Bay Islands of Honduras

I met up with the others in La Ceiba and we caught the ferry over the next morning.  It was a rough ride across so we were glad to get there.

Meeting up with the lads in La Ceiba.

We’d booked a hotel room a few minutes walk from the pier and found it to be a great little place – it had a cool bar/restaurant and even a pool!  We went to suss out the diving and Earner and I signed up to do the two-day Advanced Open Water course with Utila Dive Centre, while Poff and Jeffers went and did a few dives with another outfit.

    
The local beach.                                    A favourite haunt – the tree-house bar.

New Year’s Eve was a lot of fun and we went back to one of our favourite places – a bar over the water – for a huge dance party.  It was a great night!  We rolled into bed about 4am and Jeffers didn’t show up until mid-morning.

On New Year’s Day we rented a Hobiecat catamaran, loaded up on some beers and got sailing.  We roared downwind along the full length of the island to a group of smaller islands where we planned to chill out for a few hours before sailing back.  That’s where it all went horribly wrong: a few hours before sunset we decided to start heading back up the island, and we found that – with a centreboard – the catamaran couldn’t sail upwind at all!  We started drifting away from the island, and the only way we could get back to the island was for three of us to swim along dragging the boat through the water!  Eventually we needed to get towed back to where we started (a story in itself) and arrived back well after dark, greeted by the irate owners of the boat.

Myself, Poff and Earner on our ill-fated catamaran trip, just before it all went to shit.