Utila Scuba Dunks

This is just a quick one…Back in our Utila post, we told you all about the fun we had diving and coming up with the materials to play underwater basketball. Well, our mate Joel has finished his editing work and come up with this awesome video!! We love it!

If you like it, you can check out his other work here: www.joelsharpe.com.

Honduras III – Becoming Divemasters in Utila

While the land based attractions at Utila were great, our main reason to go to there lay underwater! We wanted to spend a couple of months becoming Divemasters, the first of the professional scuba dive qualifications. They told us it would be the experience of a lifetime and it certainly was!

Divemaster is the first qualification that enables you to earn money diving, guiding groups or refreshing skills. The next step in training is to become an instructor, but as tempting as it was, the investment would have shortened our trip… or tempted us to stay in Utila for good.

We spent our first day in Utila visiting and getting a feel for all the diveshops and staff. Finally we decided to go with BICD for a combination of reasons including friendly and professional staff, big boats, neat premises, quality gear and some great added extras. Needless to say, we never once regretted that decision!

The first two weeks were full-on, covering all the theory work, exams and skills sessions while still loading and unloading boats and getting in our daily fun dives. Albert, the boat captain, also taught us plenty of knots and useful things. Somehow it felt like being back at uni, but having way more fun!

In general our days went a bit like this: 5.30am breakie, prepare boat, dive, unload boat, eat, watch World Cup games and then a mix of assisting in courses, completing milestones of the divemaster program and planning other fun things to do with our friends. Most days we were sleeping like babies by 9pm.

Turtles are the coolest!

DM in training milestone board

Once we finished the theory, the exciting stuff started! John gave us a workshop on hunting Lion Fish using spears (picture us practising killing onions and bottles underwater). Now many will say it’s not fair to spearfish using scuba gear (we totally agree); however Lion Fish are an invasive species in the Caribbean. As pretty as they may be, they are reproducing and eating the local reef fish at a rate of knots! So it’s become a popular sport amongst divers and, not only were we helping the reef, but we got to have ceviche with our catch!!

We also started to assist the instructors on courses, with tasks ranging from entertaining divers in training while waiting underwater, helping them to improve their buoyancy skills, playing dead/panicked/exhausted so someone could rescue us, to calming a panicked student who wasn’t sure she wanted to continue with the course. This was something that we both found really rewarding, we learnt heaps from the instructors and had loads of fun in the process!

Diving regularly around Utila, we got used to beautiful corals, and colourful reef fish, but occasionally we were visited by some bigger creatures like dolphins and whalesharks. The biggest fish in the world, the whale shark, swims past Utila on its way to Mexico and we were really excited when we found one on the way to a dive site. We jumped in the water with snorkels and were able to catch it on camera, it was a baby, just 3 metres long…but they can grow up to 18m (think the size of a bus). It was a real thrill and hopefully it won’t be our last encounter with the magnificent creatures.

We also got to do a “dry dive” in the local hyperbaric chamber so we can be tenders (the helper on the inside) in case of a real emergency. The chamber fits three people at a time and was slowly pressurised to a “depth” of 18m at which point we got a few minutes to muck around and see what it feels like (hot, dry and our voices went helium-high).

With a bit of motivation, anything is possible on Utila, so one day after a lot talking, we decided we wanted to play basketball and make the most of reduced gravity to try crazy dunks. After a few weeks collecting a bunch of materials, planning logistics and an afternoon to put it together in the workshop we were ready to play. With a nice sandy bottom, a ball filled with fresh water and the home-made hoop hanging from the anchor chain, it was pretty awesome!! Fellow DM and talented filmmaker Joel (www.joelsharpe.com) is working on putting together a dunk compilation, so stay tuned!

As a celebration for our 100th dive, tradition says that you have to dive nude. Joel, Skye, Ana, Xavi and I reached the milestone around the same time, so we decided to make it more fun and go for a group nude-dive. We jumped in clothed (for the sake of the others on the boat) and then stripped off behind some coral, for the hilarious 30min that ensued. We were really lucky to be diving in warm waters and not to run into any other unsuspecting divers, although a big octopus caught all our attention. The pictures are censored, but we came up with a commemorative postcard for the family album.

Our 15 minutes of fame came one day when a Eduardo, a Honduran TV presenter, came out diving with us as part of the Utila episode of TuristeandoHn, a program on tourism in Honduras. http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kDGsSnMxLpI– interview around 11:00 mins.

As we were finishing up the last requirements of the course, we were given an amazing opportunity to do a week internship at the dive resort next door. We assisted Divemaster Willie with his wonderful customers Pat & Jody and the incredible Pedro and Dave. Normally with four customers, 2 assisting DMs wouldn’t be necessary, but Dave & Pedro are both in wheelchairs so they needed some extra help under the water. Willie spotted lots of the harder to find species like frog fish and seahorses and the guys were amazing, inspiring and gave us so many laughs and excellent experience at the same time.

Finally, the last step in becoming a Divemaster is the infamous “snorkel test”. How they’re done differs from shop to shop and country to country, but ours involved donning a mask and specially adapted snorkel (complete with funnel attached to the top) and then waiting to see what lovely beverages or other items the instructors decided to inflict on us. We somewhat bravely decided to make this our last night in Utila before a 5am ferry to the mainland, and it was a night to remember.

Our time in Utila and the DM course left us with amazing memories, a great bunch of new mates and the confidence and qualifications to guide and help out other divers in and out of the water. Leaving was a really difficult decision, but there are many countries still waiting to be visited and we’ll go back there in the future for sure.

Next up, more tales to come from Nicaragua as we got back into the backpacking routine to continue our journey south.

