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Search for Darren Dawson on Yahoo for slideshow and long version of report
General: We took our first trip to Roatan on August 6-13, 2005 and stayed at Coco View Resort. CCV is a dedicated all-inclusive dive resort which can accommodate roughly 72 guests on-site. The resort was full the week we were there due to the presence of two rather large groups. While this did not cause problems with meals or crowding around the resort grounds, the dive boats were (over)crowded. We found the diving on Roatan to be very good, especially the walls, which were really colorful with abundant sponges and corals. The fish life was also healthy – lots of schools of small fish on many dives, though not great numbers of large fish. We used insect repellent with Deet throughout the week and experienced no problems with mosquitoes or no-see-ums.
Lodging/Dining: We stayed in an over-the-water cabana, which was a duplex, and found it to be very nice. It was air conditioned with two double beds and plenty of storage space. The bathroom was outfitted with shower, toilet and sink, and we were never short on hot water. Of course, the resort had standard Central American plumbing (no flushing of toilet paper) and the tap water is not potable. A large jug of drinking water was provided in the room. Our balcony was furnished with a hammock and Adirondack chair and offered a beautiful
view.
Maid service was provided daily and towels were replenished each day. Guest rooms do not have televisions or phones, which was fine with us. The electrical outlets in the room took standard US plugs. The grounds were nicely maintained and ample sitting areas were located around the resort. The main building contained the office and gift shop in addition to the dining area. The dining room was cooled with ceiling fans and not air conditioned, so it did get hot at times. Phone calls to the US can be made from a phone in the office at the rate of $1 per minute. This was nice for checking in on the children during the week. The food here was average, but certainly acceptable considering CCV’s relatively low price. All meals are served buffet style. Breakfast was actually quite good – with hot meats and made-to-order omelettes, pancakes, waffles, etc. as well as cold cereals and bagels. We both thought the coffee was awful, though. Lunches and dinners ranged from below average to good, though a few meals were actually quite good. For some of the meals there were very limited choices, particularly with regard to side dishes, and the desserts were not fancy (cakes tasted like they were made from box mixes, but a knowledgeable source told me they were homemade). Fresh fruit was usually available at breakfast and lunch (bananas, watermelon). On Friday night we were served surf and turf, which was excellent. Also, there was a free rum punch party in the bar/recreation area after dinner with live music and dancing. You can purchase sodas from the bar in the dining area, and you can get sodas and a limited variety of snacks from a small on-site store called The Trading Post.
Diving: The resort has 4 large dive boats, which we found to be the best boats we have ever been on. Divers could enter the water two at a time from the back of the boat or from either of two side entries. The boats are covered in the front, open in the back. All boats had mask rinse buckets and nice large, clean camera rinse tanks. Upon arrival, you are assigned a boat for the week and your gear is set up on the same spot on the boat all week long. The gear rooms are spacious and well designed. They are walk-through garage-style rooms with one end open to the dock by your boat and the other end open to rinse tanks and drying racks facing the back of the main resort building. There are large rinse tanks on both sides of the gear rooms and camera rinse tanks on the resort-side. The dive schedule includes two boat dives per day, one in the morning just after breakfast and one in the afternoon right after lunch. The boat rides to the sites tend to be 5 to 25 minutes, though most are in the 10-minute range. Following each boat dive, you have an option to do a drop-off dive along one of the two walls on either side of the boat channel or on the Prince Albert wreck in the channel. You can also do shore dives any time of the day or night, conditions permitting. Tanks are stored in the gear room area, and you need to suit up there, then walk around the main building to the shore dive entry site.
There is a relatively smooth entry channel from shore, where you walk out to a wooden platform where you can don your fins and mask before swimming out to the wreck or the walls. We joked that the CCV video which describes the shore diving as “a few fin kicks away” needs to be modified to “a few HUNDRED fin kicks away” as it is definitely a bit of a swim out to the walls and the wreck. While the gear set-up and the boats were really well-designed, we thought that there were too many people on each boat. We regularly had 14-16 people on board following one DM. While this was not too much of a problem for many dives, where we just followed behind the group at our own pace, this was a real issue when the DM found creatures like seahorses and everyone piled on top of each other trying to look or get a photo, or at sites like Calvin’s Crack and Mary’s Place where everyone has to go through a portion of the dive single-file. |
Where else diving |
East End of Grand Cayman, Little Cayman, the Bahamas, Belize, Bonaire, Cozumel, the Kona coast of Hawaii, Utila, and Dominica |