Yesterday we got a break from the rain. The night before Julie and Ed had sent us an email asking if we wanted to go on an impromptu cruise on Spirit of Free Radical early the next morning. We are all about spontaneous decisions so of course we jumped all over the chance. How could you not?

The next morning we got Charleston to water-taxi us over to their bight and hopped aboard. Today was going to be sort of a shake-out cruise. They have new engines so they’re still breaking and tuning them in and they also wanted to check out some mooring spots and check transit times for some potential charter and day-trip destinations. It was to be Melanie and Brent (the house sitters) and Sarah and me joining them.

We cast off at about 11:00am after wrapping some sails Julie was working on (she is an excelent sailing seamstress and has written a highly regarded book on the subject called Canvas for Cruisers). It was a _perfect_ day for snorkling. Bright, hot, and dead calm. We first tripped east to the Cow and Calf again and moored to a buoy that had been recently installed. Ed and Julie wanted to make sure it was close to the islands so people could leap off the boat and be right in the thick of it, but not so close that they ran aground.

As they moored up and started to spin towards the islands I thought it looked _way_ too close for comfort. But with years of experience they weren’t nervous at all and it turned out to be perfectly placed.

From there we headed towards the Pidgeon Cayes. Holy smokes. Pidgeon Cayes. They are two tiny litte sandy cayes that are the embodyment of the one-palm tropical island. Garly Larson’s name comes up a lot when you see the cayes. We had seen them when we cruised to Guanaja on Larry’s boat and they looked very inviting. But as we got closer my mind exploded in wonder.

As the bottom of the ocean comes up to meet the cayes you could suddenly see that the water was _incredbly_ clear. We could see at least 50 feet down. As I mentioned, they day was also very still and the water was like glass, not a ripple on the surface. This conspired to make it feel like we were flying above some other-worldly tropical garden of fish and coral. It was stupifying. My brain could not take it all in. We were all leaning over the side pointing out schools of fish and particularly impressive heads of stag-head coral. Brent spotted a big black ray that lazily flew a few centimeters from the bottom. It was like diving with no tanks or snorkling with no mask. It was a life experience. It was something I will never forget.

We took the Spirit of Free Radical’s little rigid infaltable into one of the cayes and played around in it’s perfect untouched powder sand. We walked around the whole island in about 5 minutes treading on sand the whole way.

From there we waded into the water and did some snorkling. It was obviously fantastic. Diving down and chasing after fish and swiming through big schools. I dove down really deep to grab some big urchin skeletons (20 cm across) and the first sun-bleached sand-dollars we’ve found here.

We eventually swam back to the boat, watched the anchor pull up (we could easily see it burried in the sand and watch it pull all the way up from the bottom) and Julie and Ed topped off the perfect day by making us dinner.

Massive massive thanks to Julie and Ed of Sprit of Free Radical for the best snorkling trip ever!

They also keep a faaascinating blog of their life on the island and their trip around the world.

Actually yesterday had one more amazement in store. Charelston, the local guy who is a little younger than us who ferries us around took us on a _ride_!

You know the mangrove tunnels right? They are about two meters wide, a kilometer long, and have a closed-in canopy of mangroves. So Charelston blows through them in his little skiff at full bore, which is like… I dunno.. 40kph or something. Which is pretty fun. Earlier he had bragged that he could do the same thing by moonlight. Well by the time we got back it was dark and there wasn’t exactly a full moon. But Chareston put on a show anyway.

As we aproached the entrance he put on speed and I looked back and gave him a big grin. We blew under the bridge that marks the entrance and things got very dark. I could sort of see the sky through the canopy but not really and I certainly couldn’t see the walls of the tunnel much less the water. Ocasionally a lit opening would blow by where someone had cut an entrance for their dock. There’s a large brackish pool in the middle of the tunnels and the light from the exit to the pool apeared as salvation. We shot through the exit at full speed into the wide moonlit pool.

That was cool. But what was comming was… pretty terrifying. There is an entrance to the other half of the tunnel on the other side of the pool. And sometimes I have trouble seeing it during the day because it’s kind of camoflauged. But at night? We were now barreling at full speed towards a wall of black. You could see _no hint_ of the entrance. For all Sarah and I could tell we were speeding towards a solid wall of mangroves. We started getting audibly nervous. With comments like “Holy shit this is a bad idea” and “Oh my god oh my god”. Charleston did briefly slow down just before we got to the edge, but only a tick, and then whoosh, we were back into the world of black with the outline of vines and branches wizzing by overhead.

He did actually bump the side of the tunnel once and as we exited the tunnels alive and exhilerated he explained it was a little harder than usual with us sitting in front of him blocking his view.

