Roatan Anthony's Key AKR Report

Ok – it has been a week since we returned from AKR (Anthony’s Key Resort) on Roatan and I’m still thinking . . . wow . . . that was the best vacation ever! Here’s the details for anyone pondering visiting AKR or Roatan. I shall apologize right up front – this will be L....O.... N.....G!

Part 1 of 4:

We flew direct from Miami to Roatan on TACA (we live in the Tampa Bay area so we took a Continental “mini” flight from Tampa to Miami). We were worried about all of the reports of lost luggage so we reclaimed our luggage in Miami and proceeded to the TACA counter – this was a very long walk – word to the wise – there are “people movers” moving sidewalks on the 3rd floor but it is still a long way from Airside G to Airside A! The TACA ticket counter was very busy and I really regretted not knowing the Spanish language because people were speaking Spanish everywhere! We waited in line to get our boarding passes (30 minutes) and then we were told to enter a different line with our luggage to go through the Xray – this lasted 60 minutes because they were calling people with a flight that left 10 minutes before ours to the front of the line – by the time we had been “cut” by approximately 50 bags I was kind of fuming but hubby reminded me that we were on vacation and fed me Twizzlers to calm me down! Finally a security woman, who had just come on shift, saw us and took our bags before she found out that the other flight was supposed to go first! We still had an hour before our flight so we made it to the gate just fine (we had a 3 hour layover). Even though this was a bit of a pain I was glad to feel the relief of being “pretty sure” that our bags would arrive with us.

The TACA flight to Roatan was nice – very brand new plane – and oh by the way – free alcoholic drinks for anyone who’s interested! We landed at the airport and the weather was beautiful. Oh – I did follow the advice of others on this board – I lathered on the Cactus Juice before I got off the plane. I didn’t see any bugs though – but maybe thats why they’re called “No-see-ums”? We were toward the back of the plane so we were in line outside for a while so sunblock and sunglasses is a good idea. I saw Eduardo from AKR with an AKR sign and a big smile so that made us feel welcome right away. He collected our bags while we went throught the entry procedure – no big deal – showed the passports, handed them the papers that TACA had given to us on the plane and then we met up with Eduardo on the other side. He told us to confirm that he had our bags and then we put them on the xray machine. He then led us to the AKR bus which already had around 16 people on it. Our luggage followed in some other vehicle. Once we arrived at the resort they told all of us to go upstairs to the “front office” area where they served us drinks – either virgin or alcohol – I forget the name but it was yummy. Yolanda then talked to us about what to expect for the week, gave us our keys, and we filled in some forms. We were given (ok – paid for) Bungalow #17 (with A/C) – at first I was disappointed that it was not on the oceanside of the key but by the end of the week I loved the location. We were right across from the museum and the dolphin show area – facing East. The sunrise in the mornings was beautiful – 5:30am though so good thing we stayed on “Florida time” – 2 hours later. The walk from the taxi was rather short so that was nice too. We shared a covered patio with 2 hammocks with two other bungalows but we never saw anyone until the 2nd to last day so it felt like the hammocks belonged to us! Next time we would probably request #18 because it was by itself with its own patio/hammocks. A couple we got to know were in #30 which was at the very end of the key way out over the water all by itself so that one seemed cool too – just a longer walk. The resort deliverd our bags right to our room (unfortunately I had put all of our cash in the safety deposit box at the front desk – per their recommendation – so I didn’t have any cash to tip the guys – so some advice – keep out some cash to tip the guys – they work VERY hard) When we left they picked up our bags at our room and delivered them to us at the aiport so we tipped them at the airport.

We arrived on a Sunday so at 6:00pm we went to the SCUBA school for a “fish ID” seminar. This is highly recommended – the instructor Gary showed us tons of fish at all age levels and gave us good tips about what to look for – we were starving but it was well worth the time – lasted about an hour and 15 minutes. So we went straight to dinner around 7:15pm.


see part 2 if you are not tired of reading . . . :11ztongue

Part 2 of 4:

Dinner in the dining room suprised us a little – I misread the brochure and thought that every dinner would be a buffet AND a choice of 2 entrees – woops – its actually just a choice of 2 entrees. There was a rib/bbq buffet dinner on the key Wednesday night but the rest of the nights were “buffetless”. That worked out fine though because the entrees were quite good and the waiters were quite happy to bring extra food or little additions. We didn’t sit in a specific section so we kind of got to meet all of the waiters (so I left a nice tip to be shared by all of the waiters at the end of the week). Some people seemed to sit at the same tables every meal so they got to know their waiters very well. Just for the curious – here is a recap of some of the dinner offerings:

