CoCo View Resort Review - Roatan

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Kingscrab

Registered
Messages
42
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0
Location
Maine, USA
# of dives
500 - 999
Hey SCUBA folks! Just got back a couple of days ago from my first trip to Roatan, and I thought I'd throw some words of advice out there. Where to start...?

Honduras diving totally lived up to my expectations! :D

My wife and I honeymooned at CoCo View Resort and I want to officially give this place two thumbs up. The trip got off to a rocky start thanks to the POS airline known as DELTA. DO NOT FLY DELTA. Seriously. Every. Single. Plane. Had mechanical issues of some sort. We missed the first whole day of our honeymoon due to missed connections.

Flight to Roatan = Captain announced over the loudspeaker he had to "reboot the plane" to get a certain censor to work. 30 min gone. Upon arrival in Atlanta (which is an enormous traffic CF - 30 min gone) the "door wasn't opening" so we sat at our gate while the clock ticked. 20 more minutes gone. RAN through the vast expanse of the Atlanta airport, actually got to our connecting Roatan flight gate 5 minutes before take off only to find out that the plane had pulled away early. Yeah. Got rerouted to Houston to catch a Continental flight the next day. (which BTW was quite nice. Continental seems to hame a nice modern fleet) So, night one of honeymoon = Hello Garden Inn at Houston. :shakehead:

Return Flight = Thinking a 4 hour layover was sufficient, we sat in the Roatan airport confident we wouldn't have to stay at another flea bag airport hotel. Right? Wrong. The incoming plane to Roatan that we were waiting for was, yup, 4 hours late. End of honeymoon in Altlanta hotel. I could go on, but alas, I digress.

Bah. Enough negative. Now the good stuff!

CoCo View resort was amazing. The people were all very friendly and it was the lowest maintenance diving I have ever done. As a backpacker, I'm not used to "resort vacations" so this was a new experience. Upon arrival, we met Mitch, the recent manager, who upon hearing our tale of woe, immediately took us out for a shore dive/orientation dive. The Prince Albert wreck is about 100 yards offshore and I have to tell ya, I could do this dive 5 times a day. It is BEAUTIFUL. There is so much to keep you busy down there!

Never once did I feel like anyone working at the resort was being schmoozy or cheesey. Our divemaster was Kirk and our Captain was Dave. You never really know what to expect from a dive guide. I've seen all sides of the spectrum, from the "know it all" yahoo to the quiet stoic type. Well, these guys were really great. Just the right mix of professionalism and easy going attitude. Kirk and Dave were very easy to get along with and could basically talk to anyone about anything. It felt very genuine. I was amazed at how knowledgeable Kirk was about the reef too. I mean, when he said something like "A seahorse lives on this rock right about here *point at map* and I will look for him" he meant it. The guy has eagle eyes.

Anyway, it's a slick operation and a well oiled machine. They made it SO easy to go diving.

Eat, go out on boat for first dive, drop off near wreck for second dive. Repeat.

Speaking of eating: The food was pretty damn good. The dinners were the best meals by far. I feel like the quality of the food trailed off by the end of the week, but I have to say, we had some STELLAR dinners at CoCo View. The breakfast meals were pretty average fare, but hey, neither of us got sick from the food or water so I'm not complaining. :) The vegetarian options were pretty lacking, or so I heard a couple people grumble, but I eat meat and was quite happy. I do wish they would have put tortillas out at every meal where they had rice and beans present, (makes sense, yeah?) but hey, minor gripe.

One thing that I really liked about CoCo View were the nice little touches. The area (garden, walkway, etc) was well maintained. Every morning when we got to breakfast, Jose the parrot was just waking up. He was nice enough to say "hello" to us everyday. (100 times or so!) The house resort poochies were always floating around looking for a pet and a bite of food. Little Gizmo was our fave! :) There were also a couple of humming bird feeders that were fun to watch. CoCo View had some non diving events that were a nice touch also. Fire dancers, Honduran kids doing traditional Honduran polkas, crab races, etc. Solid good fun to mix up the routine a little bit at night.

Back to diving. The water was great, and I'd say the VIS was better than average. I was a little worried about jellyfish before I went down there but it didn't even seem to be an issue at all. Not once did I hear about any recent stingings, etc. The coral was very vibrant and beautiful. LOTS of sea fans and barrel (?) coral. The wall dives were stunning. We saw schools of squid (my personal fave) tons of schooling fishes, seahorses (thank you Kirk!) eels, giant hermit crabs, garden eels, toad fish and (to the local's dismay) many lionfish.

