The diving here truly is superb, incredibly convenient and very cheap. At only 15 dollars a dive, it was around a third of the cost of diving in Belize. I stayed in a hotel called Chillies, which is right by the beach and has a dive operation attached to it. It literally was a case of rolling out of bed straight onto a dive boat! The reef is only minutes offshore, so unlike Belize there were no really long boat rides to endure.
However, it must also be said that some of the rigourous safety standards that I was used to whilst diving at Pez Maya weren't neccesarily applied here! Buddy checks and buddy diving don't really happen here and on several ocassions I dived on my own. On one dive I didn�t see any other divers for nearly 60 minutes! A little reckless perhaps, but great for taking lots of photos - click HERE to see them. However, my diving practices were definitely conservative compared to the antics of some divers...
There was one guy staying with us who absolutely loved diving deep. Some of his dives defied belief. I think his finest hour was on Christmas Day when he went to 185ft, went into decompression mode on his computer but ran out of air and had to surface without completing all his deco stops! Somehow, despite this and other similar tricks, he survived without getting the bends!
All this time, Nick and Sarah were busy diving on Utila, but they came across to join me on Roatan on New Years Day. Good job too, as it meant I had some buddies when I plunged to a ridiculous depth of exactly 50m on one dive! (Photographic proof HERE!)
In the end I spent 3 weeks on Roatan and racked up 33 dives. I saw nearly everything possible - stingrays, eagle rays, turtles, moray eels (including one that gave me a massive shock when it swam over my shoulder), massive groupers, crabs, lobsters, spotted drum fish, shrimps..... the list goes on and on (see HERE for some photos).
I finally managed to drag myself away from here on 8th January. I could easily have stayed for longer, but I could sense the summer in New Zealand slipping away so I decided to move on. But not directly to NZ - I thought that I would go via Guatemala.....