Grouper or Beef Medallions
Chicken Parmesan or Shrimp
Tbone or Salmon
Rib BBQ on the key (everyone loved the Ribs)
Pork Medallions or fish (forget which kind)
Beef Kabobs or Calimari
Pork Chops or Red Snapper

Lunch offerings:

Burgers
Cold cuts
Mexican buffet (yum)
BBQ buffet on the key (double yum)
Po Boys or chef salad – ask for a roll and you can make a turkey, ham, and cheese sandwhich out of the chef salad!


Breakfast – same every day – pancakes, french toast, omelettes, etc – all very good and plentiful – only disappointment was that the cereals tasted stale (probably becaus of the humidity) but I discovered that they’ll make french toast with wheat bread if you ask and it was delicious!

OK – I haven’t even gotten to the diving yet and this is already long! Hope that is a good thing?


The DIVING:

We were told to be at the dock by 7:45am the first day so we could find our boat, get weights, etc. We were assigned to the “Andrea” with Tyrone as our captain and Ricardo as our dive master – great guys who really made the week wonderful. There were 13 people assigned to our boat which is a good number – there was just enough room to gear up without elbowing the person next to you. I must say – we met the nicest 11 people that we could have ever hoped to dive with! There was a couple from Spain who spoke just a little English but we all managed to communicate with them which was fun. Everyone else was from the U.S. – mainly the east coast but one couple was from California (lucky ducks were booked for two weeks at AKR!). We picked our spots on the boat and set up our gear and then jumped in the water behind the boat to do a “checkout” dive. Ricardo just watched us each flood and clear our mask and then remove our regulator and then breathe again. He also checked our boyancy out – that was not too accurate since we were only in 12-15ft of water so everyone thought they were underweighted – but they guys were more than happy to give everyone a little extra. I only set up my gear in the mornings – all the other times Ricardo set it up for me. Now I am perfectly capable and proud that I can handle my own gear but Ricardo seemed to always beat me to it! After each dive he would have my gear removed from the tank before I was even dried off – then when he would bring the freshly filled tank back on board he set it up before we even reboarded – so after the first couple of days I finally decided just to enjoy Ricardo’s pampering and it was rather nice. I did of course give him a nice tip (which is probably why he targets us ladies – good tippers). We were very pleased with both Tyrone and Ricardo – they seemed to enjoy their jobs and were fun to converse with on the water and on land. For our two night dives we had different divemasters: Lucas and Dennis. The divemasters take turns doing the nightdives – and sometimes they combine some of the boats to one boat so not as many go out. If anyone out there is afraid of night dives and skips them – PLEASE DON’T! The AKR night dives are only in 30-35ft of water and everyone has flashlights so its really not scary and it is an opportunity to see so many creatures that you wouldn’t normally see!

Part 3 of 4:

OK - I will resist writing about all 20 dives but here are the highlights:

Mandy’s Eel Garden – spotted eel, queen angels, fireworm, flounders, and a crab trying to get into a mussel!

Odyssey – 330 ft wreck – lots of cool holes to go through and take pictures through.

Overheat Reef – NIGHT DIVE – LOVED IT! – we saw 4 or 5 octopus, 2 huge crabs, a toadfish (Rare to see but the DM Lucas found it!) also saw cuttlefish, slipper lobster, spiny lobster, banded coral shrimp, and lots of sleeping parrot fish – kind of creepy because they look dead and they’re covered in mucus – very glad the fish ID seminar taught us not to shine our lights on them because they might think it is daylight and come out of their protection.

Mary’s Place and Pablo’s Place – we did these as a 2 tanker – lots of georgeous corals but it seemed like the Northern dive spots had more fish – did see a big school of Dogsnappers. After the first dive (Mary’s Place) we spent our surface interval motoring around Cocoview and Fantasy Island – we even tied up to Fantasy Island’s dock and used their restrooms. Both resorts seemed nice with their own pros and cons – the bungalows at Cocoview seemed like the ones at AKR. Fantasy Island seemed more like a regular hotel – and they were working on another building – but they have a really nice looking beach.

Melissa’s Reef – huge green moray eel around 95 ft down – and a turtle who seemed like he enjoyed posing for pictures.

