral is fabulous here - healthy, varied, fascinating. And there were tons of juvie fish in some locations, leading us to suspect that the lack of big schools of adult fish has to do with overfishing. The north side of the island (or perhaps just a portion of the north side) is a marine reserve, but elsewhere it’s not protected, and there’s a fishing village of about 600 people in closely packed houses on one of the Cays on the south side of Utila... hhmmmm.....

We saw a fair number of sea turtles, sometimes interrupting them rooting around with their heads dug into the coral so that they completely ignored us while they kept on feeding.

There were both loggerheads and green sea turtles here. Southern stingrays,

and one spotted eagle ray (that I saw, that is), but I never saw any manta rays or sharks of any species. (Though wetcaver claims to have seen mantas right off the end of the resort’s dock several nights when he was tarpon fishing around midnight, but we have no supporting evidence for this assertion, and we all know how fishermen love to exaggerate....) Several times I did encounter schools of Atlantic spadefish,

which considerately circled around us long enough to photograph. Plenty of squirrelfish, Spanish hogfish, stoplight parrotfish, trumpetfish, blue tangs, black durgeon, blue chromis, four-eye butterfly fish.

Not a lot of angelfish, but the occasional gray, French, or Queen angel would come by; the queen angels were quite small, but beautiful as ever. I did see several very big porcupine fish, bigger than the little guys I’ve seen most often. And spotted trunkfish, which always delight me because their triangular shape is so improbable for efficient underwater locomotion.

I saw the juvie spotted trunkfish a couple times, those incredible little marble-sized black balls with white spots; even got a picture of one, which of course you can only tell it’s there if you magnify the shot 3 or 4 times! Also, another of my favorite fishes - the immature yellow-tailed damsel fish, which is all-over midnight blue with electric blue spots. I found several coral heads that were just alive with these guys, giving me a great game of trying to get one centered for long enought to get a shot at photographing it.

The whale shark experience was not what I’d expected, and I have to say I’m glad that I’d had a chance to see them before. The plan in Utila is: during your SI, go to the general area where the whale sharks may be, and search around for a swarm of birds feeding, and tuna jumping out of the water. Obviously, this feeding frenzy works its way down the food chain, but the terns and tuna were what we keyed in on. Then we’d look for a whale shark feeding near the surface, and if one was sighted, we’d slip into the water with snorkel gear. The way this turned out was that there would be multiple boats in the area, and everybody JUMPED in, creating a big splash, and if you were really lucky, you’d get a 5-10 second glimpse of a whale shark before it dove deeper and you couldn’t follow it because you were only snorkeling, and you can only go just so far on that one breath. Don’t get me wrong, a whale shark is a whale shark, and still beautiful and exciting to see, but this was certainly not going to provide you with any photo ops or long encounters. My previous whale shark experience was in the Galapagos, where we were actually scuba diving with them, and they were swimming steadily at 50-60 feet, not feeding on the surface, so you could stay with them for a longer period of time. That said, the hunt was still fun. I only got to see one whale shark, and that only about the back ¾ of it - a juvenile, maybe only 15 feet long, still just as beautiful as can be, with those white spots on black-to-dark gray back.

Highlights: my dive buddy wetcaver and I found an upside-down jellyfish just pulsing around on one dive; it was very cooperative, and we snapped lots of photos, though of course it was in front of a background of sand with suspended sand in the water, so it was hard to get enough contrast in the pictures.

And then, on a night dive we saw the COOLEST thing EVER! Shore dive from the resort, not a lot of critters moving around, no octopus, then we went through a desolate area of rubble that looked like a bomb went off, then reached a sand channel. Just when we were thining this might be the most boring night dive ever, I saw this THING and went to look. We both hovered around examining it (no cameras with us, of course!), and we were both thinking that we didn’t know what the hell it was, but it clearly was something special. Turned out to be a “berried anemone.” It was translucent, pale sandy colored, sort of cone-shaped with little nubbly- spots all up the cone, and clearly anchored in some way at the broader base - looked almost like a suction cup. It was about 10-12 inches high, I think. At the top was what clearly looked like typical anemone “fingers” wiggling around, and coming out from that were long slender thread-like white filaments that streamed out maybe 2 feet, all going in one direction, with the current. Truly amazing. Liz, the resort manager, said that’s pretty much the exact spot she’d last seen this critter, and showed us photos of it both at night and during the day. In the daytime, the whole thing collapses down on itself and the little “berries” on the stalk are all you can see - it just looks like this pile of clear yellowish berries. Well of course we were determined to go back the next night and find it again, to show others and to take cameras. I swear we ended up practically doing a grid search for this critter, but of course never stumbled on it again, in spite of wetcaver’s promise that he could put us right back on it, no problem! ;op - Oh well, I was going to say that if you want to see what I’m talking about, you’ll just have to look it up in Humann’s Reef Creature book... but it's only shown there in its collapsed, non-feeding pose. So I guess everyone will have to go find one on their own!

