Michael Rock (Part 2) Guanaja Honduras Bay Islands

Monday 10 February dawned a little cloudy with a light breeze.  Not quite perfect conditions for diving (8/8 clear blue skies would have made it so) but pretty well close to ideal.  We planned to do 2 dives.  It makes for quite a long day but once you’ve got the kit wet you may as well do 2 dives to maximise the ratio of fun to clearing up afterwards.  The first dive was, we think, on The Pavilions but our dive map is a bit vague so it’s hard to be sure.

It doesn’t get much better than this

Whether it is the Pavilions or not matters little; it was a superb dive.  We found the terrain here to be really interesting.  There are many open sand patches surrounded by stands of rock and coral.  There are high pillars and stacks with deep valleys between them; and there are tunnels and caves with pools, some with openings to the surface, others entirely enclosed.  It makes for a stimulating dive.  There are myriad route choices around the vertical features and you have to work to remember your route (and thus the route back to the dinghy!) all the while delighting in…….

Clockwise from top right: Porkfish, nurse shark, lionfish, blue tang

….. the colours of the coral and the sheer abundance of beautiful fish.  We were even lucky enough to see a nurse shark sleeping in a fissure.

Swimming along a valley in the coral

It was great fun and, since we never knew what was around the next corner, it just seemed to just get better and better all the time.

French angelfish

Centre: note the bright red corals, only seen as such under the light of a torch or camera flash

The coral seemed to be in fabulous condition, with a good mix of hard and soft corals.  When we shone a torch at them we found the walls to be much more brightly coloured than, for the most part, we had imagined.

Smooth trunkfish

Coral close-up

It had been friends talking about dive sites of this quality that had brought us to the Honduran Bay Islands…….and in just this dive alone the trip has been worth it.

Juvenile blue tang.  Oh so tiny.  Oh so cute!

Getting the kit together for dive number 2

Our dive computers logged 55 minutes on that first dive and we were keen to repeat it in the afternoon, after a spot of lunch.

Swimming in an aquarium

This time we headed for Michael’s Rock Key (we think!  Same caveat as before!).  Here we found even more reef fish.  We hadn’t thought it possible, but it was!

The terrain was very similar to that at the morning’s dive site…

Top left: one of many huge shoals of Blue chromis.  Bottom left: an unperturbed Rock hind

…. and again we enjoyed swimming along the valleys, peering through clefts in the rocks and gazing up at the huge shoals of fish circling around coral heads.  The colours and the numbers and the beauty of the terrain were amazing.

Blue tang in close-up.  The Blue tang is a member of the Surgeonfish family, all of which have a sharp spine, used as a weapon, at the their tail base

Lionfish.  We saw Lionfish on all our dives on the west coast of Guanaja, which is very worrying since they are an un-predated invasive species, which causes great damage to the reef ecosystem.  But they have poisonous spines in amongst their feather-boa-like fins, so catching them and killing them is a fraught business

It looks as if Nicky is leaning on the coral here but that is not the case.  She is holding a small torch in her right hand, which is outstretched in front of the wall

Scrawled filefish – a first sighting for us.  Even in real life, and not just in the picture (which could have been doctored, but hasn’t), the blue markings on this fish shine a bright neon blue in the sunlight

Once again, tearing ourselves away from the amazing underwater vista was hard to do but, eventually, we had to get out and leave the sea-creatures to their world and return to ours.

Tiny shrimp.  We saw quite a few of these over the several dives we did in the area but do not know what they are called.  This one is back-dropped on an anemone, we believe.  Our identification book says that anemones often host small shrimp and other tiny creatures – think ‘Finding Nemo’

Back on board BV we had 4 dive tanks to fill and lots of water to make (to replenish that we used for cleaning our kit).  We had filled 2 tanks, had 2 partly filled (just requiring a final top-up the next day) and were in the process of making water when….. the generator failed.  Not good!  Without the generator our diving plans would have to be drastically amended.  Happily, the fault turned out to be a broken cable to the capacitor, which I successfully fixed fairly quickly.  Near-disaster averted!  But once the generator was running again, we found its output voltage to be about 10V down on what it had been, so clearly this capacitor has been affected by the failure and will need to be changed in the not too far distant future.  We now hold a number of spares on board but don’t want to go through them too quickly so we noted the issue as something to monitor and turned our attentions to dinner and to deciding which dives to do the next day.

Michael Rock, Guanaja, Honduras Bay Islands