SHARKDIVE: For those of you who are not yet jaded or have not done a dive like this, the Sharkdive is TOTALLY worth it. It's a little pricy ($100 or so) but it's fun. We did the one tank dive to watch the sharks eat and it was BAD ASS. The current was strong so the divers had to "climb" down the mooring line to get to the feeding area, but it was amazing. We had 10 or 11 sharks show up to the chum bucket. You sit with your back to a small wall and watch as the dive master opens the bucket. After we watched them eat, the guide let us free float and basically you're floating there and sharks are all over the place cruising around. It was cool as hell. If you wanna see sharks, you WILL see them on this dive.

ZIPLINE: My wife got a cold one day so we did the Pirates of the Carribean zipline tour instead of diving. It was an hour of pure AWESOME. Scary as hell and every bit as fun. If you do this, do the EXTREME route. Again, pricy at $65 a head, but I'd do it again in a second.

As I said earlier, my wife and I are (traditionally) backpackers so resort vacations are usually not our thang. We like mixing with locals and seeing the reality of a place when we travel. Alas it was not to be this time. CoCo View is on a small island and getting back to the mainland just didn't occur to us. I'm sad to say that not once did we even see Honduran money, but we expected to be cloistered and focused on diving when we signed up for the trip. I admit, I was a little uncomfortable with the vast difference in standard of living in Honduras. The closest we got to experiencing the local scene was from our boat, I'm afraid. At times it was difficult to see people living in shanty towns on the water's edge as we tooled past in our fancy dive boat, but again... I digress. We tipped (EVERYONE) good so hopefully some of that will trickle back to the local economy. (small consolation, right...?)

If you are only interested in diving and chilling out, CoCo View is PERFECT.

The closest thing to a complaint about CCV is that it was a little difficult to get common items. The staff was good about trying, but still, there is no "local pharmacy" or corner store" to run to if you need something. For example, when my wife got a cold there was ONE packet of cold medicine at the gift shop. (Which was overpriced of course) Plan ahead! I will say that the staff was very helpful to us when we needed it. Example: We had no clock. Our phones had no service and usually we use our phones for the time. The staff sent someone to the mainland buy us a cheapo alarm clock though and we had one the next day! :)

Here is another fun tidbit for ya. We discovered that island wide power outages are planned and quite frequent on Roatan. A couple times that week, power totally dropped for about a minute. Fortunately, CCV is ready and has three huge power generators that kicked right in. Apparently they can run for about a month if they have enough fuel.

One thing that was really nice was hanging out on the sun deck. They have a sandy pathway that runs along side a long dock. The dock has a couple of "nodes" that stick out with sunning chairs on them. The end of the dock has a big shaded area with hammocks. It was SO relaxing sitting out there reading and watching divers trickle in and out of the shore line as they finished their drop off dives.

CCV has a very organized system for shore night dives as well. While we didn't do one, it was fun to sit at the bar with a boat drink and watch the glows from the night diver's lights out in the bay. Sigh.

I will add more to this later...
 
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Kingcrab,

My wife and I will be staying at CCV in two weeks. There has been quite a bit written on SB about the mosquitoes in Honduras, what was your experience like on the island?

BTW, we're flying Delta.
 
sounds like a great trip once you got to CCV....yeah Kirk does have eagle eyes...he can find the smallest critters.....the staff there is great and Mitch and Deb are very good at making sure your vacation is relaxing...are you ready to go back :D check out their chatboard if you haven't already CoCo Chat and they are on Facebook too....looking forward to more of your report:)
 
Kingcrab,

My wife and I will be staying at CCV in two weeks. There has been quite a bit written on SB about the mosquitoes in Honduras, what was your experience like on the island?

BTW, we're flying Delta.
We didn't really have a problem at all. Bring bugspray though!!! We brought some strong DEET and only got a few bites from the "noseeums". You can tell who didn't bring any though. At the airport there were many people with their legs just riddled with bites! I'm talking like a hundred bites plus. I think I got one or two mosquito bites but I am also taking anti malaria medicine just to be safe. CCV is right on the sea and it was pretty breezy. This cut down HUGELY on the flying bugs.

My condolences on DELTA. Pack overnight stuff. :depressed:

If I had to do it again and was flying DELTA, I'd factor in an overnight stay in the start so you're not sad about missing a whole day of expensive diving. Coming home wasn't as bad since we left Sunday open anyway, but it was still pretty lame to have to stay over AGAIN.