Big hugs!
Xavi & Sal

Honduras II – Utila

After a couple of days visiting Copán Ruinas and its town, we woke up at 4am to face the most dangerous day of our trip thus far. Our goal was to make it to the island of Utila in a single day, trying our best to avoid the overnight stay in San Pedro Sula. San Pedro Sula, known for being one of the most dangerous cities on earth, is the second largest city in Honduras and a transport hub, being impossible to avoid when travelling around Honduras in public transport. Fights among cartels have raised the number of average homicides per day to 20, giving Honduras a really bad reputation. Only Arepo (Syria) has more murders per year…but they’re in the middle of a civil war!

The day couldn’t start worse, our 5am bus decided to cancel the trip because they got a better deal taking tourists to the ruins… so we had to act quickly and squeeze into a colectivo heading to the nearest town, where we were shuffled into another colectivo that took us to San Pedro Sula. The good news is that full colectivos run faster than buses and, despite the unplanned change of events, we made it to San Pedro just in time to take the bus to La Ceiba, a dodgy coastal town where the ferry to Utila departs from. The bus terminal in San Pedro felt unexpectedly safe, or as safe as you can feel with security guards carrying shotguns every 20m. and metal detectors and bag inspections conducted before entering the bus. Sorry we have no photos, but we didn’t want to show the cameras around!

10 hours after leaving Copán, we felt a great sense of accomplishment when we arrived to the ferry terminal in La Ceiba with 2 hours to spare, time that we used to watch the first game of the Soccer World Cup! We also managed to survive the ride on board of the “vomit comet” (the ferry), well known among tourists and locals alike for its choppy rides and giving nausea attacks.

One of the cayes near Utila.

Javi & Mònica, friends from Barcelona who arrived to Utila 4 years ago not knowing how to dive, are currently living there and working as instructors at Parrots Dive Centre. They received us with a beer in their hands and helped us with our first night accommodation and great advice on the diving courses. It actually took us a full day shopping around to choose a diving centre to undertake the Dive Master Program….but we will tell you all about the diving in the next post. For now, we’ll just say that Utila was our home for 2 unforgettable months and we were really, really tempted to stay there for longer. We wished we had visited this place before, who knows if we’d be working as instructors now instead of being Brand Managers!

Utila belongs to the Bay Islands, at the end of the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, the 2^nd largest in the world after the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. In brief, Utila was firstly inhabited by the Paya Indians, then Cristobal Colón did his horrible thing in the early 1500s. Spanish control was taken over by the English, Dutch and French buccaneers and pirates that dominated the Caribbean in the late 1600s; and in fact, it is said that the island featured in the Treasure Island book is 90% sure to be Utila. The famous Captain Morgan lost his booty from his raid in Panamá somewhere on the north side of Utila in 1671 and divers still keep an eye for it every time they dive.

Our Utila apartment rivalled Australia with local creepy crawlies

Sal found this little surprise on her towel (hanging on the rack – how did it get there?!) one night

We were adopted by a local cat who we think was pregnant, but maybe it was just part of her plan to make us let her in and help look after her.

 

Much to Sal’s delight, another trip milestone was reached here…goodbye beard!!

Nowadays, Utila is one of the cheapest places on earth to dive and is the place that certifies more divers in the world. A couple of Aussies created a hilarious youtube clip, “If you come to Utila”, that pretty much sums up everything about the island (although beware of the annoyingly catchy song). Parties are awesome and we were lucky enough to be there during the Carnival week, when we impersonated the different creatures from the sea and dominated the parade to the amusement of locals and fellow travellers.

Heather’s pirate boat was the best costume in the parade! Sal & I went as a lobster and poseidon :)

Another drunken tradition in Utila’s life are the bar challenges, where singlets are given out as reward for completing drinking challenges. So one night after a few beers, the Guifiti challenge at the Skid Row Bar seemed like a good idea… Guifiti is a pretty feral drink made from very very cheap rum, infused with 7 different herbs, woodchips etc. The challenge included 4 shots with challenges in between each one (including 5 laps of the pool table shirtless & without touching it). Needless to say, we earnt our Skid Row t-shirts!!

The evil guifiti

 

 

Treetanic Bar – Gaudi on drugs style, and considered one of the prettiest bars in the world according to Lonely Planet.

 

Crazy decoration at Treetanic

Rehab Bar, home to the best chicken wings in Utila!

 

Tranquila Bar home to Tequila Tuesdays – where you can get shots for 10 Lempiras (50cts)!

We also had many on island adventures, riding out to the local freshwater caves and the highest point of the island, Pumpkin Hill, at a whopping 74m high.

 

Goonies adventure!

Scary things are found in the caves

The group of friends we made there was amazing and we know that we will continue in touch with many of them. We especially want to thank John, the local divemaster at BICD, for showing us around the island and all the great times we had together. John you rock and we will be waiting for you in Barcelona or Sydney, our place is yours.

Joel, Skye, Ana, Tom, Chris, Holden, John and Eli were our dive masters in training buddies and we couldn’t have found a better team to enjoy our time in Utila. It wasn’t just diving, we just spent 2 months trying to have as much fun as possible and you guys made it possible.

Slip n slide off the dock…step 1 lay down something softish..

 

Step 2, secure the slippery sheet & Step 3…water + biodegradable soap!!

 

(Slip ‘n slide + slack line) x awesome friends = hours of fun

Finally the staff from the dive shop, Nick, Vanessa, Bec, Heather, Graeme, Fa, Chase, Pamela,Carrie, Adam, Willie, John again and the rest of the staff at the Bay Islands School of Diving (BICD); you guys make everything happen and we are extremely grateful for everything we learnt from you, such a bunch of great people and professionals!

Awkward family photo

 

How many friends can you fit in a hula?

We can’t wait to tell you about our amazing experiences during the Dive Master program but we will leave this for the 3rd and last post about Utila.

Stay tuned!