So that was a pretty good day. Perhapse one of the best days ever actually.

The last couple of weeks have been pretty amazing. When it rains we get some work done and enjoy the sound of the rain on the roof and in the bay. When it’s sunny we go snorkling and kayaking.

The first trip we made after the awesome Guanja trip we went on with Larry and Karen of East End Divers was with Ed and Julie and their 48 foot catamaran.

Ed and Julie are starting up a Roatan charter business with their amazing, beautiful catamara. But this day they were just taking a bunch of friends on a snorkling cruise. We somehow managed to get invited so we got to spend the day on the Spirit of Free Radical and check out some eastern snorkling spots.

It was a great day. We met a bunch more locals. Among them Melanie and Brent who travel the world as caretakers, which is a pretty good gig. They find interesting places to look after and get free rent! Melanie makes clothes to help fund their traveling and they are really fun to hang out with.

We ended up snorkling at the Calf and the Cow. A pair of super small rock islands. There isn’t much of a tide here. The sea is pretty much always at the same level and has been eating away at the walls of these tiny islands for forever. The Calf has a diameter of mabey 20 meters. But under the water it’s been cut back so far it’s being held up by a thin axle of rock only mabey about two meter in diameter. It’s pretty cool. All sorts of fish hide out under it including the deadly Lionfish, local scourge.

The day after the Free Radical trip we woke up and the water in the bay was super clear. Much more clear than we have ever seen. It seemed like everyone was canceling their days plans and going diving so we folowed suit (although just with snorkles). We kayaked out to the reef at the mouth of the bay and leapt in. The water was _amazing_ there is a big wall that drops mabey 10 meters down and we could see all the way to the bottom.

We tooled around and swam further towards Jonesville than we’d ever swam. The highlight of the trip was a big Spotted Eagle Ray that loomed out of the darkness towards us on the way back. It was an immensly impressive creature.

There had been warnings of a thunderstorm brewing but it managed to hold off long enough that the next day we got another beautiful day of snorkling in so we took kristi and Jeff out to the same spot. kristi and Jeff are also staying with Marcia and Dennis and we’ve been hanging out together watching the sunset with a couple of beers or talking about the many lizards all around the property. kristi and Jeff haven’t done a ton of Snorkling and are a little bit nervous in the water so I stayed in a kayak and played lifeguard for the trip. I only traded off with Sarah breifly to get in the water. But as soon as I did I spotted another big Spotted Eagle Ray! I yelled to Sarah who got the attention of kristi and Jeff as I followed the ray. It dove deep off the wall and I almost lost sight of it but just as kristi and Jeff reached me it flew up the wall and in amongst the valleys of coral. It put on a pretty amazing show for us all before swooping off into the bay.

After that great display we headed back to the Gazebo out on the water by the mouth of the bay and ate our picnic lunch while laying in the sun. Such a great way to spend a day.

The day after that the storm that was threatening started to blow in. That morning we were treated to a big Waterspout! You could see it outside the bay. It was a perfect funnel of water kicking up a big plume on the sea and leading all the say up to the clouds. I wish we’d had a boat and I could have gotten a bit closer of a look. Later in the day the storm blew in for real and *BOOOM* the thunder was unbeleivable. We got a couple of massive bolts of lighting that erupted into a godlike tattoo of thunder *BOOM**BOOM**BOOM**BOOM*. I’d never heard anything like it and have no idea what caused it. It was astounging.

We spent the next couple of days getting work done and enjoying the rain. I love it when it rains here. We don’t get enough of it for me. We go for a swim in the bay most days and I spend the time diving off the boat and doing backflips and stuff. it’s great when it’s really windy or raining really hard and I get to leap off into the rain-pelted sea.

It’s been a busy November so far for us in Roatan! Our hosts Marcia and Dennis at Castaways Cove had some extra guests this month. In the boat house next to us was a friendly guy named Dave who came for a week of diving. The weather wasn’t excellent for him and it rained a lot, but it’s always wet under the water so the diving was still good. On the same day kristi and Jeff arrived in the guest house up the hill. They were visiting from Oregon for their 30th anniversary, and were friends of Larry and Karen who run East End Divers in Jonesville.

We’d met Larry the week before when he came to deal with our lionfish problem, which he did quite expertly using a scuba tank and Hawaiian sling. He told us horror stories of killing thirty or more in an hour some places. They’ve become a big problem here since they have no predators and reproduce nearly constantly unlike their Pacific relatives. I think we should start advertising lionfish fritters as a local delicacy, or sell powedered lionfish spines as an aphrodesiac. There is so much overfishing here already that people might as well fish for something invasive and unwelcome.

