Now That's What I'm Talking About

It doesn't take long for the four of us to settle in and relax a bit at Pirates Bay Inn. Within a couple hours our names are already on the boards for the two morning dives for the next six days. Boat arrives at the dock there at 7:00 a.m. and we are on our way to a dive site by 7:30.

The vibe in Utila is a great one. The island is 7 miles long by 2 miles wide and has about 17 different dive shops on it. It is a mixture of Hondurans, ex-pats from the US and Canada and a wide range of people from all over the world. Utila does a lot of dive training, people getting certified and at least as many becoming divemasters and dive instructors. Because it is cheap to live and dive in Utila it is a "backpackers" paradise.

For example, Pirates Bay Inn also owns Captain Morgan's Dive Centre. If you sign up to get  open water certified with Captain Morgan's you can get free lodging at Pirates Bay Inn. They have private rooms that when you're doing dive training are $29 USD per night, clean and safe and comfortable (add $10 per night if you insist on having air conditioning). They also have some dorm style rooms that you can stay in for free if training, if not training you can stay there for $7 per night.

7:00 a.m. on Sunday morning we get up and go to the bar/restaurant at the resort. Its really more of a bar, there are no dining tables and wait staff, but there are plenty of chairs around, bar stools at the bar and a couple picnic tables close by, and really good food.

Christina does the majority of the cooking and boy is she good at it. You can get the usual, eggs, bacon, toast type breakfast, or baleadas (a thick flour tortilla folded over some mashed black beans and other ingredients like eggs and bacon or sausage, cheese), but you could also get crepes, fresh fruit, homemade yogurt, french toast, cereal, and of course coffee, iced or hot even a latte or espresso drink, and fruit juices. I usually had either a baleada or scrambled eggs, bacon and a tortilla (homemade right there) and coffee and a bottle of water to take on the dive boat and it cost about 70 lempiras. Yep that is just over $3 US.

The dive boat was filled  every morning with about 14 divers, usually about 6 of us "fun divers" already certified, and the rest in various stages of training, either open water or advanced open water students and an instructor for each of those classes a divemaster or two to lead the fun divers and usually at least one if not two or three dive masters in training.

We regularly went north for the first dive site of the day and south for the second. It all had to do with the wind and the waves. Most of our dives consisted of the boat mooring in about 25-40 feet of water at the top of a wall. The wall often dropped off to close to 100 feet.

The dives were beautiful, we were fortunate to see a lot of see life including turtles, spotted eagle rays, lots of green moray eels and the usual cast of caribbean sea life. Surprisingly we saw no sharks  during the entire week. I'm not sure why the lack of sharks in this area.

Green Moray Eel in for a cleaning by Coral Banded Shrimp

Beautiful coral

Queen Angelfish

The Halliburton Wreck

Sea Turtle

Tarpon

Blue Tang

Of course my desire was to take photos. I assembled my camera gear, put fresh rechargable batteries in my strobes and checked to make niether my strobes or housing leaked. I jumped in the water on the first day and my strobes would not fire. I took a few pictures but was really frustrated as once I got past about 30 feet I got none of the beautiful colors of the reef or the sea life.

I thought maybe there was a problem with the batteries and left my camera on the boat for the second dive. When we returned to the resort I borrowed a charger from Sandra and charged more batteries. Second day I jumped in the water and got about 2 shots where one of the strobes fired then they both failed again. I was afraid my hopes of lots of photography opportunities were going to be dashed completely. That afternoon we checked out strobes and batteries, testing different batteries in each strobe. Finally, after a bit of futzing with the connectors on the cap of the battery compartment of the strobes I got them to work. May need to buy new caps (although I'm secretly hoping to find a way to upgrade my entire system actually but don't think my sparkling personality is paying for one and doubt I could find enough people who would want to donate to a "Go Fund Me" request).

I did try on the second day to change my attitude and rather than giving up and being upset about the equipment failure to try and work on my ability to take some good shots with just the ambient light. It is tough and I hate to lose the color, but just the change in attitude just made the diving better anyway. Overall I wasn't particularly happy with many of my photos from this trip but it serves as just a reminder that I have to just keep working on learning photography more, and taking lots of pictures .. only way I'll get better.

Chris a native Utilian from Pidgeon Cay, our divemaster, carried a spear with him on most dives and did his best to reduce the lionfish population, and Eitan an Israeli instructor on the boat with us on a majority of the days we dove also speared lots of lionfish. Greg finally got his chance to carry a spear and after a few misses early on he and Chris got a beautiful bunch of lionfish. On Sunday they brought their catch back to the Pirates Bay, cleaned the lionfish then lightly breaded them and fried them up for lunch and after a great haul on Thursday by Chris and Greg they brought them back cleaned them and Christina made Lionfish Ceviche.

Greg's first Utila lionfish kill.

Chris Howell, our divemaster with his and Greg's lionfish haul destined for ceviche.

On Wednesday we got the biggest treat. On  our way to the dive site we came upon a large pod of dolphins. Our Captain, Whitney stopped and we got to get in the water with snorkel gear and swim with them. It was so great to be in the water so close to these beautiful creatures. Then after getting back on the boat when we took of several of pod surfed the bow wake of our boat. I lay on the bow of the boat and took the video, when they would breach  I could have probably reached out and touched them they were so close. It just made my week perfect. I had hoped to upload the video here but that seems beyond my capabilities.

Also on Wednesday night Paula and I volunteered with Sea Shepherd to help in guarding the beach and the nests of turtle eggs and any turtles coming up on the beach to lay their eggs. Unfortunately there are still those who would come out and steal the turtle eggs to sell on the black market. At 7 p.m. we went to the BICA (Bay Islands Conservation Association) office, which also houses the new Sea Shepherd office and met with  Fernando, the coordinator of this program and Chel who would be the person actually logging research information about nests and eggs etc., as well as Haley, a visitor from Wales who like us just wanted to volunteer. We rode out on ATV's to a secluded beach set up a tarp with some sleeping bags laid out on it and started our watch. It consisted of every hour walking one half or the other of about 600 meters of beach, watching for signs of turtles coming up on the beach, signs of poachers, or signs of turtles returning to the sea.Then we returned to the base camp and slept until the next patrol, from 7 p.m. til about 4:30 a.m. We didn't get to see any new nests laid or turtles but Chel was kind enough to show us a nest of eggs which had been laid two nights before. We saw two or three eggs of what is likely about 200 eggs in the nest. The eggs stay in the nest for 52 days so my plan is to be there on August 8th to see those babies hatch and hopefully make their way back to the ocean.

Turtle Eggs in their nest.

All in all a great week of diving with great friends.

My dive buddies, L  to R: Greg, Paula, Sandra

Next post: The other part of the trip to Utila and returning to Placencia.