More Utila Diving with Paradise Divers

Well, after 2 more days of diving with Paradise Divers in Utila, I am happy to report that they are 'a good operation at a budget price'. They are so convenient to us at anchor... 2 minutes in the dinghy and we can unload all our gear directly into the dive boat.


Though we did do one afternoon of diving from our dinghy, we opted to take 3 2-tank trips with Paradise, to go to places further away. 2 trips to 'The North Side'... walls that drop to 500 feet, and one to the 'Sea Mount' on the east end of the island.

Paradise's boat and the equipment IS a little worn, but it all operated properly. The instructors are good, and really care about the students. And everything went smoothly on our dives.

We still didn't see a Whale Shark (but didn't really expect to, this time of year). Our divemasters (DM's), Joaquin and Daniel, were good knowlegable guys and safety conscious. And all were 'characters'.

Oli, Joaquin, and Daniel
It was interesting diving on a boat with such a diversity of people. We had students from Germany, Israel, Spain, the U.S. and Ireland. Language is an issue with the divemasters and instructors! One Divemaster told me a story about having to coach a student from Israel through the written test via pantomime, because they didn't have any tests in Hebrew, and the kid didn't understand enough English.

And of course us 'cruisers' add to the exotic mix. I'm sure they think we are as old as God. (I remember at that age thinking that my 30-year-old teacher was OLD). Dave talked about first getting certified to dive in 1970--that's about 15 years before any of these 20-something students were born!!! And they just couldn't believe we were sailing around the world for 10 years.

A couple of the DM's were interested in seeing how we live, so we brought them out to Soggy Paws for Dave's 'engineer's tour'. They were both ready to go buy a boat and sail around the world. But Dave showed them all the 'systems' he has to maintain...they understood after hanging out with us for a few days, that it isn't all 'margaritas in the sunset'.

We did a total of 8 dives... 6 with Paradise Divers and 2 out of the dinghy. We took the camera on the last dive and got a few good pics.

A Tasty-Looking Crab (6" across)
Beautiful Soft Corals
Two Banded Coral Shrimp
Tomorrow we leave for West End, Roatan, 25 miles away... the 'front' we've been expecting passed through today. We got some rain and a little wind shift, but nothing more than a 5 knots from any direction.

The forecast for tomorrow is for light SE winds, so it should be a nice motorsail further East (to windward, but only 25 mi).