Old Port Royal Roatan Honduras

Coral garden between the sand patch where we anchored the dinghy and the reef wall.  There was lots of soft coral here

Giant barrel sponges

We’d spent some of the afternoon the previous day, snorkelling over the reef close to the ‘wreck (conspic)’ to the east of the entrance to Old Port Royal.  Now, on Monday 24 February, we decided to dive on the wall to the west of the entrance.

Left: spiny lobster.  Right: lionfish

It was a nice dive.  The visibility wasn’t as good as that which we’d had in Guanaja but we saw plenty of reef-life including, disappointingly, several lionfish.

A stream of blue chromis

Beautiful coral garden with adult bluehead wrasse (right foreground), younger bluehead wrasse (left foreground), stoplight parrotfish (initial phase, centre foreground) and yellowtail snapper (above foreground coral head)

One of several large schools of surgeonfish

Scrawled cowfish

Stoplight parrotfish (initial phase)

We’re still struggling with identifying sponges!
This one might be a red encrusting tube sponge

Parts of the reef were shallow and, even without a light on my camera, the colours of the corals and sponges stood out clearly in the bright sunshine.

Fan coral

Yellowtail damselfish ‘displaying for the camera’

Top and bottom left: The mangroves east of Bailey Point Cay with a resident white egret stalking in the shallows.  Bottom right: the shallow cut through to the sea between Bailey Point Cay and the mangroves

After our dive we took the dinghy a little further east to briefly explore the channels around Bailey Point Cay. The one leading to the open sea is quite well marked but looks very shallow.  Unsurprisingly, we didn’t see many pangas coming in from that direction, though the channel that runs inshore of the cay and the mangroves to its east is very well frequented by traffic.  The new electricity cable linking St Helene to ‘mainland’ Roatan also follows this latter channel, and there are large signs warning one not to dive, anchor or fish in the channel.

BV anchored in Old Port Royal, viewed from the lagoon end of the cut-through east of Bailey Point Cay

Left: Cushion sea star.  Right: conch (perhaps a milk conch as we think it had green eyestalks)

In the afternoon we decided to try a dive on the ‘military wreck’ in New Port Royal.  However, our dive map is not terribly detailed and we failed to find the site.  The visibility was dreadful (though I suspect that those who dive in parts of the UK would tell me that it was actually quite good) and all our short search pattern out from the dinghy mooring revealed were several cushion sea stars and a few conch.

So we moved back to Old Port Royal and dived on Old Shrimp Boat Wall (East), roughly where we had snorkelled the previous day.  This wall dive turned out to be deeper than that on the west side where we had dived in the morning…..

Large green moray eel (which looks to be auditioning as a Dementor in the next Harry Potter film)

…..and some of the residents were significantly larger too!  We saw 2 green moray eels on the dive.  One very close too, the other further away and, mostly, underneath a rock.  I only got a very fuzzy photo of the latter but the first eel seemed reasonably unfazed by us and I managed to get several good pictures before we felt we should move off out of his/her territory.

Grey angelfish

The same grey angelfish in close-up

We also spotted s couple of very large French angelfish…..

Giant barrel sponges with a lionfish between them and a bluehead wrasse to the left.  Thin leaf lettuce coral under the wrasse, brown octopus sponge(?) in the foreground and sea plume in the mid-ground

….more huge giant barrel sponges and, again, some more lionfish.  I really do need to get a spear so that we can try to kill some of these scourge.

Spot the reef fish hiding in and around the coral

It was another lovely dive and the highlight of it, and probably of the day, has to have been that first green moray eel we saw.

The mountains of mainland Honduras visible on the horizon.  Given that the mainland is over 30nm away those mountains must be very impressive when seen close up!

The weather was quite calm overnight and in the morning of Tuesday 25 February we had our first glimpse of the mountains of the Honduran mainland.  The forecast was for easterly quadrant winds at 10-15kts, filling in from the southeast overnight and increasing to 25kt gusting to 35kt.  We spent the day doing chores, filling the dive tanks, writing the blog to post at some point in the future and Nicky did some proof-reading for the next edition of the OCC’s magazine, Flying Fish.  Part way through the morning a panga stopped by and the driver asked if we wanted to buy some hash.  We passed on the offer.  There are no photos of all this excitement but we managed to achieve quite a lot and, in the evening, the wind filled in from the southeast and increased as promised and we were very grateful for the shelter offered by Bailey Point Cay.

Old Port Royal, Bay Islands, Roatan, Honduras