We tagged along with Captain Larry and friends on a three day trip to the neighboring island of Guanaja (Guanaha). His boat the Islander had been chartered by the Floating Doctors, a volunteer group living on a sailboat and running clinics in remote parts of the Carribbean. Pretty cool bunch of people which what sounds like a very tough job. They worked long days while we were there and treated a good portion of the island’s 10,000 residents.

The four of us left Castaways Cove before dawn, taking a flashlight-lit trip through the mangroves with Charleston to BJ’s bar in Oak Ridge where Larry’s boat was waiting. We watched the sun rise spectacularly on the 3 hour trip to Bonacca; Guanaja’s main town situated on a cay a little ways from the main island. They say people came to the cay to escape the biting noseeums. It was just a little strip of sand at first, but people threw their garbage into the water and gradually built on top of that until the town was 20 times its original size. It’s like something from Waterworld: densely packed houses with wooden boardwalks going here and there between them, and Venice-like canals cutting through town. No cars of course, and ‘main street’ is just a couple meters wide. Still Bonacca is a very workable town with schools, shops, restaurants, bars, even a bank.

There were other taggers-alongers including our friends from Hole in the Wall: (Canadian) Larry, Don, and Randy of the S.V. Homeward Bound. (Canadian) Larry had spent some time in Bonacca before and took us on a tour and a bit of a quest to find an open bar at 10 am (hey – we’d be up since 4!). Colin and I kind of fell in love with the place, it’s charming little ramshackle buildings and interesting characters. We met a monkey at the Texaco, window shopped at the cellphone and bilge pump store and were treated to two rounds of Salva Vida by a mysterious man in a bar with no name. Apparently anyone can run a business but you have to pay to put a sign above the door, so many places don’t advertise.

(Captain) Larry took Colin and I snorkeling that afternoon to a reef near a beautiful cay. The corals there were more vibrant and alive than near our bight and there were more seaweeds and sponges, but I think less fish. I did see a pale yellow spotted snake eel slithering through the sand and into its hole.

That night the doctors were still hard at work in the clinic so the rest of us took the boat over to dinner at the Manatee where they made us some mean bratwurst and mashed potatoes. Where they get the wurst (not to mention good German mustard and sauerkraut) from is a mystery, but it was the perfect meal after such a long day.

The next day we scouted out some possible lodgings for future East End Divers trips. We went for lunch at Graham’s Place, a resort on a beautiful little island that Graham has put a tremendous amount of work into. We learned that his island was totalled along with most of Guanaja when Hurricane Mitch sat over it for two days in 1998, but he rebuilt the entire thing from scratch. We met his tame pelicans and other odd pets and admired the powdery beach and lack of noseeums, both the products of considerable effort.

Next we stopped at another private island called Dunbar Rock; a spectacular white hotel perched on top of a boulder on a coral reef. I think it looks a little like a miniature Alcatraz. Colin thinks this could be indie island if we can raise 1.7 million to buy it, but I’d prefer to live on Graham’s cay with the pelicans.

We went snorkeling again in the afternoon and saw wild sharks for possibly the first time in our lives. They were a little bigger than us, snoozing ten or fifteen feet below on the sandy floor. Colin had a childhood fear of sharks and was super super nervous to be so close to them. It wasn’t until later that we learned they’re incredibly docile nurse sharks who have little sucker mouths like a catfish and barely take notice of people even when they’re playing with them or riding on their backs.

I had a bit too much sun or beer or salty conch fritters and had to take the evening off. kristi and Jeff brought us fried chicken and we ate dinner with them on our hotel patio looking out at the ocean. The power had gone out (a common occurance) so we looked for the southern cross in the clear starry sky.

On our way back to Roatan, the doctors caught a couple small tuna and it started to rain so much we couldn’t see anything around the boat but ocean and mist. We learned it had been raining the entire time in Jonesville and that the beautiful weather we’d had in Guanaja was a localized event. So lucky us!

The water around our Roatan boathouse is clearer than ever today now that we’ve gotten a week without any storms. Colin noticed an oddly regular brown shape from the deck so I took the snorkel down to have a look. I climbed in off the boat dock and nearly stepped on a spread-hand sized Upside-down Jellyfish lying on the muddy bottom pretending to be a flower. Trying not to stir up the thick mud, I made my way to the shape Colin had seen. It was an incredibly ugly fish with froglike arms and gill holes in its underarms, probably a Longnose Batfish. It’s a kind of angler that, like the upside-down jelly, sits and attracts lunch to it using its (tasty-looking, I guess?) lure nose.