Overheat Reef at daytime – spotted eagle ray! 2 turtles, and the bigeest midnight parrotfish I’ve ever seen!

Bear’s Den – we loved this sight – fun crack down to 60 ft – lots of fish – and at the end of the dive we did a mega long safety stop because there is tons to see at just 15 feet! Saw a neat fish called a “houndfish” its kind of like a Barracuda but with a pointy nose – he was right at the surface eating some fish from Tyrone (our captain).

Aguila – 230 ft wreck – went through the stern – rather small hole but everyone fit – we saw the resident green moray who quickly left the scene – guess he was sick of visitors – also saw a large group of 6-7 big groupers. Oh yeah – also some some huge parrot fish that were light blue and looked like they had rearended somthing – their faces were smooshed in – I thought it was just one deformed one but then there were 3 or 4 more so it was definately a characteristic of whatever type of parrotfish they were.

Overheat Reef (again – last day – “divers choice”) – Ricardo (our DM) found a rather large (7 inches?) orange seahorse! Also found a small turtle who let me swim around with him – so fun!

These are just the sites where we saw “big stuff” - each and every site had tons of tropicals – lots of juveniles – and may small things that Roatanman keeps telling us to SLOW DOWN and look for – like banded coral shrimp, cleaning stations, gobies, tiny drums, nudibranchs, anemones, and all sorts of other stuff that I didn’t know the names to but were really neat to look at. I think my favorites were the Sharpnosed Puffers – these little guys were only a couple of inches long and they have the coolest shape and color – we seemed to find them on almost every dive. We also enjoyed the yellowtail snapper schools that became our dive buddies on almost every dive – it was neat to dive along and look over at them just swimming along with us!

Most of the dives were “stationary dives” with 2-3 of them being drift dives – not too swift of a current (nothing near as fast as Cozumel!) All of the sights were very close - the only long one was “Mary’s Place” which only took 45 minutes so really not long at all! AKR has some great fast boats so that helps to make the trips quick – just hang on for the way home – Tyrone liked to “open up” the engine on the way home! After the dives they had two dunk tanks to rinse the gear and a gear room with lots of hooks to leave the gear – we did bring our regulators and camera back to the bungalow with us – just to “be safe”.


Oh yeah – one more dive site to mention – the DC3 in the lagoon – aka the channel dive – DO NOT do this dive unless the visibility is perfect – our divemaster warned us that the viz would be terrible but we did it anyway – all I can say is it was a “braille dive”. It was neat to see a plane down there – just the fusilage – the wings are somewhere else in the channel. We did see a couple of shrimp and some crabs but otherwise it was just a lot of brown fuzziness! In order to do the channel night dive you have to sign up on Monday, Wednesday, or Friday – they’ll hook you up with tanks and give you a ride over the the bouy that is attached to the plane (close to the dolphins). The plane is around 30ft deep. After checking the plane out you have to swim back to the dock – compass skills are handy in this situation – we ended up just swimming at the surface because we couldn’t see one foot in front of ourselves anyway! On a good day this would probably be a good dive – at least we tried it though – and it was just hubby, me, and 2 girls from our diveboat so it was kind of a fun “bonding” dive.

Part 4 of 4:

This was our first trip with a camera – a 35mm Sea & Sea MX10 – we loved it! We had most of our rolls developed through the resort – 50 cents per print – they sent the rolls into town in the morning and the pictures came back in the afternoon. The developing was fine for us since we’re newbies but we did notice that the rolls we had developed back in the states had better color quality and the negatives were cut better in the U.S. – looks like they cut the negatives by hand on Roatan. But it was great for us to see the pictures as the week progressed so we could see how we were doing. We’re quite pleased with our results – once I scan some of them I’ll figure out how to post pictures on ScubaBoard!

Ok – I’ve covered the resort, the food, the diving – oh yeah – THE DOLPHINS!!!!!!! We were maxing out our budget just to go on this dream trip so we did not spring for the dolphin dive, snorkel or encounter – but we found out that you can interact with the dolphins just by hanging out at their key (Bailey’s Key). We took the taxi over there one day around 4pm and ended up staying for almost 2 hours! We watched the trainers feeing the dophins and then all of the trainers left in a boat and it was just us and one other couple on the dock. The couple were newlyweds from NY and they had been doing “dolphin stuff” all week so they taught us to tap the water and touch the dolphins’ noses when they came over. The dolphins seemed to love just being petted. They also liked to play “fetch” with sea grass. They would bring up a blade of grass and we would throw it and they would bring it back to us. It was a lot of fun – probably even better than the organized events because those have more people around. But – if you want a great picture with a dolphin you should do the encounter – our friends from Spain showed us a great shot of the two of them smiling with a dolphin smiling in the middle – really cute.

