Overview

This was our second trip to CoCo View Resort. We enjoyed our first trip so much, we just had to go back! For a look at our first trip, be sure to take a look at my post about it.

Roatan is a unique place. The reef structure and marine life varies depending on where you’re diving on the island. It can be separated into four areas: the west end, the north shore, the east end, and the south shore. CoCo View typically only goes to sites located on the south shore—though special trips can be arranged that go out to the east end.

map of roatan showing ccv

Dive Operator & Experience

CoCo View Resort is still one of my favorite places to go diving. Everything about the resort is set up to be awesome for divers. The staff and dive crews are all the best of the best.

CoCo View is unique in that they offer divers a “swim-home” with every boat trip. What they do is after your dive, as they get close to the resort, they will drop you off at one of the two walls that makes the channel in front of the resort, and you swim back to the resort, and return from the shore in their front yard. I don’t know of any other place that offers this and it is such fun! After every dive out on the reef, we’d swap over to a fresh tank, and hop in the water just offshore. We saw lots of awesome stuff on almost every swim back. There is no time limit to get home, it’s just you and your buddy, and you take as long as your air lasts. Boat dives are limited to 60 minutes bottom time, but Becca and I were hitting 75 minute times on our swim home dives.

Dive Sites & Conditions

Conditions underwater were pretty good. Visibility ranged from about 25 feet out front of the resort in the channel, to about 100 feet out on the reefs. The reefs themselves are showing signs of degradation from a combination of SCTLD (stoney coral tissue loss disease), bleaching, and surface runoff from all the new development happening on the island. These issues are not unique to Roatan though. Unfortunately all of the Caribbean is facing similar issues with the reef health. Despite these challenges though, all the sites were still very “fishy”, with lots of life in all levels of the water-column, which you can see for yourself in the Photos & Videos section below.

Here’s a map of all the places we have dived on Roatan:

map of roatan dive sites

  1. Saturday:
    • no diving
  2. Sunday:
    • CCV Front Yard
    • Anka’s Place
    • CCV Wall
  3. Monday:
    • Wreck of the Mister Budd
    • Newman’s Wall
    • Forty Foot Point
    • CCV Wall
  4. Tuesday:
    • Patty’s Paradise
    • Newman’s Wall
    • Osman’s Reef
  5. Wednesday:
    • Calvin’s Crack
    • Newman’s Wall
    • Minagerhea’s Reef
    • CCV Wall
  6. Thursday:
    • Mary’s Place
    • Newman’s Wall
    • Gold Chain Reef
    • CCV Wall
  7. Friday:
    • French Cay Bank
    • Newman’s Wall

CoCo View has some artisticly drawn maps of the sites that I wanted to share as well.

Dive Log

Sunday — Day 1

Our diving began on Sunday morning. Since we’d already been to CoCo View before, we didn’t have to do the “orientation dive”. Instead, we went out shortly after the new guests who were doing the orientation dive, and got ourselves sorted out. We then explored the house reef, called “The Front Yard”. This was a shore dive, where we entered right next to the mail clubhouse, then after walking out a bit, submerged, and swam out to the channel where the two walls and main reef are located. The coral immediately in front of CCV—near the wreck—is in rough shape. Fortunately, once you swim a bit along the wall, the coral is more intact and healthier.

After the morning shore dive, we joined the rest of the folks we’d be diving with for the week on “our” boat, Coco II (aka the blue boat). We greeted our divemaster and guide, Ruben, and our captain Marcos. This was our second time diving with them, and it was awesome seeing them again. We went to Anka’s Place. This was a nice reef with a wall, though I don’t recall anything especially unique to the site. The water was a bit hazy. Then on the way home, we got dropped off at the start of the CoCo View Wall and swam it’s length back to the front yard to exit and return to the resort.

