What a wonderful time we had on our Roatan trip! We were with a great group of people at a beautiful resort. We managed to have all of the “over-the-water” rooms and it seems like everyone was really pleased with them. Even the few who weren’t over the water had ocean front rooms with beautiful views. In fact, we had a little spotted ray and a puffer fish swimming around our bungalow almost every day.
Coco View’s dive setup is excellent. The boats are wide and have a well in the middle of the boat that you can come up in during rough weather so that you don’t have to fight the “bucking ladder.” We got to do a dive at one of the various sites in the morning, then a drop off dive at Coco View wall as our second dive. After lunch we did another dive at one of the sites and then a drop off dive at Neuman’s Wall. On the drop-off dives we just swam along the wall until we got into our resort again. The one thing that is that the orientation dive in the “yard” is required before you can go on the boat dives, so we had one couple that got there late that couldn’t dive for a bit because of that (and short staffing).
Check out our amazing Shark Dive!
They have the best setup for night dives too. You take a number and the strobe if you are first in the water and the last ones out at night take the strobe back with them. It is hard to lose track of people that way. I did have a reaction to something on my last night dive and my fingers looked like sausages. What great dives though.
Some of us also did the lionfish hunting class and we were able to get about 30 of these pests off of the reefs during our week there. I am always a little bit torn though because they are so beautiful, but I know they are not good for the reefs there. We were disappointed though because they promised us that we would get to eat them on Friday night and they forgot. It’s hard to complain about the steak and lobster dinner but I was looking forward to eating our lionfish.
We also did the land tour of the city and got to hold monkey’s, sloths and play with hundreds of iguanas. We then did a boat tour through the mangroves that was pretty impressive too. We got to learn a lot about the history of the island.
The only complaints we had (besides not eating our lionfish) were that you had to pay separate bills at the store, the dive shop and the main office (I guess all are separate businesses) and you are paying almost 20% extra in taxes and CC processing fees if you pay with a card and most didn’t have enough cash in spite of the upfront warning about it.
It was a fantastic week though and as we landed in Salt Lake City on Saturday evening in a blizzard, we sure wish we were back on the island of Roatan.