My Equator Adventure: Utila, the island that stole my heart

April 18-26, 2016

Writing about Utila just won't do it justice. I fell in love with the island and the people there. I had to pry myself off of it with a crowbar, after staying twice as long as I had intended. I'll say what I can though, and you get to imagine this post busting with love for the island community.

Getting to Utila involved a ferry ride from the mainland. I was on the Utila Princess.

This was how I felt about it. Like WA ferries, but everything shoved into a smaller space. And then when we hit the first wave outside the harbor, everyone SCREAMED! Most people calmed down after about 15 minutes, but one kid positively shrieked every time we went over anything not flat. I was less than amused.

Once on Utila I settled into my dive shop hostel room, and explored the island. Which meant exploring the one long main street that runs the length of the bay. Its very much a diving island, known for good diving with very cheap prices, and it was reflected everywhere in the artwork adorning the walls.

Fences were white, houses were small, and the little sidewalk-less road usually hosted about three lanes of go-cart and motorcycle traffic. I thought I was gonna die...

Public beach down at the end of the road

My dive shop there, Captain Morgans, I can´t say enough nice things about. The attached hostel was so-so, some good things some bad things, but the diving was fantastic.

I got my PADI Advanced Open Water certification, having gotten the Open Water in Taganga, Colombia back in September. It was just me and one other gal in my course with our instructor Caco, who did an excellent job running the course. It was laid back and fun, but still covered everything we needed to know.

Everyone else on the dive boat each day was also fantastic. The other dive masters, dive masters in training, and instructors were fun and friendly and it felt more like a bunch of friends going out to dive, rather than a bunch of guides taking clients out. Not that the quality of service was any less.

I liked the dive boat too, while going out to the dive sites or during the surface interval between dives, we got to sit on the roof and lounge around in the sun.

Utila is known for whale shark sightings, between March-May it´s more common to see them as they migrate along the coast. I unfortunatly didn´t get to see any this time, but between dives one day our Captain Luis did spot dolphins. So we headed towards them, and I got to snorkel with dolphins. It was so cool.

The pod had about 10 big bottlenose dolphins, and they didn´t exactly come play with us, but they weren´t too far away either. Their squeaks and clicks were clearly audible underwater, and one stopped a bit in front of me and faced directly towards me before clicking. I totally got echolocated! Another one did the SeaWorld jumping thing, and I watched him swim really fast underwater towards the surface and then lifted my head out of the water to see the aerial part. Luis drove the boat in a circle around our group, and I watched a couple playing in the bow wake from the underwater POV. While whale sharks would have been awesome too, wild dolphins were a close second.

Heyo! Rocking the socks and wetsuit look.

Stephanie, Jack, and Cassio

Once I finished my course, I stuck around for more days of fun diving. I did a couple night dives, which meant we were leaving the dock as sunset was spreading across the sky.

David in the neon waiting with divers for the boat to head out

Our course completion photos. Me, Aimee, and Caco

Diving the Halliburton wreck on my birthday

Other than diving, there was a lot of hammock relaxing that happened. One day I saw the weekly beach cleanup was happening, and thought that sounded like fun. I hopped in the back of a pickup with a bunch of gals from the whale shark research center on the island, and we drove to a beach on the other side. It is one that is known for sea turtles nesting on it, and they wanted to clean it up a little before they started arriving in a couple weeks.

We were greeted by this sight, and I was apalled.

On the Pacific side, ocean currents take the trash out to sea, where the big trash raft the size of Texas is. On the Caribbean side, it all gets floated back to the beaches.

There were tons of plastic bottles and bottle caps, shoes, flip flops, razors, miscelaneous car parts, lots of styrofoam, tooth brushes, those indiscriminate plastic bits that have been in UV so long they just disintigrate when you touch them, and more plastic silverware than I care to think about. Not as many knives, but forks and spoons in all sizes and colors. I am henceforth making a concious effort to not use plastic silverware if I can at all avoid it. It was disgusting how much of it was on the beach.

Down where there wasn´t a trash tide-line, you could see how pretty a beach it was.

With just 10 of us and 2 hours working we picked up this much trash. And that was mostly the big easy stuff to get. We definitely didn´t leave the beach ´clean´ just cleaner. It felt good to get out and do something, however small, to make the world a little cleaner.

I celebrated my 25th birthday on the island. I had my favorite day of diving, (shoutout to David who was the best dive buddy!) and a nice quiet dinner looking at the ocean. Then I went out with friends from the dive shop, and the night started with a birthday bottle of champagne with a sparkler in it at the bar next door. I had a great night dancing the night away with friends, and ended up going to bed about 4:30am. The next day included a bunch of naps.

There really aren´t words to say how great all the people at Captain Morgan`s were. Even more than the great dive sites and visibility, they made my diving so much fun. And I didn´t manage to get pictures with them all either, so easy to forget. The ones I did I will cherish, and the memories will last a lifetime. And I´ll be doing my best to get back there again sometime.