Roatan, Honduras (2016)

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

016-20.246 N
086-28.537 W

The crew of the BlueJacket wishes you a hearty welcome from Roatan, Honduras!

After hanging out in Guanaja for a few days, we headed to the Barefoot Cay resort/marina in Brick Bay, Roatan. John, from Best Day Ever, was having his girlfriend fly in and needed to get his boat ready for her arrival, so we spent several days enjoying the facility while John cleaned/organized. The resort was lovely, with a great pool, beautiful grounds and a nice restaurant. They also appear to have a top notch dive operation based upon the dive boats that we saw and the number of people using it.

The first thing that we discovered upon arrival was that this was a resort with docks and not a marina. The staff, while extremely friendly, knew next to nothing about boats. Thankfully when we arrived they had staff there to help us as we backed into the dock. The 105' yacht that arrived after us wasn't so fortunate as when they arrived, there was no one there to catch any of their lines. Luckily Sue & I were there and got them tied up.

John transformed his boat and Cay arrived bearing gifts...AKA things that we shipped to her to bring down for us. Sue's diving BC (buoyancy compensator) arrived as well as a pressure gauge for the dive compressor. Yeah!

We rented a car and spent a day exploring the island. While cruising along the coastline it was obvious from all of the resorts that now populated the area that major changes had occurred since we were last here in 2004. You wouldn't know it while driving on the roads, as most of them were tucked well away from the road with only a small entrance visible. One of my favorite areas is the E end of the island where there are beautiful deep bights and high hills overlooking them providing grand views. One of the more bizarre things we saw was a pirate ship, which was on land and apparently under construction (photo below) at the far east end of the island where there are very few tourists. Why anyone would build something like that at that location was beyond us. And speaking of strange things, we saw lots of Bernie signs, but nothing for any other candidate.

One of our first stops is known as the West End. When we were last here it was a sleepy town filled with dive shops and a dirt road. Well, now it has even more dive shops, they've paved the road and now have severe traffic problems. I guess that's called progress...

The good news was that we were able to drop off our laundry and our dive tanks to get hydro'ed. The tanks need to have this pressure test done every 5 years and I haven't seen anywhere to do this since leaving San Diego, so I was quite happy to get this done. After that we wandered towards the east end of the island exploring many dirt roads and discovering that our KIA rental car had about 6" of clearance, which didn't do well on these roads.

The next day we moved the boats around to the West End anchorage. This was always one of my favorite places as it it had good diving and lots of funky restaurants and bars. It's a marine park and they want us to use their moorings and luckily 2 of them were available.

Sue & I wandered around the town, dodging cars (you would have thought that when they paved the road, that they would have installed sidewalks, but in most places they didn't) and were happy to see that many of our old haunts where still there.

Since our dive tanks were being hydro'ed, I decided to go diving with Coconut Tree divers and had 2 nice dives. It is very different diving with a group, but it worked.

We had one last long transit with the boats that we needed to do and that was to Belize. I had planned on doing an overnight passage to Light House Reef, but there were strong diurnal winds blowing. These are winds that pick up in late afternoon and then blow hardest between 9 and 3 AM. The forecasts were for 20-30 kt winds at night and none of us wanted to be sailing overnight in that, especially with the problems that Best Day Ever was having with the autopilot dropping off line. As a result I came up with a plan where we would move to Utila and from there we would leave at the crack of dawn to make a 74 mile passage to Glover's Reef in Belize, but that's a story for another day.

-- Geoff & Sue

 

 

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For the cruiser:

The entrance into Brick Bay harbor is fairly straight forward, given good light and good instructions. Unfortunately we had neither. Here's how I did it: There's a stake at about 16-19.9N/086-28.76W which marks the NE edge of the reef. Keep this stake about 20-30 yards to your starboard side when entering. This should center you in the reef cut. Follow the channel as it curves to the left. As you approach the area where the channel curves to the N, you'll be able to see rocks along the starboard side. There are supposed to be 2 stakes marking the curve, but there was only 1 when we went through. Keep the stake(s) 40-50 yards to your starboard side. Using this approach, we never saw less than 35'.

Barefoot Cay charged $1.30/ft, $0.55/KW and $0.15/gallon of water. Breakfast and lunch were good deals at the restaurant. Be sure to have spray for sand fleas. We found that Nurse Andrea's 2 in 1 Bug Solutions worked best. You can get it at the shop at Barefoot Cay and at Bulk Gourmet.

Barefoot Cay arranged for our car rental from a place near the airport. They dropped off and picked up the car. The price was $53/day + gas. If you're going to drive on the dirt/gravel roads, I strongly suggest getting a car with good clearance.

Bulk Gourmet is about a 5 minute walk west on the main road & they stock all kinds of gourmet US products. They also have a restraurant which serves sandwiches like you haven't seen since the US.

Elden's Grocery is located in French Harbor & has great provisioning. We took our dinghy to the far E end of the bay and asked the guard if we could tie up the dinghy there. He agreed and from there we walked up to the main road and found Elden's. We tipped him with a cold Coke when we returned andhe was very happy. If you don't want to do that, the marina will arrange a taxi to drive you there and wait for you until you're done for $15.

French Cay Harbor appears to be much more of a cruiser hang-out as they have an active VHF net on 74 at 8 in the morning and were constantly talking about pot lucks, veggie boats, etc. I would stop there in the future.

The entrance to West End now has both red and green stakes, making it much clearer as to where the reef cut is.

If there is a mooring ball available, the marine park wants you to use them, but will allow you to anchor if none are available. The mooring that we picked up appeared to be well maintained, but many boats attach their own line to the mooring as a precaution. No fees were charged for the mooring balls.

I had the tanks hydro'ed at the Mares store for $25 each. The fill was $5. Diving with Coconut Tree divers was $35/tank, but you can pricing from $25-$50. Quality Time divers offered a small group/personalized dive for $50/tank.

Log ID: 2277