Utila: diving as an official scuba diver and celebrating on our very own private island

As I mentioned before, Parrot’s (the dive center we dived at) offered us our very own private island for a night AND two free fun dives in exchange for them to give us our open water certification. This is not just because we are all very good looking, it was the fact that it really pays to go to small islands in big groups during slow season. Saturday we had two epic fun dives. Now that we were official big kid open water divers, we dived with an Alaskan dive master that went by the name of Zack that was extremely laid back letting us break the rules and dive at 21 meters. These dives included a small wreck, a cave, hunting and killing lion fish, losing Ruben and playing on sand patches and doing “the matrix”. Not to mention all the cool marine life we played with. Can I just say once again how extremely weird this all is for me, I.. scuba dive now? Andddd I like it? So weird, but awesome.

Our epic morning dives set the tone of the rest of the day. We came back in time for the lionfish feast, which was the finale of the lionfish slaughter competition which are an invasive species in the Caribbean. Apparently a hurricane hit Florida in 1999 and five lionfish escaped from aquariums and now have populated all the way to Brazil, destroying reefs and altering biodiversity. So the community of Utila has competitions among the dive centers a few times a year, in which people get amped about murdering as many lionfish as possible.

After the celebratory feast of dead fish we hopped on a boat and we were off to spend the night on our-own-personal-island. It was more amazing than I even could have imagined. The house was huge. It had enough beds to sleep 20 people comfortably, palm trees with real life coconuts for our island themed drinks and dinner, not one, but two docks to lay on and a reef surrounding it that offered snorkeling for hours. We took advantage of all these things for the rest of the afternoon as well as the rum we brought along.

Dinner was coconut stir-fry over rice and one of the best meals yet. After we cleaned up and we started to settle into some serious drinking game time, when Ruben discover a baby turtle that had come through the front door! We were all extremely excited, took pictures and gawked over the adorable little creature before we decided to set it free in the ocean. That was when we discovered that our entire island was covered in baby turtles searching for their ocean home. This was almost too much for my drunk self to handle. We found a box and frantically collected baby turtles. When we had found every baby turtle we made a guessimate of about 50 turtles! We then had a releasing ceremony where we all squealed and hugged as we did our good dead. Simply wow. Baby turtles isn’t something that happens very often and we managed to accidentally stumble upon this surreal event. Not to mention we were on our very own island. The rest of the night we laughed and loved over a beach bon fire.

I woke up to the sun filling my room. I had purposely fell asleep with an open door that gave me a view of palm trees, sand and ocean. I rolled out of bed and plopped myself on some sand and took in the Caribbean sunrise. Here I was, 24 year old, on some tiny island off the coast of Honduras with 7 other back packers doing exactly what we should be doing, experiencing life.