Monday — Day 2

Day two started with a dive on a really nice site. It’s called the wreck of the Mr. Budd, but the site has some really nice reef as well as the wreck. The wreck sits in a flat basin where there is some good muck-diving over the sandy bottom. The wreck itself is smallish and has easy access to the interior. The wreck is right at the reef’s edge, so after you’ve explored the wreck, you can then travel along the wall and see the rest of the reef. We saw several groupers, and lots of the regular reef fish. We did the swim home on Newman’s wall this time. I prefer Newman’s wall, it gets better light, and the top of the wall is a bit deeper than CoCo View Wall so it’s a little easier to swim along the top and see the more interesting reef life up there. The afternoon dive was at a site called Forty Foot point

Tuesday — Day 3

Day three of diving started with a dive at Patty’s Paradise. On this dive we saw three bearded toad fish! Most remarkable was that the toad fish we found on the wall actually swam out from the wall, into open water, towards Becca (she got some great video of this)! I’ve never seen any other video or read any reports of a toad fish free-swimming like that. It was amazing! That was followed by a swim-home on Newman’s Wall. In the afternoon we went to Osman’s Reef. We skipped the afternoon swim home dive because we were considering a night dive at the Front Yard. We ended up being too tired though and just relaxed the rest of the day.

Wednesday — Day 4

Wednesday morning we hit what may be my favorite site, Calvin’s Crack. The reef is very nice, and the wall has a lot of interesting plate corals and some cool overhangs. The most interesting part is the reef’s namesake—a large crack in the reef formed during an earthquake. This makes for a dramatic swim-through with lots of beautiful light patterns formed by the sunlight coming in through the opening of the crack above. Our afternoon dive was at Minagerhea’s Reef (pronounced like menagerie) and the site lives up to its name. There were absolute tons of schooling fish here. Massive schools—almost shoals—of sergeant majors and creole wrasse. Big schools of Bermuda and brassy chub near the boat. All of that was not to be outdone by tornados of spade fish circling around us on our safety stop.

Thursday — Day 5

We got an extra early start on Thursday and went to possibly my second-favorite site, Mary’s Place. This site also has a cool swim-through with another large crack in the reef. This one may actually be larger than Calvin’s Crack. I don’t find the swim-through to be quite as dramatic as Calvin’s, but it’s still a lot of fun. There is a second “branch” to the crack in this site and I didn’t know it at the time, but this second crack ends up at a dead-end. It seems too tight to turn around, so I found a small opening in the reef above me, and I carefully exited through that. It was just large enough for me to fit without hitting anything on the way up. The swim-home after this morning dive was again Newman’s wall.

Our afternoon dive was at Gold Chain Reef. This spot had been named for the predominant colors of the corals here. This used to be my absolute favorite site because the top of the reef was absolutely covered in lettuce, yellow pencil, stag-horn, and elk-horn corals. Unfortunately, this time it looked like much of that coral had died. I would estimate that 75% of the lettuce coral was dead and covered in algae. I didn’t see any live stag-horn corals at all, only one live clump of bright-yellow yellow pencil coral, and one solitary elk-horn—shining like a beacon of what once was. It was especially hard to see how much this site had degraded in just the year-and-a-half since we had last been there. Gold chain was still very fishy, with lots of parrot fish, blue tang, mixed with doctor and surgeon fish, and more spade fish and chub near the boat at the end of our dive. Our swim-home dive was on CoCo View Wall, which isn’t my favorite, but it was still a nice, long dive.

Friday — Day 6

This was our last dive day of the trip. We only had two morning dives, as we needed the rest of the day to off-gas before our flight home. We had a really interesting dive this day. We started the dive at a site called French Cay Bank, but instead of circling around and returning to the boat, we swam on to another dive site where the boat had repositioned to a new mooring ball. I’d never done a dive like this in Roatan, and it was quite fun! We saw some stingrays and a turtle off in the distance, and a big green moray eel. There wasn’t any one thing that was especially unique on the dive, but the chance to swim so far and see a larger section of the reef was really cool. I hope we can do that again our next time here.

The final swim-home dive was again on Newman’s wall. Becca and I really stretched this one out, staying shallow (about 30-35 feet) and going slow. We saw lots of great life on the wall. There were several moray—one of which came down on me while I was filming another moray, and Becca thought it was going to bite my head it got so close (you can see this in my video below). Then immediate after the moray encounter, a spotted eagle ray swam past us heading out as we were heading in. This was also our longest dive we’ve ever done at one hour and seventeen minutes.

Photos & Videos

Here are a bunch of photos from the trip.