Marc's Public Blog - Diving

I'll start with a quick review first, Roatan had interesting soft coral, even if not to Fiji standards, but the fish life was on the lower side compared to most other places I've dived at. It wasn't bad, but ont a top destination I'd say. The boat itself was reasonably big, but ended up with the smallest cabin on the boat and the smallest cabin I had ever had on any liveaboard: there was no room to put belongings anywhere, so I left them in my luggage on the same bed I slept on, not the best but oh well.

Apart from that, the weather was warm, actually kind of too warm and hummid on land, but thankfully more bearable on the boat once at sea. The weather was nice, and viz was good to very good on most dives. Water was between 28C, up to 30C, very comfortable (albeit not ideal for corals that don't like it that warm).

Here is our trip:

Picture Gallery of best pictures and videos (29 dives over 7 days): https://photos.app.goo.gl/1NqJHcdD8VPmSnBPA

Arturo and I arrived a couple of days early to do land based activities the first day for land based activies, and the 3rd day we did land based diving from The Roatan Yacht Club where we were staying:

not a lot of rays during this trip, but found a few

we did find huge crabs

crashed plane

and prince albert wreck

almost no hard coral, but some nice enough soft colar

Our safety stop between the first 2 dives was very nice, big french key:

After those 3 dives, Arturo and I went to board the Aggressor, big enough looking boat, but the dive deck was bigger than it needed to be and in turn some cabins like the one we got, were super small

dive deck was spacious

dolphins came to race us a few times, but never saw or heard any during the dives

The next day, we started our 5.5 days of diving, 5 dives a day every day but one. Night dives were worth it overall, but it was unfortunate that the boat's schedule put the night dives after dinner: never had the chance to properly clean up/dress up for dinner, and it was hard to eat when you were going right back to the water (of course, also no wine with dinner).

Day #1:

Day #2 started with a shark feeding, didn't see any of those sharks during any dive except that feeding:

big groupers also came to join

multiple kinds, even

saw a few small turtles

We got lucky to see squids at night, they were curious:

Day #3:

Without our guides, we'd have missed a lot of things, like this burrowing fish:

Thanks to the guides who found us some sea horses I would have missed:

interesting starfish like animal that moved quickly

On the 4th day, we went by Cannery Bank, which had very friendly nurse sharks since they get fed:

during the next dive, the nurse sharks came to see us many times

I mentioned earlier that I didn't think there were lots of fish in Roatan compared to many places I've been to, but we did get schools on 3 dives, including this school of barracudas:

Roatan did have some amount of Manta shrimps, they were fun to play with:

And I even found a squid in daylight, which we followed for a while. It as not thrilled, we got it out of breath :)

it tried to turn into a weed :)

Day #5 started with a wreck:

found a nurse shark sleeping in the rocks

Even found a somewhat rare slipper lobster:

Day #6 was only 2 dives left at the same 40ft point dive site we had done the first day:

Let's end with a turtle eating:

And that was it. Did all the dives from the trip, 29 out of 26 :)

While the boat offered plenty of dives (26), the last day we could have done at least 2 more, but we went back to port and were invited to get off the boat and do land activities. This was fine, but I wish they had made it more clear since we would have used that time to do land activities we had done on previous days by arriving a day earlier. Oh well, so, we did a brewery tour which was ok-ish and a way to kill a few hours until the evening celebrations and dinner (at our cost at the yacht club):

So long, 'til next time.

Here is a list of videos above: