Utila - Honduras

When we first arrived at the Bay Islands, we were thinking about heading to Roatan, but after some solid advice from Kristy, decided to give it a miss and head to the smaller island of Utila. We worried that our curse of sideways rain during island living was going to follow us from Panama, as on the first day whilst looking for accomodation copped a torential downpoor and thought things were not looking good. Luckily it only lasted the first day, and afterwards were given 4 days of awesome sun, which made the diving we did incredible.

On Utila the main thing to do was dive, and all of the 400 dive shops on the island offer pretty much the same sweet deal. We managed to to do six dives each, costing about $25 aus a dive, all of which were boat dives. The accomodation was so cheap and, as the photos show, the location was pretty solid. We had a simple room, but it was on stilts standing over the water, and connected to the dive shops own private jetty and two storey hammock house/diving board.

The dives we did were all in really warm water, with the best visibility that either of us had ever seen. There were however two dives that really stood out. The first was a drop off called the labrynth, that we swum over at about 3m, and then plunged down straight to about 22m. From there our divemaster took us along the wall, and through a few swim throughs. Most fish Richo had ever seen, and the coral, even though quite deep, still looked really bright. The other dive that stood out was at a place named the sea mounds - these hills in the middle of the ocean that again just have massive amounts of coral and fish. On this dive we went straight to our max depth of about 18m, at the edge of one of these underwater hills, and swum around the outside of the hill slowly ascending in clockwise circles - very cool.

We tried looking for whale sharks during around surface intervals between the dives, but with no luck. So then we signed up with the whale shark research station to go on a day trip out looking with them, but the boat blew up or something and were unable to go... we´ll have to head to W.A. and do it there when we get back home.

The photos show us on the top storey of our hammock deck looking back on the hostel, and the rest are pretty self explanatory.