CCV was BRILLIANT though! You will LOVE IT. :)

PS: Kirk's boat is the Red One. Coco View 4 I think. I'd request him as a guide again in a heartbeat.
 
sounds like a great trip once you got to CCV....yeah Kirk does have eagle eyes...he can find the smallest critters.....the staff there is great and Mitch and Deb are very good at making sure your vacation is relaxing...are you ready to go back :D check out their chatboard if you haven't already CoCo Chat and they are on Facebook too....looking forward to more of your report:)
Yeah, Mitch and Deb were VERY nice! They stopped by our table on several occasions to check in and make sure we were having a nice vacation, talk about Gizmo, the shark dive, etc.. :coffee:
 
COCO View is my daughter's favorite dive location.

< ----- And I like it pretty well myself!
 
I'm going to chime in on this one as it appears that maybe I was there at CoCoview the same time you were. I ditto what Kingscrab said about the great dive operation. If you are looking for a lowkey, relaxed, nothing but diving vacation, this is a great place to go. We stayed in one of the cabanas over the water and it was wonderful. The grounds were kept up very nicely. I will say on the animal front for Cocoview, they need to learn about parrot upkeep, the two parrots in the front of the resort had dirty cages, no toys and their food was not kept up regularly. We did mention this to Mitch and Deb (managers), so we will see what they do about it. The dogs are kept happy though. Bring bug spray, at least two cans. One for your cubby at the dock, so when you rinse off after you come back from a dive, you can spray on your bug spray, one at your room so you can spray on some after your shower. If you do that, you will be bite free. The food was subpar,but you were usually hungry and if you didn't like what they were having they always had a decent salad bar so, you won't starve and there was plenty of food. I will second the compliments on the dive staff. They are amazing. They all go out of their way to make sure that you are happy. They will tailor the dives to fit the divers on their boats, which makes for great diving. I did witness where we dropped off a diver on the Prince Albert, she forgot her weights but we had already left. I was looking back and saw her waving at us and mentioned it to our captain who promptly turned around...just as another cocoview boat saw her and began racing to give her assistance. It made me happy to see that anyone that saw a diver that needed help went right away. It did not have to be someone from their boat and the other boat did have to see that we were already turning around to go back but because they were closer and did not know the issue, they responded quickly to the diver. I also noticed huge fans were installed in the area where they fill tanks to insure good clean fills. And they have incorporated a sign in/out sheet for night dives as well as the beacon that flashes when a diver is out at night. Good safety measures on their part. Our boat was crewed by Mark and Gringo...they were great and could not have been more personable or gone out of their way to make sure we were happy. They actually kept some dolphins running with our boat the whole way to our drop off dive, so when we jumped in the water for our dive there were 3-4 dolphins swimming within 5-8 feet of us! Overall, I think this is a great dive operation and anyone who goes and says they didn't have a good time won't have a good time no matter where they go because they are looking for things to complain about.
Oh, and on the Delta note...my husband travels for work and would not fly Delta because he said that any flight you take with them is delayed, almost always to mechanical issues. I believe he was held up one time for faulty brakes and they said, "well, if we don't fix it in the next 30 minutes we will just go and we will fix it after we land." What? Avoid Delta if you can.
 
Drat! I missed those dolphins but I heard about them! I think that was the morning (Wed) we did the shark dive and didn't go out on the boat. :cool2:

I found myself showering a lot and constantly reapplying bug spray/sunscreen, but whatever. Small price to pay. It worked. No sunburn and minimal bites. :)

Yeah, the parrot cage outside looked a little dirty, and they really need to put a sign in the dining area to not feed Jose. I saw one dude feeding Jose (the talking parrot) bacon and eggs. Not sure if that's allowed or not, but it just seems... wrooooong. :no:

But as for diving: Top notch. Very professional and on the ball. As FinniMinni mentioned, there were other CCV boats usually in the area too dropping off divers and I found it comforting. It didn't help the VIS around the Prince Albert, but there was no shortage of divers around in case something went wrong. The boats communicated to each other quite well also.



I'm tellin ya. DELTA's fleet is falling apart! In Atlanta the luggage elevator was broken too. LOL also, as the final insult, we got the LAST two seats on our plane back to Portland in the very back by the roaring engines. It was the only seat with no window view too. Pssshaw.
 
Thanks for the report and am glad to hear that you love Roatan and the diving on the South side as much we do........we go often and stay just accross the canal from you......we take the direct flight on Continential out of Houston Texas and we have never had a problem with them....suggest that you look into Continential for your next vist to Roatan and Cocoview
 
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