Roatan, Honduras, Tuesday Jan 18th

These are pictures of the village of Coxen Hole, where we arrived at Roatan. The village itself is very small and poor. I guess they put the pier there because that's where the water was deep enough for the ship. The road from the parking lot through the village to the main road system was unpaved and full of mudholes. The taxi ride through town, in an old Isuzu compact car with over 250,000 miles on it, was quite an adventure.

The big attraction at Anthony's Key Resort is the Roatan Institute for Marine Sciences, which offers short encounter sessions with some of the dolphins that they train and study there. We were setup in groups of 4 people with a trainer and a dolphin and were given about 20 minutes to play with and learn about the creatures. Our dolphin was Boomer, a 3 year old male (teenager in dolphin terms). The camera seems to have a water spot or fog on the lens for these, unfortunately.

I found our copy of the VHS video they made during our dolphin encounter, and transfered it to DVD-R and then to a computer file. The images below are screen shots from that video. (I tried to pick shots with little motion, so the interlacing wasn't too bad.) A DivX-encoded copy of the video can be downloaded here: dolphinvid.avi (AVI/DivX format, 110MB, 8m20s)