St Helene Bay Islands Honduras

We left Mangrove Bight at 1045hrs on Thursday 20 February under sunny skies and with a forecast of a nice sailing wind.  We were sad to leave Guanaja and could happily have stayed much longer but we wanted to explore some of the other islands too.

Leaving Mangrove Bight

The high, bright sun, coupled with our entry snail-trail on the chart plotter, made leaving through the reef easy……

The east end of Roatan, including the islands of St Helene, Morat and Isla de Barbareta 

…… and as soon as we were clear we hoisted full sail and gently moseyed downwind towards St Helene, one of the islands at the eastern end of Roatan.

Dolphins!  The first we have seen for ages

It was a lovely sail, made even better by being joined for a short period by a large pod of dolphins – the first we have seen in a long time.

Outer approaches to the anchorage off St Helene

We arrived off the outer approached to St Helene at about 1500 and, with a chart plotter chart looking much like Christopher Columbus’s of the place when he arrived (it doesn’t say ‘Here be dragons’ but we feel it should!) we made a cautious approach.  Happily the water was very clear and the sun (as we had planned) was still high so we were in more danger of being spooked by coral heads we could see 9m below us than of actually hitting something – but that’s always a good situation to be in!

Final approach to the anchorage to St Helene.  We use Navionics charts on our chart plotter
 but whilst they were very accurate in Cuba and the Bahamas they aren’t here in the
Honduran Bay Islands (and, yes, I do update them frequently).  In fact, they had so little
detail on them that the stack rocks in these picture do not show up on the charts at all. 
Eyeball navigation is king ….. and the key to eyeball navigation is good light

Oddon in his leaky canoe

As we arrived, very slowly, in the anchorage we were welcomed by Oddon, a local Rastafarian who had been fishing in his very leaky canoe as we arrived and who had waved us in quite impatiently.  Clearly we should have been driving in far faster!

The main village on St Helene, next to the anchorage

Oddon wanted to sell us seafood, fruit and crocheted items that his niece produces.  We refused everything at that point, explaining that we had enough food aboard but we did give him a jar of peanut butter that he requested for his niece.

Local panga (with an inboard engine which is quite rare; most are very speedy with large outboards).  There are no roads between St Helene and Roatan so everything and everyone arrives by sea 

Looking east from our position in the anchorage.  The fishing boat is anchored in a relatively shallow lagoon.  The large dock behind it was built about 9 months ago but we saw no ships use it

Believe it or not, this was the first bunch of
green bananas that we ever had on board

The next morning (Friday 21 February) Oddon came past again, bringing with him 4 mangoes and offering to get hold of other items for us.  Nicky relented and bought the mangoes and requested a papaya or a pineapple and 4 ripe bananas.  When he returned later in the day, inevitably he had brought more than we had requested, in this instance in the form of a small bunch of green bananas.  We’ve never had a bunch of bananas aboard before, having taken heed of the warnings of Atlantic crossers before us who said that if you get a large bunch all the bananas ripen at once and you end up with a glut.  But we reckoned we could deal with the numbers here and the papaya looked (and was) good as were the 8 very small, ripe bananas.

The forecast for Saturday was for strong northerly winds as yet another cold front was expected to enter the area.  So, rather than go ashore, we decided to spend Friday diving and then explore on foot the next day.  Our first dive was on Helena Wall, on the reef to the east of Rose Cay, which itself is to the east of the anchorage.  Unlike in Guanaja, we found no moorings marking the dive sites, so we anchored the dinghy on one of several large sandy patches close to the reef and hopped over the side to see what was around. 

It’s not a deep wall but it’s deep enough.  The visibility wasn’t as good as it had been in Guanaja but I think we were rather spoilt there and it was plenty good enough for us to enjoy the dive.

We saw 6 (yes, six!) lionfish on the outbound leg of this dive.  We definitely need to do a Lionfish killing course

And it was quite good enough for us to spot 6 lionfish on the outbound leg of the dive (and we saw 2 of them coming back too).  To quote from Caribbean Reef Fish by Micky Charteris: ‘It has been called the worst marine species invasion ever.  Although lionfish are now found throughout the area, they are not native to the Caribbean…….and are remarkably successful in their new habitat, with no natural predators.  ……  A female can reproduce after only one year and, under the right conditions, can do so every 4 days.  She can release over 2 million eggs every year.  ……  The major threat from lionfish comes not from their [venomous] spines but from their voracious appetites.  Indiscriminate feeders, with stomachs expanding to 30 times their normal size, they may continue to feed until full.  …….  Over 70 local species have been found inside lionfish……. They also target juvenile fish, which seriously disrupts the balance of local reef ecosystems.’  The rangers at the Roatan Marine Park in West End run training courses in killing lionfish and it is certainly something we hope to do when we go there so that we can do our bit, albeit a very little bit if the numbers are correct, to help to reduce the population of this scourge. 