We didn’t do the horseback riding or the canopy tour but we heard great reviews about both of them. We did take advantage of the kayaks – very peaceful to kayak over to the dolphin area at sunrise and just watch them swimming around.

Oh - they are putting in a swimming pool in the middle of the key - you won't believe this - they're digging it by hand! We saw the guys working out there every day with their pickaxes and shovels - VERY hard workers - hope they'll get to swim in it when they're done!

About the bugs - not really a problem! We did see people with bites but hubby and I were VERY anal about putting on our "stuff" after each shower and before going outside. I used Cactus Juice sunblock/bug repellant (which they do sell in the snack shop-so no need to order online) and hubby used Repel with 29% Deet.


Well – that was our week at AKR – really great diving, fantastic people, wonderful hammocks (I forgot to mention – the hammocks were our favorite way to spend “land” time). We will definately go back – just need some time to save up again!

One more note – on the way home we did get stuck in Miami because Hurricane Jeanne decided to dodge West and headed over to Tampa Bay so the Tampa airport was closed. At least it was better than spending the night in a hurricane – it had already passed North of the Miami airport the night before we landed from Roatan. I really enjoyed not having a TV for the whole week – we had too many weeks of watching hurricanes before we left for vacation. We didn’t even know there was a hurricane over Florida until the day before we left – and we only found out because we walked through the bar (where the TV is) when they happended to have the Weather Channel on!


Oh wait - an additional note - thank you to the many posters on this wonderful board who posted such great tips and advice and answered my questions before we left. It was so great to be informed before we actually went on vacation. I hope this post returns the favor and I would love to answer any questions about anything I forgot.
Thanks again SCUBABOARDers :dazzler1:

dhappydiver -

Excellent! Thanks for the review. We leave for AKR in 2 weeks. You have stated some great things for us to try - like the Baileys Key dolphins at closing We too didn't want to spend that much for an 'average rated' dolphin experience - but my wife REALLY wants to see dolphins.

Just one question - leaving for Roatan in the Miami airport... did you get pulled into that 'XRAY Catapult' line? Man, we got pulled into that line on our trip to Curacao, and it actually launched our bags out the back end about 4 feet 'airborn' before hitting a wall. The guys in front of us were professional videographers from Telemundo - watching their faces drop as the XRAY launched their camera bages into the air was almost horrifying! :icon10:

Hi Addict - we saw that catapulting xray machine also - very scary! Luckily we had room in our carryons for the regulators and camera so no worries about those getting catapulted!

Warn your wife to bring a beach towel to the dolphin area - I have bruises on my ribs from laying down on the dock to pet the dolphins - you have to lay down and lean over to reach them so something cushiony under your body is a good idea! Bring beach towels from home also - the resort does not provide those - just little white towels for showers.

I also fogot to mention the dolphin show - they do it 2 times a day near the museum - the day we went there were only a few people watching so they let us go down right behind the trainer which was neat. The dolphin jumped up to touch an orange ball with his nose and then he pushed the trainer up there so the trainer could touch the ball - it was cute. We never did make it to the museum but we heard it was nice - only a 15 minute excursion - we were going to go the day we played with the dolphins but we played so long that we didn't get there before closing time!

Well - have a great trip and please say "hi" to the fishies and dolphins for us!

dhappydiver - I told my wife about the review you put up (she should have time to read it today) - she got all excited about seeing the dolphins.

I appreciate the tip about the towels - never know exactly what you need to bring and what will be supplied, that is a good help.

And yes, RoatanMan - this is definitely a usefull and entertaining review! I can't wait to get there.

Well, thanks so much for the review. It was long but good information. I haven't been there yet...but plan on it in the near future. Our planned trip right now is Bahamas at the end of Nov. and can't wait for that. then after that in March is Dominica for 2 weeks, then in May it's Bonaire. again, thanks for the report. and glad you had fun.

Thanks for the wonderful report. We leave for CoCo view this Saturday and are looking forward to some wonderful diving. Your report just juiced us up, thanks.