Honduras, One More Time!

Hello again. Just catching up on the posts from Honduras and this is the last one. Coming up...Buenos Aires!

We’ve really enjoyed spending time with folks we’ve met through the dive shop. Shannon and Christian from our hotel also got their Open Water certification at Native Sons. We met a few Brits in from Manchester, Mark and Mark (renamed by the dive slaves Red and Ted). We also met another couple, Milan and Christina, who live in Zurich. Milan is an engineer working on a design for a jet engine that can be used to generate electrical power more efficiently and cleanly. He’s originally from Britain and we discussed at length what might happen in the seventh Harry Potter book. Christina is a particle physicist and part-time snowboard instructor. Hello, power couple!

We also saw Ryan, the dive instructor, play some of his music at a club called Fubar. (I explained to Byum and Tom what that stood for and if you don’t know, ask your mother.) On our last Saturday night a local bar called Land's End had a full moon party. Here's a picture of Jen and Shannon enjoying a cocktail. On our last Sunday, we hosted a party for all our new friends at the hotel. By the way, a fifth of good rum here costs about $6.50.

Our neighbor in the hotel is a fifty-ish guy named Tim. He’s an old radical who protested the Vietnam War and started food co-ops in the 70s. He also invested in oil companies after the first gas crisis in the 1970s, bought property, lived in Mexico and sustains his retirement living off dividends on stocks and funds. He’s an unusual fellow who has a lot to say about politics, business and what’s happened to radicals, liberals, democrats and co-ops. He is down here for diving, returning after a nine-year absence and he’s gone diving all over. This is the best reef he’s seen.

Getting back to the diving, like I posted earlier it’s quite amazing. The reef is in excellent condition, although there are less fish than there should be. We’ve seen a few turtles (one was quite a big fellow), various types of grouper, barracuda, spiny lobsters, crabs, numerous Blue Tang (Dori from Finding Nemo), a seahorse and Moray eels. We dived a wreck; a cargo ship was purposely sunk to create an artificial reef and one of the hurricanes broke it into three pieces. There is a Moray eel who lives in the wreck which I have successfully named Murray, Murray the Moray. We saw three eels on that dive. They are mostly found poking partway out of their hole but we saw one eel swimming freely amongst the coral followed aggressively by a large grouper. This is apparently an unusually occurrence. We did a night dive where we saw numerous sea urchins and an orange starfish. Just looking at the coral is incredible, with colors of purple, green, brown, orange, red and white, in so many shapes it’s hard to describe. There are thin waves, giant barrels large enough for a person, tubes, sticks, blobs, and long plant-like branches which lots of little feelers. And they are all growing on top of or out of one another.

At this point in time and with the present-day climate, the reef appears healthy and growing. But just one degree Fahrenheit change in average seawater temperature can kill this reef. It's a pretty sober thought.