Michael Rock (Part 6) Guanaja Honduras Bay Islands

Friday 14 February dawned fine and calm.  We’d spent the previous 2 days doing chores albeit in nice surroundings.  Online admin on Wednesday at the End of the World (EOTW), with shopping in Bonacca on Thursday followed by a mountain of hand-washing (Nicky) and designing then cutting and gluing the wood for a bracket on which to mount the monitor of our Raspberry Pi computer (me).  But by Friday we felt we’d done enough chores for the time being.  It was time to play again.

So we went diving (what else?).  Our first dive of the day, at Black Rock Canyon, was at the cut in the reef through which we’d brought BV 5 days before.  Unfortunately, whilst we were descending, I had a kit faff and as I adjusted my straps my camera floated behind me on its lanyard.  When the straps were all adjusted and I pulled the camera back to hand I realised that I had lost my camera light.  Somehow, it had detached and either sunk or floated away.  We searched but failed to find it – hugely frustrating!

Without the camera light the red coral just doesn’t standing out in the pictures as vividly as I would like….

…but you do get to see the almost eerie glow of some of the sponges,
 just as we see them underwater

Spiny spider crab

The visibility on this dive, and the one in the afternoon, was not as good as we had been used to, with lots of particles being carried through the cut by the current.  We also found that there was less to see and to photograph.  Many of the sponges stood out clearly though; it was almost glowing.  However, without the camera light the coral just didn’t stand out as vividly as wanted.  For the photo to the left I tried illuminating the crab with my small torch.  That helped a bit but sadly was not a patch on what I’d become used to.

Our second dive was another wall dive, which we think called is Bayman Drop.

The visibility was a bit better here and the sunlight was brighter too so the pictures are generally more colourful [Ed: that and we spent a bit longer in shallower water].

French angelfish

We saw shoals and shoals of blue chromis on this dive….

Sci-fi movie set inspiration

….and crossed several plateau outcrops, voyeurs on the hectic fishy world below.  Nicky said that looking down and watching the near never-ending stream of blue chromis passing, with groupings of other fish busying themselves at different levels around small pinnacles of coral was like watching one of those sci-fi films where the city is frenetic with various types of airborne vehicles all rushing around sky-scraper buildings.

Overall, we were a little disappointed by this day’s diving, not helped by the loss of the camera light too.  The visibility was poorer than on previous days and we both felt that the terrain and the marine life we saw was not as good as at the other sites we had visited.  Or perhaps we’re just becoming blasé about what is, quite frankly, superb diving on some fantastically healthy and vibrant reefs.

The next day (Saturday 15 February) we returned to boat chores.  Nicky completed the last of the washing and I finished off the wooden bracket for the monitor of the Raspberry Pi mini-computer.  With the glue dry I could set it all up and check that it fitted at the chart table, which, happily, it did.  Now it needs to be sanded and painted to finish it off but we have no black paint so that job will have to wait a while.  Whilst waiting for the laundry to dry, Nicky had another play with the Raspberry Pi and OpenCPN and discovered the computer doesn’t maintain a time clock whilst it is off and seemed to need an internet connection to update the time after start up.  Furthermore, the OpenCPN navigation software seems unable to update its date and time from the GPS feed, using the computer’s clock for these instead.  Which seemed to give us a problem when it came to the tidal rise and flow programmes displayed on the charts and when it came to recording tracks.

With the washing dry, we took the dinghy back to the EOTW to use the internet.  Marlie had left the day before for a one month advanced chef’s course but Ana served us beer and some excellent breadfruit French fries [Ed: quality healthy food choices – not!].  We did all the admin (emails, blogs updates, bank stuff etc) and got distracted with OpenCPN and Raspberry Pi fora, trying find a solution to the time/clock issue.  We stayed far longer than we had intended and it was almost sunset as we took the dinghy back to BV for our final evening anchored off Michael Rock.

Michael Rock, Guanaja, Honduras Bay Islands