The Photography
ok, so I’m still learning. Before I left on this trip, I decided I was ready to buy my own underwater camera instead of renting. Then I see-sawed back & forth on whether to go digital or stick with film. Finally I decided to go digital, and everything arrived only about 2 weeks before we left for Utila, wo I really didn’t have any time to play with it. So I look on this trip as a learning experience for the camera. I think the digital is really cool, but sometimes I’d still be fussing with its functions instead of just taking shots. It took me a while to get the hang of looking at things on the monitor and really “getting” what it was I was seeing (could have something to do with my middle-aged eyesight....) And with digital, there is the tiniest of time lags while it reads and interprets information, so when you click the shutter at the perfect moment on something that is moving, the shot you actually get will be a split second later, and so I got a lot of fish butts and stuff like that. The biggest “flop” of my photo experience here was that I’d also gotten one of Ikelite’s new digital substrobes to use with the camera. But I didn’t buy an Ikelite housing, for which I am apparently being punished. So the arm and bracket that I got with the strobe did not fit on my Olympus housing. We joked all week about rigging something up with zip ties and duct tape, but seriously, I thought it best to leave it in my room (the alternative being swimming around with strobe in one hand and camera in the other - a skill which I do not possess). So I made no attempt to take photos on night dives, and I didn’t just take photos willy-nilly during daytime dives either, because I knew I was limited to the camera’s built-in flash. Nevertheless, I still got some ok shots, and I’m excited about continuing to learn with this in the future. At the end of the week it finally dawned on my to offer my strobe to wetcaver,

who was also shooting digital stills with a brand new camera and no strobe - but in an Ikelite housing!!! And it just snapped right onto his housing like they were made for each other! (...amazing, isn’t it?) So now wetcaver is going to have buy a strobe just like mine, since he really liked the difference once he started shooting with a strobe!

Miscellaneous episodes
What else? Oh yeah - THE CANNON! At the end of the week, our last afternoon dive I think, we were diving on the south side of the island, and 4 or 5 of us came upon this section of coral that - well, had a cannon attached!! We looked at it for some time - long, lying pretty much horizontal and forming a ledge of coral, pretty much circular in diameter and wider at one end than the other. Though covered with coral, you could see bumps on its outline where fittings would have been. When we got back to the boat, both the divemaster and captain stared at each other, then us, then said: “what cannon????” Apparently no one had ever found or reported this cannon, so they were pretty excited, and plan to go back to look for it themselves later.

The Great Tarpon Hunt: Wetcaver wanted to do some bonefishing, as did some of the others. One day, 2 of the guys skipped the afternoon dive in favor of going out fishing. But more often, people just took some gear and went to the end of the resort’s dock, where there were lots of tarpon. One evening, wetcaver hooked a tarpon, and spent quite a long time with it on the line, walking up and down the dock with it, threading the rod under the dock when the fish tried that little trick, and eventually ending up standing in the shallows near shore. TJ, the 21 year old I’ll-try-anything-once guy, was standing in the water near him when the fish threw the hook. Without missing a beat, wetcaver yelled “Git ‘im, TJ!!!” ...and so of course TJ goes lunging after the fish, attempting his best this-is-how-I-catch-catfish-at-home technique, and actuall briefly does get his hands on the fish, before losing his grasp as the fish swims away to tell all his buddies about these crazy Okies up at the dock. Thus is born the new sport of “noodling” for tarpon. While all this was going on, Tim (trip leader) was sitting on the dock ignoring everyone, patiently (desperately) waiting to hook his own tarpon.

And let us not forget our mascot, Froggy - a plush stuffed animal toy who Tim apparently bought in the Houston airport just so he could plant him in the coral somewhere and watch us all flood our masks when we burst out laughing after seeing it grinning up at us from 40 feet. Froggy ended up being the bow decoration on the dive boat, sitting up there waving his hands with prominent middle fingers raised for all to see.

Summary
Great trip. Glad I went. Great bunch of people, fantastic resort and dive operation. Would I go again or recommend it to someone else? Hhhmmmm. Probably, but not immediately. Anyone who goes there just needs to understand that you will not see the size and abundance of fish that you are accustomed to in Cozumel and other locations. It’s hard not to be disappointed at this. Takes some getting used to, that’s all - to remember that the coral, sponges, and little critters are just as spectacular in their own way.

Any Questions???