It's been awhile since we talked. One thing that we have not found recently is fast internet! Lots of slow internet to be found though. As you would expect, we have been enjoying the remaining Bay Islands these past months.
Guanaja is hilly, green, very undeveloped and has some of the most beautiful water yet (think bahamas). And the main village called "the settlement" is unlike anything we've seen - houses stacked on one another on this tiny island, sidewalks that are considered roads, great veggies delivered on Fridays by ferry, very friendly folks and immaculate. In Guanaja we noticed a little shark sucker living under Dragonfly, we named him Stevie - he was about 1 foot long, 2 inches around and adorable.
Cayos Cachinos is a probably my favorite in the Bay Islands -it's a series of islands that are 20 miles from everything, hilly, green and lush with a few private houses, one simple hotel with great food and friendly staff, great snorkeling and super diving, a few nice walks up the ridge for great views and a Garafuna village that hosts tourists. It's all a marine park and the marine police approach in their yellow boat wearing camaflouge outfits, holding huge guns -- ok we'll pay our fee! There are about 10 moorings available to boats (no anchoring) but we never had more than 2 neighbors, although little Stevie the sharksucker was still with us our first week in Cayos Cachinos.
The West End of Roatan is the diving and tourism center of the island. The main street is about 20 blocks long and there must be 20 dive operations. We went door to door to find "our" shop and picked up a great vibe from Reef Gliders. They led us on some spectacular dives and never with more than 8 divers. We were there around the the full moon which brings out even more underwater life - the highlight for us being the huge groupers and snappers. This also coincided with Samana Santa (easter) when the West End is packed with vacationers from the mainland, but the anchorage is just far enough from the center of town that we could get away from the music and the beach parties. We arrived at West End and had trouble anchoring, finally got the hook secure in a small sand patch as a rainstorm started. Lucky for us, 50 feet behind the boat was a small coral patch and when snorkeling on it we saw a big green moray, a tiny french angelfish, a yellow tail snapper missing his tail but swimming fine with his mates, and hundreds of lobsters crammed into every nook and cranny. This area is all marine park so no lobster dinner for us! Little Stevie disappeared after a few days in West End, I guess three weeks was enough for him, maybe he was eaten by that moray.
Utila is backpacker tourist destination. Inexpensive diving, whale shark sightings and late night parties are the attraction. The town is actually quite cute and offers quite a bit for us mid-lifers too. We have enjoyed the diving here although the highlight has to be our 2 encounters with whale sharks -- one on Dragonfly when motoring here with our friends Alan & Gail and the other during our excursion with the Whale Shark Research Center. The diving is quite cheap so we completed our Emergancy Responder (CPR/First Aid) course here and Rick completed his Search & Rescue course. This is all great knowledge or us to have since we are now the proud owners of a used dive compressor and we'll be diving on our own more often than with dive operations. We were extrememly fortunate to have the highly skilled negotiator, Alan "the shark" Green, with us for the purchase of the compressor. He saved us some dough and made the entire event a hoot! Oh, and in the category of "small world", the catamaran "Evensong" anchored next to us and they have a sister and mother in Marblehead and Steve grew up in both Marblehead and Swampscott. Oh, we discovered an even bigger shark sucker living under Dragonfly today -- this one is probably 2 feet long and 6 inches around. Hope he beefs up for the trip to Belize.
So here we are, a few weeks away from leaving Honduras. We'll head north to Belize in early May for a few weeks and when the weather is right we'll start the passage back to Florida. The next time you hear from us we'll probably be in shock in crazy Key West!
