West End, Roatan, Honduras, Day 2

We spent Tuesday afternoon ashore in West End, poking around and looking for dive shops, grocery stores, bars that will carry the Super Bowl, and the Marine Park Office.

West End's 'main drag' is a sandy 'dirt road' that is very bumpy, so auto traffic moves very slowly here. (Good for us pedestrians).

Mike, Sue & Dave on Main Street, West End
Like Utila, in West End there is a dive shop about every other business. Plus lots of bars and eateries. The composition here is 44% dive shops, 44% restaurant/bars, 10% real estate offices, and 2% everything else. There are several internet cafe's and several grocery stores with basic stuff. (Anyone who wants anything fancy takes a bus to the main city of Coxen Hole).

We stopped in the first 6 or so dive shops, asking about tank fills and dive trips. Prices are just about double here, compared to Utila. The standard price for a single 1-tank dive here is $35 (PLUS your gear rental, if necessary). You can get that down to $25 if you buy a package of 8 dives or more. Most dive shops tend to do 3 1-tank dives a day rather than 2 2-tank dives, so the quoted price is PER DIVE vs per trip. Fills universally seemed to be $5. We never did ask if we could reduce that by buying a package of fills. Dave has decided to break out our compressor and make sure it is working, while we're in a place to get spare parts.

Mike and Dave Working on Dive Equipment
Mike from Infini had bought some used dive equipment in Utila and was also trying to find a place to get his new (used) dive tank hydro'd. As well as buy a few more bits and pieces of dive gear to complete a one full set of dive equipment. There are more places here with dive equipment for sale, and also parts for compressors. We did finally find a shop (Sueno del Mar) that seemed to know what they are doing, and agreed to do some PM on Mike's regulator, and hydro the tank.

Fresh Fish for this Restaurant on the Water!
We found a couple of small grocery stores. In front of the main grocery store, there was also a guy selling veggies out of the back of his truck, and another guy selling frozen seafood (shrimp, lobster, crab). We didn't buy much, because we are still well stocked from Guatemala. But we are always on the lookout for the small 'specialty' stuff. "Oooh, look, they have Extra Crunchy Jif Peanut Butter!" (We did finally find Dave some Cheerios in Utila, which we've been looking for for 6 months!)

We also checked in at the Roatan Marine Park Office (roatanmarinepark.com) and bought dive tags for $10 each. We could probably slide by without this expense, but we feel that preservation of the marine environment is a very important cause, and we want to be 'good cruisers'. We also bought a nice color guide to the Roatan dive sites, complete with a description and color sketch of the dive profile for each dive, and GPS waypoints. Sherry spent some time yesterday entering the waypoints into her handheld GPS.


We really needed to do a few small maintenance projects yesterday, but opted to go diving instead. It was absolutely flat calm yesterday and the water was fantastically clear. Dave and I did 2 dives from the dinghy to 60-70'. It's only a 5 minute dinghy ride to the closest mooring bouys, and there are bouys that stretch from a couple miles south of us to a couple miles north of us.

Dave Hanging Out in the Dinghy Between Dives
I think we'll be staying here until the Super Bowl. Dave and Mike already scoped out a bar that will be televising the game.

Dive Compressor Comes Out of the Closet