CHUM - Houston's SCUBA Club is the sponsor of the 
AquaNut
Nurse Shark
- First Name
- Kurt
I’m a frequent Roatan diver and this trip was 10 days in the water. Started off a little turbid, with some sargassum drifting through and breaking up. Half Moon Bay was actually brown for the 1st 2 days. There was also significant surge that I hadn’t really experienced there before. After the 1st few days, things calmed and cleared. Aside from the usual fun diving on the typical sites on the west end, we ventured east and did The Land of Giants. I had been there once, but it was like visiting it for the first time. The coral heads are massive and spaced out. It’s interesting to hang back a bit and see the scale of the coral head with the tiny divers near it. Another day we traveled to the south side of the island to dive Mary’s Place. It’s listed in the National Geographic book, 100 Dives of a Lifetime. It has a long deep tilted vertical crack swim though. It’s another fantastic site that I had also done once before, but felt new. I also did another night dive there. The timing was just right for seeing the magical string of pearls!
The highlight of my trip was taking the Roatan Marine Park Coral Conservation course and visiting the RMP Coral Nursery to see the coral tree I adopted in February. The class consists of some class time learning some basic biology and ecology of the coral, and what you will be doing on the 2 dives included in the course. The 1st dive is in the nursery at Sea Quest, where you do a little tree maintenance. We scrubbed the structures removing algae and fire coral. We then checked and recorded if there was any disease present and counted the coral fragments. We also did some propagating to create more fragments. Our time at the nursery was concluded after removing staghorn (acropora cervicornis) fragments from my adopted tree to take to another site in the reef for outplanting. Dive 2 was at Chief’s Quarters where we outplanted the coral we removed from the nursery. First we had to find a good spot to place the fragments. Then we prepped the area by brushing off algae and roughing up the contact points. Each fragment must be placed with 3 points of contact using epoxy. And yes… we had to touch the coral. Once all the fragments were in place and secured, we had to triangulate their location to be put on the map for future monitoring by the RMP. So, now I have my own little coral colony growing on the meso-American reef in Roatan. ACER 141 C15. The whole experience was incredible. I’m now a certified RMP Coral Ambassador and will be able to go on volunteer dives with RMP. I’ll be returning to Roatan in July and I’m excited to revisit Chief’s Quarters to check on my coral colony.
All in all, it was another amazing trip to Roatan!
The highlight of my trip was taking the Roatan Marine Park Coral Conservation course and visiting the RMP Coral Nursery to see the coral tree I adopted in February. The class consists of some class time learning some basic biology and ecology of the coral, and what you will be doing on the 2 dives included in the course. The 1st dive is in the nursery at Sea Quest, where you do a little tree maintenance. We scrubbed the structures removing algae and fire coral. We then checked and recorded if there was any disease present and counted the coral fragments. We also did some propagating to create more fragments. Our time at the nursery was concluded after removing staghorn (acropora cervicornis) fragments from my adopted tree to take to another site in the reef for outplanting. Dive 2 was at Chief’s Quarters where we outplanted the coral we removed from the nursery. First we had to find a good spot to place the fragments. Then we prepped the area by brushing off algae and roughing up the contact points. Each fragment must be placed with 3 points of contact using epoxy. And yes… we had to touch the coral. Once all the fragments were in place and secured, we had to triangulate their location to be put on the map for future monitoring by the RMP. So, now I have my own little coral colony growing on the meso-American reef in Roatan. ACER 141 C15. The whole experience was incredible. I’m now a certified RMP Coral Ambassador and will be able to go on volunteer dives with RMP. I’ll be returning to Roatan in July and I’m excited to revisit Chief’s Quarters to check on my coral colony.
All in all, it was another amazing trip to Roatan!
