Lockdown in West End Roatan Honduras Bay Islands

West End, Roatan is the western Caribbean’s dive mecca – and we were blessed
with wonderful conditions for most of our stay

West End Roatan, the diving mecca of the western Caribbean.  Gorgeous white sand beaches, a friendly village where almost every other business is a dive shop …… 

Balloonfish – check out the eyes!

………and a beautiful reef just off the shore teeming with all kinds of marine life.   The area is deservedly the central jewel of the Roatan Marine Park.  

Warm evenings with great friends in a beautiful anchorage.  Life doesn’t get better than this

From a yachtie perspective it is an idyllic location – provided that the wind stays in the eastern quadrant or remains low if it blows from the west.  Whilst the reef does provide a barrier, it remains submerged at all stages of the (very minimal) tidal range and so the protection it provides from the open sea is fairly minimal.  

Green turtle.  Turtles and a huge variety of common reef fish – barracuda, grunts,
sergeant majors, wrasse, snappers etc swam through and lived in the anchorage area routinely

The Marine Park authorities have laid about 20 moorings in an area of deeper water about 0.5nm from the village, each secured by 2 or 3 sand screws, with the idea being to protect the eel grass beds – which provide food for turtles and nurseries for juvenile fish – from damage by anchoring.  And, of course, using moorings more yachts can safely fit into the anchorage, whilst bringing in a greater profit for the moorings authorities.  To be fair, the mooring charges aren’t unreasonable, particularly if you stay for a month – pay for 3 weeks and get the fourth week free.  

So much to see on each and every dive.  Christmas tree worms……

The first couple of weeks of our stay were spent in a blaze of getting to know the little village, meeting some of our fellow yachties in the mooring field and diving.  We mostly dived independently, sometimes just the 2 of us, sometimes with other friends from the anchorage.  The reef is just one long dive site with numerous mooring buoys for dinghies and/or dive shop boats.  If the mooring buoy you want to use is occupied either wait an hour for the divers to surface or use a different buoy close by.  Or drift dive with your dinghy on a long line above you – a technique we were shown by a very experienced dive couple.  And, of course, the benefit of this is you don’t have to navigate back to the mooring buoy.  

…….and a Yellowline arrow crab.  Another tiny animal pointed out by our dive instructors

We also completed the PADI Advanced Open Water course with Roatan Divers, an excellent course which included  a deep dive over a wreck and a fabulous night dive, during which we followed an octopus (from a suitable distance) for about 5 minutes and saw thousands of ‘strings of pearls’ phosphorescing as darkness set in fully.  We learned so much from the instructors and from our experiences on the course – it set us up really well for the remainder of our stay in Roatan. 

Conner, Karl and Nicky on a very empty beach, just before lockdown bit and the final
tourists (other than yachtsmen) were sent home

Karl and Conner on Contigo, whom we’d met in Jamaica, caught up with us in West End just as the COVID-19 crisis was reaching western Europe and the USA.  It was lovely to see them again and we had a couple of social get-togethers with them, including a visit to a local coffee roasting business.  

And with empty beaches came empty beach bars……. this was the
final cruisers’ get-together before lockdown began

But it was during a Sunday afternoon yachties' gathering in one of the beach bars that we heard that the concerns about COVID-19 had reached the island and that tourists who had flown in were no longer being ‘encouraged’ to return home, they were being told to leave.  

The sun sets on normality

So Nicky and I spent the next day busy with jobs.  Early, early we took a brief sojourn a few miles offshore to empty our holding tanks.  Having returned we dinghied back and forth between our mooring and the shore lugging diesel, petrol and water and then other supplies to top up all the other tanks and generally prepare for whatever we might be told to do.  

Now you see him…….or perhaps you don’t.  
A Peacock flounder blending in, just as we tried to do during our lockdown

As it turned out, the governor of the Honduran Bay Islands treated us very reasonably.  Like the local population, we were gradually restricted in where we could go and what we could do but, unlike in other Caribbean islands, we were treated exactly like the residents.  Shops, including food shops and petrol stations were closed and propane refilling trucks stopped circulating for a few days.  But then, when it became clear that this would be a longer term problem, food shops re-opened, with restrictions on when individuals were permitted to use them and propane and drinking water suppliers began to operate almost normally.  Petrol and diesel supplies remained restricted to discourage travel and taxis and buses stopped running too.  

