A Change of Plans on Roatan: West Bay back to Mahogany Bay

For the third time in four years, I was on a cruise that stopped for a day on the island of Roatan. And for the third straight time, I made a beeline for West Bay Beach - the place I’d been boldly calling the best beach snorkeling in the Caribbean. Unfortunately on this latest visit the weather didn’t cooperate. Cloudy skies with strong winds and below-normal temperatures combined to create poor conditions for snorkeling.

I planned a full day at West Bay, even buying a day pass at Infinity Bay Resort that fronted the beach and offered the best reef access close to the south end. Luckily a pool and its adjacent lounge chairs were at my disposal because the beach chairs were in a wind tunnel.

A dozen people were in the water, most of them snorkeling near the cliffs that bordered the south end of West Bay and that offered some shelter. The seas were certainly less choppy there but I was still frustrated by the poor visibility when I finally dove in. It improved as I swam further from the beach but the low sunlight still made it difficult to see anything much further than a couple of armlengths away. At least the balmy water felt familiar.

I snapped some shots of Caribbean squids and Atlantic blue tangs amidst the sea grass. Further out a variety of corals came into view which several varieties of parrotfish chomped on. The lush canyons of coral I enjoyed swimming through on previous visits were dim and murky, drained of color. They also lay under the worst swells. A hulking rainbow parrotfish tempted me to venture further, but I resisted.

Back on land, I waited vainly for the sun to break through the cloud cover. The weather app stated it wasn’t until close to sunset that the forecast improved. As a result, I headed back to the ship before noon after barely three hours at West Bay.

Mahogany Bay is a cruise port carved out of a corner of the mangrove coastline on Roatan’s southside. The construction of a long pier, sandy beach, and protective sea walls spared the original coral reef in a few spots. I was actually excited I was going to explore the area’s natural history up close for the first time. Viewing from fifteen stories high atop the ship that morning, I had discerned the the striations of the port's reefs just past a long pier marking the development’s border.

To reach the beach and the reef, I walked the complex’s Nature Trail through native forest. Always ready with my Canon’s telephoto lens, I photographed the fauna I encountered along the way. A spiny-tailed iguana and a white-winged dove were no surprise, but an agouti - an endemic rodent that looks like a large hamster - startled me as it crossed the path. I was thrilled to encounter my first Carnivet’s emerald - the local hummingbird - and, possibly, my first Yucatan vireo.

Past the shops, restaurants, and bars, beyond the orderly rows of chaise lounges and the crew’s tiny spit of beach, I reached the pier. At its end, where a lifeguard watched over the water activity, it was an easy plop into the shallow water. White buoys marked the the channel where gargantuan cruise ships sailed in and out.

My first impression of the seascape was its preponderance of silt stirred up from the ship traffic. It covered everything. My second was how different the weather was on this side of the island. The sun was shining. The winds had died. And the water was calmer and clearer than at West Bay eleven miles away.

Stretches of silty grass with crops of dusty coral extended around me. I swam near schools of parrotfish and surgeonfish and spotted a pair of four-eyed butterflyfish and a lone indigo hamlet. Pink sea fans and bent sea rods swayed in the gentle current; trumpetfish tried to hide behind the corals. I circled the same small area of the reef a couple of times, not wanting to venture too far as I soon found myself mostly alone.

In fact my cruise ship was scheduled to depart in almost half an hour so I cut my snorkel short. Walking back dripping wet on the same forested trail, I spied two more birds: a Yucatan woodpecker and an immature white-eyed vireo. Sure, I thought as I rushed onto the ship, West Bay hadn’t shared its typical underwater dreamscape, but snorkeling on a new reef and birdwatching in a patch of native habitat at Mahogany Bay wasn’t a bad afternoon at all.