November 29, 2024
Today is our last day of diving and our last full day on Utila. We had arranged for Chover to pick us up verbally yesterday, instead of by texting through WhatsApp, so it made me a little nervous when he wasn’t as prompt as all of the other days. He was on his way though, and deposited us at Tank’d right at 7:30.
Mariam met us when we walked in and let us know that our gear was already set up on the boat. We were the last to arrive, and within a few minutes, we were on our way.
Captain George took us to The Maze, which is a pretty far boat ride up the west side of the island. We’d been there before in 2022 with Dewey, so we knew what to expect.
Today, in addition to Michael from Tegucigalpa, we had a US retiree named Sandra who lives on Utila. Mariam gave us our briefing, we got our BCDs on, and backward rolled off the side of the boat.
First stop was a cavern that was 77 feet down. It was pretty cool. I think I’ve been that far under the surface only once before, and the cavern was pretty dark, so I was glad I had my flashlight.
After we all looked around the cavern, we left that area to go to the swim through parts of The Maze, which were all a bit shallower.
We saw a green moray eel, lionfish, Black Durgons, lettuce slug, a tiny brittle star, about the size of the end of my pinky, parrotfish, and queen angelfish.
Back on board the boat, we had a snack of pineapple and waited out our surface interval. The second dive site was closer to Utila town and called Raggedy Cay.
We descended to about 20-25 feet initially and spent time on top of the reef looking for nudibranchs and other small creatures. From there we continued, descending to about 45 feet and saw all kinds of things!
First, we saw a baby trunkfish, which Mariam got really excited about. It was tiny, and trying to hide, but there it was. He was about the size of the end of my thumb, from the last knuckle to the nail, yellow with spots, but from a distance I couldn’t see his tail fin.
After that, we saw a spotted eagle ray swim past us and a couple barracuda. We also saw Black Durgons, a triggerfish, huge schools of blue fishes swimming around us, and the usual reef fishes. Both dives ended after 60 minutes, and I still had well over a 1,000 psi left in each tank.
We got back on the boat and made the quick boat trip back to the dive shop. Once at the dock, we unloaded the boat, cleaned up our gear, got our dive logs stamped, and said goodbye to Mariam, Michael, and Orlane.
We walked back to Purple Jawfish, but not before stopping at the grocery store for juice and souvenir coffee to take home. We also made a pit stop at a souvenir shop and I got a new T-shirt.
By the time we made it home, I was famished, so I set up the porch swing and fans, got the mosquito coil burning, while Nathan made our sandwiches.
We still have no internet, but we saw Angel on our walk home, and he said the house behind us was upgrading their router or service, so now it could provide wifi to 5 houses. The owner of the upgraded service came over to check on us and share the new password. I think the owner of our place was getting both frustrated with the speed at which the internet service provider was attending to his antenna, and also nervous we might leave a negative review (we didn’t), so it was nice to be able to talk directly with the neighbor so he could pass along the message that we were still chill.
Wifi in hand, I was able to check us into our flight, and we went out for our last snorkel of the trip. We saw a southern ray, a green eel, a spotted eel, a flounder, trunkfish, trumpetfish, a massive barracuda with huge teeth, and the usual parrot and angelfishes.
It was about 4:30 when we got out of the water, hung our gear out to dry, and quickly showered. We did a little bit of packing before dinner, rum drink in hand, before walking to Mister Buddha for more lionfish ceviche and sushi.
We ended the night with more packing. Tomorrow is an early morning and a long day of travel, so we prepped as well as we could, and attempted a good night of sleep.