Winch love

During the first 2 weeks of lockdown, diving was forbidden so we spent the time preparing BV for a long ocean passage.  Whilst it seemed increasingly likely that the Hondurans would not force us to leave the island, it seemed not unlikely that there might be some form of civil unrest which would make us wish to leave.  Happily, food supplies to the island continued to run as normal and a good number of the local businesses continued to employ and pay at least some of their staff.  Alcohol sales were severely restricted or forbidden and there was a nighttime curfew as well as movement restrictions by day.  Throughout our time on the island (about 2 months in total) there was no unrest and only a small increase in the crime rate, primarily in the main town. Also, because travel into the island was forbidden, including for island residents who had been caught on the mainland, Roatan and the other Bay Islands remained Covid free for that time too.

Garden eels – ‘so where have all the people gone?  Anyone?  Anyone?’

In that first couple of weeks we tackled all the big ‘pre-ocean crossing checks’ as well as a number of nice-to-haves that we’d been putting off in order to do things that were more fun.  We started with major servicings on the main engine and generator and had to fix a number of unrelated but concurrent problems with the generator at the same time.  Happily, we suceeded in making the generator fully serviceable again as we needed it to run our watermaker, though we were able to obtain potable water ashore from a commercial supplier of locally produced RO water.  However, for lots of reasons, but primarily because we thought that we would most likely cross back to Guernsey in the summer, we were very keen to get our watermaker up and running and we cheered loudly when we finally got the generator working again.

Variable boring sponges – not that boring!

Then we moved onto servicing all the winches and the windlass and lubricating all the blocks and clutches.  Next up was a check of the various radio antennae followed by a full rig and rigging check, which included replacing some of the anti-chafe gear and the cable-tie locks on most of the shackle pins.  To complete the mechanical ‘must-do’ jobs we scrubbed the hull and carried out a thorough check on the propeller and steering system.  

Most of the rest of the jobs involved canvas work so I dug out the sewing machine and patched and repaired seams on most items one way or another – the sail cover, the bimini and the covers for the aerials and various other deck items.  I also restitched the velcro on our foul-weather kit – we’d not used that for a long time!  Then, since I was at it, I built covers for the dinghy seat and the fuel tank, something I’d been intending to do for ages, whilst Nicky used the time I had the dinghy on deck for fitting the canvaswork, cleaning it and regluing the seams to try to keep it air-tight.

Banded coral shrimps

All in it was a busy couple of weeks, made all the busier part way through when 2 things happened.  Firstly, the President of Honduras declared a countrywide State of Emergency, which affected us little as effectively that was what the Bay Islands Governor had done a week earlier and, secondly, a dinghy fuel can and separately a dinghy and its outboard were stolen overnight from the anchorage.  At the beginning of our lockdown, Suzanne and David on Suzie 2 who, like us are OCC Roving Rear Commodores, set up an anchorage morning radio net.  This ensured that everyone was kept informed about changes to regulations and allowed group arrangements to be made for, say, minibus access to supermarkets on the other side of the island.  

Green moray eel – this evil-looking chap would surely make a good night watchman!

Now we stepped in to set up an overnight anchor watch to disuade further light-fingered activity and also, at the behest of the Marine Park custodians, to keep an eye out for illegal fishing and poaching.  It took a while to adapt the roster to best efficiency but we did and the group successfully kept the night watch going for the next 6 weeks with only one other item going missing in that time (one more than we wanted though!).

Lionfish hunting – our gateway back to diving during lockdown.  Here our qualified Lionfish hunter
begins his mission to rid the reef of this highly invasive and hugely destructive but very
tasty species – you just need to be careful about the poisonous spines!

A couple of weeks into lockdown the Bay Islands Governor announced on his daily briefing that diving, independent of a dive shop, would be permitted to enable Lionfish hunting.  The Lionfish is a highly invasive species and can eat vast numbers of immature and small native reef fish.  This destabilises the reef’s natural ecosystem and in the not-too-long-term destroys the reef, certainly destroys it as a location that thousands of divers each year wish to visit.  From the minimum of a purely fiscal perspective, with Roatan’s economy primarily based on tourism, and dive tourism at that, protecting the reef was/is vitally important.

Happiness is a good day’s diving!

