Utila
HONDURAS
The Diving
By AARON
Friday, April 4, 2008
So in the last episode, Lyndi filled you in on the quaint little town of Utila, Honduras, with it’s numerous dive shops, fun locals, and good places to eat and drink (Treetanic!!!). For part 2, I will take the wheel and tell you all about the great diving that Utila is well known for.
So Lyndi, already being Advanced Open Water (AOW) certified, decided to take her diving to the next level and take the Rescue Diver Course at Utila Water Sports, where we were staying (for even cheaper than $7US a night, but I’ll get into that later). So anyone who has done the Rescue Diver course will tell you that it is one of the most rewarding courses to take. Not only do you further enhance your diving skills, you feel so much more confident as a diver, knowing what to do in practically every disasterous underwater situation. The course is 3 days long, and consists of watching some videos, book work, and of course, diving. The Rescue Diver course at Utila Water Sports costs around $320US (that includes EFR- emergency first response course), which is very aggresive pricing for the island. Most places you will find have fairly similar pricing for their courses, but one of the bonuses of Utila Water Sports is that with every course you take, you also get 4 free fun dives as well (most places only offer 2). Lyndi had the pleasure of drawing the Divemaster with a desert-dry sense of humor, Erik, and his faithful sidekick/Divemaster in training, Jeff. Let the games begin.
In order to be a qualified Rescue Diver, one of your main objectives is to prevent a problem before it occurs, and, unfortunately if it does occur, to remedy the situation as quickly and as safely as possible. Sounds relatively easy for a focused, AOW stud like Lyndi (and Greg, our new found friend doing the course with Lyndi), right??? Enter Erik and Jeff. By the time it was ready for all the classes to go out on the boat for the day, Lyndi and Greg, after classroom training and shallow water training, had the responsibility of making sure everything on the boat was copasetic, (i.e. first aid kit, life preserver, no weight belts on seats, etc.). It was however, Erik and Jeff’s hidden responsibility, to ensure that everything did NOT go according to plan. Basically, everything that could have gone wrong, went wrong. They were even recruiting me, out on my open water dives, to join the dark side against my girlfriend, and leave my weight belt on the seat, instead of underneath where it belonged, just to see if she noticed (she did by the way, and I was chastized accordingly). So once Lyndi and Greg got all of us safely to our dive site, without allowing the boat to blow up, it was time to dive. Since the rest of us on the boat now had to go our separate ways with our instructors, there was no one left to recruit, so Erik and Jeff (the terror twins on this particular day), would play the role of the dumbest divers ever to put a snorkel and mask on……. backwards……and upside down.
Lyndi and Greg would be playing the role of dive instructors, watching over their little lambs as they go for a fun, safe, enjoyable dive consisting of Erik trying to breathe underwater with his snorkel, Jeff turning off Lyndi’s air supply (no, not the musical group, just her life support underwater), Erik dropping his weight belt and rapidly ascending (a big no-no in diving, unless you want your lungs to explode), and Jeff trying to pull Greg’s regulator out of his mouth so that HE can use it after finding out that he couldn’t in fact, breathe underwater with a snorkel. Yep, just another relaxing dive for our heroes, Lyndi and Greg.
After three long, arduous days learning how to deal with the worst of the worst, Lyndi, Greg and I lifted our Salva Vida’s (Honduras’ national beer) at Treetanic Bar and toasted our 2 newly accredited Rescue Divers. As far as my progress, I had just finished my Open Water certification, and was about to start my Advanced Open Water training. I’m not going to go into too much detail about the Open Water training course. It was fun, but all in all it consisted of book work, watching old PADI dive videos made in the early 80’s where everyone owned a bright neon green or blue wet suit (even the men), and of course, some instructional diving. For my Advanced Open Water (AOW) course, I had the same instructor I had from my Open water certification, Maya. Maya is a multilingual Divemaster from Denmark, and if you are at Utila Water Sports, I highly recommend her – although any of your instructors there are top notch, extremely knowledgable, and do a great job mixing professionalism with fun (that’s my plug for Utila Water Sports). Already earning 4 free fun dives for doing my Open Water Certification, it was a no brainer to continue with the AOW, in which you not only get 4 more free fun dives, you also get 5 dives during the course. We did Underwater Navigator, Underwater Naturalist, Peak Performance Buoyancy, Deep Dive, and Night Dive. So basically, you get 9 dives, plus certification, for around $230US. I won’t go into any detail about the 5 technical dives, but I have to say, the Peak Performance Buoyancy was one of the best. We swam through hoops, played frisbee, kung fu fought each other, ran a barefoot race, all underwater, and all in the company of 8 Carribean Squid who seemed to form a line in front of us, as if watching a strange underwater movie, where 4 ugly looking fish take part in a role of Bruce Lee meets Matrix epic saga. The cool thing about it, was that they stayed within about 4 meters of us the entire time we were underwater, not once being wary of all the movement we were making. Definitely awesome, and no, I didn’t have a camera so you’ll just have to take my word for it.
So once all of the training for Lyndi and I had finished, it was time for some fun dives! Racking up about 8 fun dives from the 2 courses I took, and Lyndi’s 4, we went out diving, twice a day, for 3 days on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. Monday and Tuesday we rented an underwater camera and took over 100 pictures. Each day brought around something new, from giant blowfish, to huge green moray eels, to little seahorses. Unfortunately, during all of our dives, we never encountered any Whale Sharks, one of our main reasons for visiting the Bay Islands in April, but that didn’t take anything away from the absolutely beautiful underwater wildlife that Utila has. Just as a reference, keep in mind that the reef system around the Bay Islands is the second largest in the world, only the Great Barrier Reef in Australia is larger, so the coral and sea life on Roatan and Utila is breathtaking.
One day, on one of our dives, we were heading to the north side of the island, (which has a bit better diving, plus it’s where the whale sharks usually hang out so your odds increase in that category), we ran into a pod of about 30 bottlenosed dolphins swimming about 15 meters off to the side. Our boat captain, John, turned to go chase them, and apparently they had the same idea in mind because within 1 minute, they were swimming with the boat almost full throttle, jumping out of the water within arms length. Just like the squids, they stayed swimming with the boat as we headed to our destination for about 20 minutes, then apparently got bored and swam off. Unfortunately that day there was a strong current, and there was nowhere near to dock or anchor the boat, so no swimming with the dolphins, but aside from Sea World, this was the closest I had ever been to a dolphin, let alone a whole pod, so I was satisfied to say the least.
So as with everything else, all good things must come to an end, and thus our time on Utila would expire on the morning of April 16th. The night before, we went out to yes, you guessed it, Treetanic, to say goodbye to everyone we had met and befriended while we were there, and then closed out our tab with Utila Water Sports. I don’t know if there was some sort of mistake, or that they just thought Lyndi and I were so awesome we deserved it, but for all 11 days we stayed in that oceanfront hotel we only payed $30US for the entire stay! So thank you Utila Water Sports, and thank you Utila for being such a great start to our adventure.
