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Dear Reader:
I'm always searching for small, isolated places with healthy reefs, as I found six years ago at Itza Resort on Long Caye, 50 miles off the Belize Coast, at Lighthouse Reef (see April 2016 Undercurrent). So I returned in February, eager to see if it was still a pleasant place with good fishy reefs.
At the edge of the world's second-longest barrier reef, Itza picks up guests in Belize City on Wednesdays and Saturdays for the long boat ride out, the comfort of which depends upon the weather. In my case, the seas were calm, and two hours later, the resort staff handed me a drink and led me to the same comfortable second-floor ocean view room I had previously.
I had made reservations for myself and six other friends several weeks before our trip. As a condition of coming, I wanted the assurance that we would dive together and without others. Elvis Solis, the manager, dive shop owner, guide, and jack of all trades, went one better. Since no one else was scheduled, he said he would take no other guests. We could have the whole place to ourselves. And the first afternoon, when I joined my friends for Elvis' briefing in the comfortable lounge, with sofas, books, and a giant floor map of Lighthouse Reef, he went one further. While our package included 17 dives, we could dive as much as we wanted. I ended up doing sixteen, and only once did our group do four dives.
The next day, the wind and rain made me
wonder how many dives I would want to make
after we were limited to a 30-foot dive to a
protected site as the only dive of the day.
While I was happy to get back in the water,
this was an ordinary dive at best, with
mainly juvenile reef fish and nothing more
unique than a saddled blenny and a sharptail
eel. I had no way to know whether the diving
would measure up to six years ago. Fingers
crossed.
The next dive day, fingers uncrossed.
After a 10-minute boat ride to Half Moon
Caye, we dived Roller Coaster and then Half Moon Caye Wall, both with a good
dose of reef sharks and friendly Nassau grouper. At the wall, I passed chubs and
schoolmasters hovering under the boat as I descended
to the sand. I kicked along the fishy crest down to
75 feet, spooking a turtle. Reef sharks patrolled
in the blue, showing off their muscular builds,
some shadowed by bar jacks. Husky tiger and black
groupers hide in the cracks. After 35 minutes,
Elvis motioned us to the reef top to burn off
nitrogen and swim with parrots, chalk bass, goldspot
and bridled blennies, and barred hamlets. My
partner showed me five Peterson shrimp in a corkscrew
anemone, and soon, a southern stingray sailed
by, chasing garden eels back into their holes, and
leaving just their eyeballs showing. A saucer-eye
porgy joined a mixed school of striped and spotted
goatfish as it was time to head up....
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