We leapt to the call to dive with alacrity and, having a compressor for filling our tanks on board, were fortunate that we could do so easily.  There followed 4 or so idyllic weeks.  We dived daily, sometimes twice a day.  Sometimes we dived by ourselves, at other times with friends. 

Social distancing Roatan style 

Later, as the lockdown eased somewhat, we did some diving with a couple of the dive schools that had helped to make our lives easier.  In particular, Paul at Pro-Dive had helped by allowing us the use of his dock to access the village and both he and Denise at Clearwater had provided low-cost tank fills as restrictions on diving and the use of local companies had eased.

Channel crab inside a barrel sponge

Featherduster worm

We carried out so many dives, and the water quality was so high and the number of different species we saw so great that we risked becoming blasé.  Creatures we had oohed and ahhed about seeing once just a couple of months before, we now felt disappointed if we didn’t see.  

I spied a Nudibranch (a Red Tipped Sea Goddess, it’s tiny)
– and the local dive book’s official photographer, who happened to be with us, didn’t!

But I am very fortunate to have pictures of a couple of quite uncommon sightings – a Red-tipped sea goddess (a Nudibranch and really very small) and some Yellowhead jawfish.  

Yellowhead jawfish

These latter fish hide in tiny holes in the sand and, like sand eels, pop up and down depending on whether or not the coast is clear of potential predators (ie divers).

Green turtle

The diving was fabulous, we were able to socialise, albeit with appropriate distancing, with those other crews in the anchorage and time slipped away surprisingly easily.  Before we knew it May was creeping up on us.  By this time we had decided that we would sail home during the summer Atlantic crossing season.  There were a number of factors playing into this decision:  the Canadian border was firmly closed and didn’t look like it would open anytime soon; Covid-19 was spreading madly across the US; we would likely have visa issues if we tried to extend our hurricane season stay in the US for longer than the normally permitted 6 months; each day there was a different (usually bad) story about the reaction of US Customs and Border Protection to arriving non-US yachts/crews, particularly those wishing to make an extended stay; we had always travelled in the expectation of being able to return home easily if there was a family emergency; and there was plenty to keep us well-occupied at home.  

Spiny lobsters don’t have claws unlike their northern counterparts but we wouldn’t
be enjoying a Maine lobster supper this year

We were in contact with a good number of friends who were or had been in the eastern Caribbean and who were either en-route home or very shortly to be so.  Similarly, Nicky was a Net Controller for the OCC’s Atlantic Crossing West to East Net and was speaking (with increasing difficulty as the boats moved north and east) to friends and radio-friends who were already on the move.  Suddenly, and it was quite sudden, we knew we had to get going. 

More pre-transatlantic maintenance

So followed a flurry of final pre-ocean sailing checks:  another rig check; further refuelling; another good generator check/mini-service and a check of the main engine; we packed away the dive kit, re-counted the kilos of rice and beans and bought plenty of fresh food.  It didn’t take that long.  The biggest issue was the weather.  Perhaps we should have left earlier, maybe later.  We saw what we thought was a window and grabbed it, hightailing it into town with a few other crews to clear out, only for the window to briefly slam shut before reopening again for a short time.  Our vacillation over the weather was frustrating and mildly embarrassing as most eyes in the anchorage were on us – shortly to head off ‘all the way across the Atlantic’, if we couldn’t get our departure from here right……..  In the end, 2 of the boats who had said that they would leave with us elected to stay a few days extra for a more consistent forecast and we were rather pleased they made that decision as we expected to meet quite poor conditions in the Straits of Yucatan. 

Oi, you!  Yes, you – looking at me.  Best you come back…..or else!

We had dinner with Karl and Conner that final night before we left.  It was a lovely meal and we spent quite some time reminiscing about our time in Jamaica and in Roatan with them.  Never before had we spent so long at anchor/on a mooring in one place; we normally keep moving on.  But despite (or is it because of) our stay being pretty much enforced by circumstances, we hugely enjoyed our extended stay in West End and would return in a heartbeat.  The friendliness of the island population, in particular those in village at West End, and the beauty of the island and of its reef combine to make it a very special place.  We very much want to return to the Bay Islands as a whole but West End, Roatan and the west coast of Guanaja are top on our list of places to ‘drop anchor’.

Goodbye West End, Roatan.  We’ll be back

West End, Roatan, Bay Islands, Honduras