CoCo View Resort. Roatan, Honduras March 6-13, 1999

Author: Scubadave

This is a resort definitely geared for divers. Most of their schedules are set around the dive boats. Breakfast is at 7AM. The dive boats leave either at 8:15, 8:30, or 9AM depending on how far away the dive site is. The schedule and dive site for the trip was posted on a bulletin board each day. Two dives in the morning finishing up between 11 and noon. Lunch at noon. Then time for a short nap and back for another 2 dives at 2PM. Dinner is at 630 PM. Night diving is whenever you want. The bar was open until 11PM so plenty of time for a drink after the night dive. No surprises when the boats left; they blew a horn at 15, 10, and 5 minutes before departure so you have plenty of warning to hustle down to the dock. No need to carry our gear, either, since there was ample storage right at the dock. Despite all the expensive equipment hanging about, I never heard of any missing gear there. As often as not, the dive staff had set up our gear on the boat by the time we arrived. The boats were somewhat slow, but the trips were usually short; under 10 minutes. The boats were well set up with ample gear storage and areas for cameras and masks. There were several exit points on each boat so getting off is easy once "the pool was open". After the dive, there are two separate ladders for easy exit including one located in the center of the hull for rough water.

The dive sites themselves, if not world-class, were nice. A typical dive site was a kinda-sorta wall dive with a steeply sloping coral wall from about 25- 40 feet to about 150 -180 feet. The visibility ranged from 50-100 feet. Lots of hard corals, many sea fans and some gorgonians were present too. Tropicals such as parrotfish, damsels, and angels were abundant. Toss in the occasional eel, lobster, crab, or grouper and you have a pretty typical Roatan wall dive. On most of the dives the boat was tied to a mooring, but a few were done as drift dives. On many of the sites you could spend the last part of your dive in 15-20 feet water instead of a safety stop. After a short surface interval to switch tanks and have some fruit and water, the boat would drop us off on one of the two walls adjacent to the resort. We could then dive the wall and swim up to the beach. Our group also got to do two special dives during the week. One was "Mary's Place" a long swim-through that had been closed to divers for years. At this site a large chunk of wall has pulled away from the main reef leaving a 5-7 foot wide channel that divers can swim through in single file. Kind of over rated, but worth doing. The other was a new wreck called the Island Fueler. This was a 200-foot tanker that was just sunk about 3 months ago near French Harbor. The wreck sits upright in about 90 feet of water. This was the only bad dive all week. There was almost no life on the wreck. The visibility was awful (10 feet) and it was dangerous to penetrate any of the compartments due to the extensive silt. It seems ironic that with all that wonderful shoreline they had to place a nice big wreck in one of the few places on the island with bad visibility. Some claimed that most of the wall dive sites were repetitive, but if you moved slowly, there was a lot to see. Several divers in my group spotted sea horses. Big critters remain somewhat scarce, but we did see a couple of sharks and some rays. Some people in our group made almost 30 dives during the week. I managed to make 24. The divemasters gave good briefings and were generally pretty helpful.

The two main concerns I had about diving in Roatan were: 1. What about Hurricane Mitch? and 2. What about the coral bleaching? No worries about either. The coral is alive and well and there is very little if any evidence of hurricane damage. In fact, a lot of the silt seems to have been washed off the reef in some areas.

Shore diving was also very easy there. A chain leads from the beach area to the wreck of the Prince Albert; a 160-foot freighter sitting upright in about 65 feet of water. The wreck had quite a bit of encrusting coral on it and had a lot of fish present from the big snapper in the bow to the school of glassy sweepers constantly circling in the engine room. From the wreck you could proceed to one of two walls which run from about 25 feet to about 150 feet deep. Tanks were always available for shore diving and you could easily do 5 dives per day. More if you didn't mind missing meals or naps.

And what about those meals? I live on Pepsi, Pop-tarts, and Jiffy muffin mix, so I am not the world's best food critic, but I thought the food was great and I never left the table hungry. Meals were served buffet style except for breakfast, which is cooked to order. There was always a cooler full of ice and bottled water, iced tea, and lemonade available in the main dining area, too. Snacks and other items were also available at the "Hitching Post" snack bar. Most of us were dive-a-holics, but some expressed an interest in doing something else. Lauray the activities director was very good about setting up things to do on or off the resort. While you won't find Club Med, there were some non-diving diversions to be found. They would set up deep-sea fishing, bird sanctuary tours, horseback rides, trips to town, and even white water rafting if you are interested. There were also kayaks to paddle around in.

The resort was not completely perfect, however. Despite repairs and upgrades after Mitch, some of the cabanas and rooms are in need of work. Our cabana door could not be easily closed and our bathroom door could not be easily opened. Some of the wood work will give you splinters if you are not careful. The water pressure in some of the showers was erratic to say the least and some showers had no hot water while some had no cold. The tap water itself is drinkable, but only in a dire emergency. The no-see-ums were as bad as always, and most of us were scratching multiple bites by the end of the week. I didn't go down there expecting the Hilton, so I wasn't too concerned with these seemingly minor problems.

Our trip down was not totally without problems, either. Good old TACA airlines exhibited their total incompetence with luggage by losing 17 (yes seventeen) pieces of our luggage on the trip down. They made the problem much worse by demanding that we surrender most of our carry on bags as well. They claimed that the older model 737 they were using did not have much cabin space. Despite promises of special handling, they managed to lose most of these too. Note: Do not give up your carry on! Fight them. I refused to give up my camera case and they let me take it. Some were stuck that night in Roatan with no luggage at all. The TACA representative at Roatan airport didn't seem very concerned. He couldn't figure out why our group was so upset when he said this happens all the time and we should get our stuff "Manana". On the return trip, they were much better. They only lost 8 bags. They also showed their complete inability to coordinate aircraft seats with diver butts. They were overbooked as usual. They kept asking our group to give up our seats for seats on the next flight. Had we known our luggage would not make the flight, maybe we would have taken them up on the deal. CoCoView, to their credit, was willing to loan us all the gear we needed, but there was not much they could do about vision corrected masks, boots and fins for size 14 feet, and missing dive computers.

Probably one of the best things about the resort is the staff attitude. They are there to help if possible. When we got in late from the night dive and missed dinner, Lauray got the kitchen staff to make us some sandwiches. When I discovered a bad o-ring in my camera, Ivor (the photo expert) didn't even charge me for the replacement. When we had to leave the island too early to get the regular breakfast, Erin (the manager) got up early to get us some food. Alex (one of the divemasters) was willing to hire out his van to take us to town and give us an impromptu tour on Friday afternoon. CoCoView is kind of like a summer camp for divers. Friendly, nicely structured, and easygoing. We'll be back.