As Colin was coming to join in, I swam over to the posts holding up the boat dock, which are so thickly covered in seaweed and orange sponges they’ve got their own ecosystem going. Among the feather worms I spotted, for the first time, a lionfish! And then another, and then another, and another… We counted maybe a dozen in all, little ones sticking close to the poles and the boat keel. The venemous lionfish are a recent invasive species in the Carribbean which they all came from a couple released pets. The people here are not happy about it and kill them if they see them, so ours will likely be eradicated soon. It’s funny that everybody keeps warning us about the dreaded (but beautiful) lionfish, and when we finally find them they’re under our own dock. If they’ve been here all along when the water was murky, it’s a wonder I haven’t been stung yet since we’ve been getting in and out of the water just a few feet from their favorite spot!

As I mentioned it’s been sunny and calm for nearly a week, so we’ve been in the water every day for longer and longer. Yesterday went on a snorkeling swim amost halfway to Jonesville. I burned my bum! The reef stretches all the way around Roatan, it’s the second biggest in the world after the Great Barrier and so varied. But although the incredible coral formations and innumerable colourful fish are amazing, I keep finding the most interesting things in the shallower waters of our bight. Conches for instance – they’re everywhere, and they’ve got such cute eyes! I hear they make a mean conch stew here but that they’ve being over-fished and getting smaller every year.

One thing I love is to get right into the mangroves with a snorkel and see how much is living down in the underwater forest. You have to move carefully to avoid the urchins, but there are tiny brightly colored fish, little crustations with wavy antennae, fast-moving (I call them ‘cruising’) starfish, fuzzy water catterpillars and of course those numerous red crabs that run up and down the mangrove trees and plop down into the water if you get too close. We saw a lot of those in Thailand too. In fact it’s surprising how many plants and animals Roatan has in common with Koh Phangan.

Well, now that I’ve seen lionfish I can check that off my list. I’m still eager to see a turtle and a ray (we’ve spotted both from outside the water), and to find another octopus since Colin didn’t get to see the one I met in the shallow grasses last week. It was a little sand-colored guy who scooted around surprisingly fast as I tried to get him to latch on to my hand.

I should have brought a waterproof case for the camera! I expected some good snorkeling days in the rainy season, but it’s been far nicer under the water than I expected. Whoo!

We had our first trip to the infamous Hole in the Wall restaurant a couple days ago. We were celebrating our host Marcia’s birthday over drinks with some of the local boys. Back in the 1600’s Roatan was haven to pirates (including Captain Morgan) who preyed off Spanish gold fleets leaving the mainland. We discovered that there are still pirates in Roatan, and they frequent Hole in the Wall. They even have a macaw, so that proves it.

While we had drinks (and Colin a hand-rolled Honduran cigar) we watched people bringing their boats in to shelter from the coming storm. Hurricane Richard was due to come right over Roatan early the next morning and many people weren’t taking chances. We watched the weather channel and joked that Hole in the Wall may not be there in 24 hours. Thinking of the shoddy little huts on stilts that make up much of Jonesville and Oak Ridge, I wondered how they’d survive. I learned that during Hurricane Mitch the owners pulled up the floorboards so big waves could just wash in and out without carrying the house away with them – pretty smart. The churches up on the hills were getting ready to accomodate families overnight and through the next day.

We moved up to the big house for the night just in case, as the boat house where we are staying is sturdy, but made of wood and sits on stilts over the water. We were woken up at four in the morning by the howling wind and rain. Marcia and Dennis got up to monitor the storm, but we (having not much to lose except sleep) went back to bed.

Turns out Roatan lucked out: Richard skirted north and didn’t reach Hurricane status until after it had passed and was on its way to terrorize Belize. Our hosts lost a couple trees and Hole in the Wall’s kitchen roof blew off, but there was no major damage in our area. It took the power company until today to get the juice going again, but we had a generator for dawn and dusk so no biggie, it just gave us a reason to take a kayak trip once the wind died down so we could check the bight for damage.

We tied up our kayaks at the point and walked around it to explore the sandy(ish) beaches so protected by the reef that you can’t access them by boat. We found all kinds of shells and coral and a fair bit of garbage washed up by the storm. Colin made friends with a hermit crab – it was nearly lifelong friends until Colin was able to convince the bugger to let go of his finger. When we got back we had a birthday dinner for Marcia and celebrated that everything was still standing.

When the storm moved through it pulled all the local moisture with it, so this morning was gloriously sunny without a cloud in the sky – we could even see all the way to the mainland for the first time. The water in our bight still looks like milk chocolate from all the runoff, but we went snorkeling up at the mouth where visibility was better. I saw an octopus! We packed a lunch and hung out on a neighbor’s deck amid dips back in the water. Such a beautiful day, thank you Richard!