Utila, Honduras (2016)

Friday, April 29, 2016

016-0.893 N
086-54.100 W

Ahoy from Utila, Honduras!

As I mentioned in my last blog, our goal is to get to Belize where John's girlfriend is scheduled to fly out of. Had we looked at the schedule before he booked the tickets, I think that we would probably have recommended that she fly out of Roatan which would have given us all more time to enjoy the area instead of non-stop moving. The positive side of moving was that we would get to Belize and Lighthouse Reef, which is one of my favorite places.

We had planned on doing an overnight passage from Roatan to Lighthouse Reef, but the high nightly diurnal winds dissuaded us from doing that. Instead I came up with a plan where we would move to Utila and then make a super-long 74 mile day passage to Glover's Reef. So the first thing to do was to get from the West End of Roatan to Utila. Thankfully Utila is only 25 miles WSW of Roatan, so it only took us 4-5 hours to get there.

We anchored, had a bite to eat and then headed into the town of Puerto Este (East Harbor) to clear out of Honduras and get our zarpe to Belize. Even though Utila is 7 miles long and 3 miles wide, virtually everything is concentrated in East Harbor. Utila is a haven for 20-somethings looking for a cheap place to learn how to scuba dive and party. There are 2 competing ferry companies which are in a price war and have dropped the price from 600 Limpuras to 100 Limpuras (that's about $5 each way) for a round trip ticket from La Ceiba! As a result the place is overflowing with people.

It's hard to get lost here as there's pretty much a single road running along the coastline with a few spurs off of it. Walking on the streets has become much more dangerous than it was when we were last here as the streets are filled with motor scooters/cycles, motorcycle-taxis, ATVs and bicycles racing up and down at high speed. More than once we came dangerously close to being hit. They really need to install some speed bumps to slow things down, at least in the downtown area.

East Harbor is filled with hotels, shops, dive shops, restaurants and bars. It's pretty much a lower class West End (Roatan) filled with people sporting a lot of ink and dreadlocks. We stopped by Tranquilos, which is a waterfront bar, to catch some local color and we were not disappointed. The number of people who were dressed for a walk-on part in Pirates of the Caribbean was amazing!

Since the next day was going to be very long, we had an early night ashore and headed back to the boat to get it ready for our passage to Glovers Reef.

-- Geoff & Sue

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For the cruiser:

Clearing out of Honduras was a piece of cake as Immigrations and the Port Captain were right next to one another on the main pier. We paid nothing to clear into Honduras in Guanaja and our only fee to clear out was $20 US for the international zarpe.

We docked the dinghy at Bush's grocery store, which is E of the main dock. Bush's had a good assortment of items. There are lots of vegie stands in town.

We obtained a SIM card for our phone at the Claro store on the main road W of the commercial dock. Rates were extremely cheap.

Log ID: 2278