When the alarm went off at 4am we got right up, excited for the trip ahead. The limo picked us up right at 5am for our 6:30 flight. In Houston we claimed our baggage in order to manually check it in with our second airline, Taca, since we had been told that it would likely not arrive on time otherwise. "George Bush International" airport turned out to be quite an experience. The "people mover" to get from one terminal to the other had only three cars, each one about 4 feet wide and 10 feet long. A couple of people and some suitcases and the whole thing was full. Hmmm, maybe they forgot that people would have luggage when using it? Our second flight took us directly to the island of Roatan, off the coast of Honduras. It's a small island, about 36 miles long and 1.5 miles wide. Osmond from Aggressor was there to greet all of us that were headed to the boat. After getting through the chaos of the airport we boarded a small bus which took us to the boat. The Bay Islands Aggressor is a 120 foot ship with ten cabins. We had one of the two on the upper deck, it was good sized with a king sized bed, rare for a liveaboard.

As the evening progressed more and more of our fellow divers showed up and we tried to remember names. We discovered that we were supposed to bring our own alcohol, which we hadn't known. The captain offered that one of the crew could take Randy into town to get some. The ride to town was interesting, it's not often that an armed guard at a traffic stop asks you to step out of the vehicle for a moment so he can see if you are smuggling guns(!). Afterwards we stopped at a gas station and picked up a bottle of vodka, then back through the checkpoint, this time without any stopping. Back on board we went to sleep around 10pm, ready for the first day of diving.

Sunday

The boat left port at about 5am, heading to Taviana Wall for our first dive. After a dive briefing, we put on our gear and jumped into the water. We decided to do the first dive without cameras in order to do a weight check and scope out the surroundings. The visibility was good and we saw lots of fish. On the second dive we took cameras, Randy with the Coolpix 5000 and Rick with our new Minolta Dimage Xt in it's own mini-housing. Rick was soon snapping away (and he said he wasn't into taking pictures underwater!). We saw a six foot long moray eel that was swimming around. It was huge! We took pictures for a while as it sat on the bottom, then it swam away along the bottom.

A Sea Pearl

During lunch the boat moved to Dan's Wall, which would be our dive site for the rest of the day. As we went down Randy was having trouble with pressure in his head from the congestion he still had from last weeks cold, so we ended up cutting the dive short. Before we surfaced we did get to see a good variety of fish, and the visibility was quite good, 50 to 60 feet. Back on the boat Randy took some Sudafed to clear up the congestion, and we decided to sit out the fourth dive and take a nap. The sunset was pretty amazing, the clouds lit up all around us in a bright pink color, with some orange thrown in. As we watched the colors kept changing, highlighting different patterns in the clouds. We had a good chicken dinner with cocoanut pie afterwards, talking diving with the other passengers.

At 7:30 the dive deck opened again and we suited up for our first night dive of the trip. The Sudafed had worked it's magic, so Randy had no trouble descending this time. We scouted around near the mooring line for a bit, then Rick spotted a small octopus! Just what he had been looking for. We watched him for a while as he slithered around and changed colors, very fun to see. Nearby was a large lobster that was backing under some coral to get away from us. We saw a number of other fish as we swam around the darkness, night dives are very surreal.