Queen triggerfish – a first for us

Despite the number of lionfish we saw, we also saw large numbers of other fish, including a beautiful queen triggerfish….

Huge shoals of blue chromis

….huge shoals of blue chromis, sergeant majors and surgeonfish….

Right:  Elongated vase sponge (left of centre), azure vase sponge (bottom centre), giant barrel sponge (a young example, right of azure vase sponge)

This formation of 3 spotted eagle rays gave us 2 or 3 passes but each time were right at the limit of visibility

….and a formation of 3 eagle rays which, unfortunately, stayed just on the limit of visibility.

There was also a wide variety of hard and soft corals to enjoy

Four ENORMOUS rainbow parrotfish – these are in their terminal phase, which can be seen by their colouring and huge size

In the afternoon we dived on the western side of Rose Cay on a site known as Rose Cay Wall.  Almost the first fish we were lucky enough to see were 4 enormous rainbow parrotfish.  Rainbow parrotfish can live for up to 16 years, growing to 1.2m (4ft) long and over 20kg in weight and these ones certainly lived up to that description.

The topography here was quite different to where we had dived in the morning.  Here we found large coral outcrops with sandy channels between them – great fun to swim along and to explore. 

Bent sea rod (top centre), common sea fan (top left), doughnut sea rod (bottom, left of centre)

French angelfish against a backdrop of corals 

Graysby

We saw several large schools of surgeonfish

As the dive, and the afternoon, wore on, the sky gradually became more overcast, resulting in poorer light underwater so we surfaced a little earlier than we needed to and headed back to BV.  We washed the kit and started to refill our dive tanks but found that, as the pressure in the tanks increased and the compressor worked harder to add air to the tanks, the generator’s output voltage was about 10V down from that which we expected; clearly that capacitor was on its way out.  So we left the tanks part filled and let the generator cool so that we could work on it.

Guanaja in the distance

Contrary to the forecast, we had a calm night and woke on the Saturday morning to bright sunshine and very benign conditions – a perfect diving day!  We changed the capacitor and topped off the tanks and found that the generator output was back where it should be.  Great news!

BV in the anchorage as seen from the village…

After a morning of boat jobs, we took the dinghy ashore to explore.

… and again, from a different angle and a little more zoomed in

We headed south to begin with, intending to go as far as a small village we could see south of the anchorage before coming back to explore the main village close to BV.

Beautiful, lush surroundings

The mud track crossed a concrete, broken down bridge and then continued more as a footpath than as anything larger.  The scenery was lovely, very lush and green, with a great variety of trees and shrubs and small houses set back away from the track.  We commented on the incredibly new-looking electricity meters outside each house.

The Channel Bar and Grill

Eventually the track reached the small village we had seen from BV and appeared to terminate but in retrospect it probably didn’t.  What we had thought was the track going onto someone’s land was probably the public track continuing past another house.

View eastwards.  If you squint you can just see BV above the docks

At Denissa’s Bar.  Left to right: Tommy, Noah and Nicky

We returned the way we had come and stopped in at Denissa’s Bar, where we got chatting to Tommy and Noah.  Both are American and live on the island for several months each year.  We had an interesting conversation about life on the island.  The houses in the village were only hooked up to ‘mains’ electricity about 5months before we visited – no wonder the meters all looked so new!  Before that each house or business had to run a generator for electricity which, as Denissa said, was a very expensive way of keeping your fridge and lights going.  Tommy talked about the withdrawal of US Aid from Honduras, one of the results of which is that the villagers now need to pay to send their children to school. 

Views from Denissa’s Bar – sunshine, a rainbow and showers in the distance coming our way!

The conversation wound back and forth between life on the island, sailing and travel and before we knew it the showers were getting heavier and the light was fading – time to beat a retreat back to BV before it got too unpleasant or too dark.

As expected, the wind picked up quite significantly in the evening but BV was quite secure on her anchor and the sea was nice and flat as the wind was off the land.  We’d just drifted off to sleep when we were woken by a couple of loud bangs on the side of the hull.  It took us a few moments to get on deck but, when we did, a scan with a flashlight showed a heavy fibreglass panga drifting off behind us.  By then it was already 200m behind us and it was difficult to see if there was someone in it but we thought it looked empty.  It was drifting away rapidly, too fast for us to be able to inflate, launch and fit the engine to the dinghy so that we could give chase and recover the vessel.  Sadly, it looks like one of the locals has lost their boat and, in the process, it looked as if BV had gained some very large scratches in her paint.  [Ed:  happily for us we later found that the ‘big scratches’ were just lines of white paint scraped off the drifting boat, which rubbed off BV’s hull quite easily].

St Helene, Bay Islands, Honduras