For this occasion I’ll limit my comments to Roatan since I have something of a history with the place – my first visit being about nine years ago – but the same could equally apply to many of the places I’ve visited – Costa Rica, Jamaica, Turks and Ciacos, the Virgin Islands, Bahamas, Belize and on and on.

I first heard about Roatan in the late Nineties from a friend who told me of an island paradise where you could happily stay in a little cabana for $5 a night and dive your brains out.

He didn’t lie – Roatan is still a bucolic place with its own sense of time. There is little to do there but dive and lay on the beach. The draw was the sheer amount of wildlife. For me it was a revelation. I’d never anything like this quantity before – anywhere. Rivers of Blue Tang’s, French Angels and Rainbow Parrots everywhere. One of the sites is called “Fish Soup” for the utter profusion of fish there. These days it’s more of a thin broth. The cruise ships began docking in Roatan about five years ago and I’ve been back twice in the interim and each time there was a marked fall-off in the numbers of reef inhabitants. Those rivers of fish are just gone. Spotted Eagles and other rays used to be everywhere – in April I saw one! I know they’re shy to begin with but they were just nowhere to be seen.

I’ve wondered too, about polluting bilge water from those ships. Prior to their arrival the largest boat in the archipelago was the ferry that zips twice a day between Roatan and Utila.

Roatan is known for its healthy corals, but I noticed this last time how much less vibrant they seemed to be – much of the colour seemed to have been drained. Bleaching, which was unknown down there, is now commonplace; but that’s true everywhere I’ve been too. Higher temperatures or no, coral is dying everywhere. The soft corals especially have suffered.

There is a funded reef protection plan – each diver is asked to donate to the upkeep and to fund anti-poaching patrols, but these are easily evaded by local fishermen who have found that there is plenty of demand for fish now that the cruise ship passengers flood the West End during peak season.

Many passengers disembark looking to do a day’s diving and I can’t help but feel that much of the damage to the reefs comes from them – they arrive, dive shops have little or no knowledge of their abilities, they dive, then leave. So often I’ve witnessed “divers” who have no buoyancy skills whatsoever in sixty feet of water, trashing the coral and it just makes me furious. Diving itself is becoming deleterious to the very environment we’re down there to enjoy. If you cannot control your altitude you shouldn’t be anywhere near coral – period.

I don’t want to get into a screed about Diving Clubs and their lack of focus on oceanic health but something is clearly wrong with the model that pushes divers very rapidly through training courses before they’re ready. To me every certifying agency needs to have environmental concerns way up front and woven into their very fabric – otherwise we’re going to kill the very thing we all love.

I’m down there trying to make friends (I’ve had so many pranks played on me by fish so don’t tell me they’re stupid and don’t have a sense of humour) and I fear that may not be possible too much longer.

SM

For further reading on the Cruise Ship issue try http://WWW.responsibletravel.Com/copy/how-responsible-are-cruise-liners