Roatan: Open Water Diving Certification

Well we are officially Open water diver certified!!

After having to postpone our last planned trip to Honduras due to Hurricane Felix, we finally made our way to Roatan last Saturday to get our PADI open water certificate. Due to some childhood problems with my ears, I was unsure as to whether or not I would be able to equalize under water, however I was thrilled to discover that I could do so quite easily in the end.

We started our trip off with a night in Rio Dulce sleeping on the deck of a huge Catamaran owned by our good friend Babette (she runs the Sundog - which is our ¨local¨ here in Rio Dulce). It was a beautiful night and a great beginning to our week off.

After a series of bus and a ferry rides, we hit Roatan and started our course the day after we arrived.

We began the course with two Dutch girls, one unfortunately became too nervous to continue, and the second became sick and couldn´t continue beyond the second day. Sad for them, but great for Doug and I as we had private diving classes the last two (and most important) days. Due to the weather we did the course in a different order then usual with a full day of theory...(all textbook and videos) on day one, followed by some shallow water training (getting comfortable breathing under water, what to do if you lose your mask or regulator, running out of oxygen etc.).

It wasn´t until the third day that we actually got onto a boat and did our first deep water dive. Admittedly I was a bit worried that I had done all the training for nothing, (not to mention both of us acing our exams) and physically would not be able to descend. Thankfully that was not the case and although I took things slowly, I was able to equalize my ears with minimal discomfort.

The four dives we did were wonderful and we both agree that we are completely hooked on scuba diving! We saw some wonderful marine life (hundreds of species of fish, turtles, crabs, lobsters, etc) ..and I even had the fun experience of having my hand stung by fire coral. I guess I brushed a little too close for comfort, because all of the sudden I felt a seething pain in my hand as I watched a long line slowly swell across my fingers and down toward my wrist. I am very proud of myself however as I didn´t panic, but simply got our instructors attention and showed him my rapidly swelling hand. He took one look, pointed to some coral, I motioned yes, he asked if I was OK (one of the many hand signals you learn) and we all happily continued on with the dive. My hand stung for many hours after and I still have a long red line where it made contact, however all was fine and I now have a cool little entry in my log book of my first (and hopefully only) diving mishap.

All up a fantastic trip. Its certainly getting harder to come back to Rio Dulce as we are very keen to start seeing more and more.

Here are some snaps of the trip.


If you can´t see the above gallery, check out the link here - Our trip to Roatan