Well…. what a disappointment. We woke up to grey, leaden skies, threatening clouds and even worse, stiff winds. Stuart, Bob and I had early breakfast and then walked down the dock to the meeting point for our diving expedition. I can’t say that any of us were particularly looking forward to it.

Roatan looked as green and lush as I remembered. Amazingly jungly and fringed with small sandy coves. We gathered at the meeting place in the port village. There were about 18 divers in all. The company representative from Anthonys Key told us that we would not be diving at the resort as expected (it was on the other side of the island) because it was too rough but they were bringing the boat around to the cruise port and we would dive that side of the island. This struck me as very odd because the wind was very clearly blowing off the sea straight inland where we were and therefore I reasoned, the other side of the island would be in the lee……

Finally after an hour’s wait, he announced he would walk us down to the boat. We set off down to the little harbour….. and then the rain really started. We were soaked within minutes. As if buckets of water had been emptied over us. At the water’s edge there was no sign of the boat and then we saw it. Quite a long way off still, struggling in the swell, to get in. We could see the platform at the back slamming up and down in the water. On top of that, there was no canopy at all, just an open deck. We were going to get totally soaked the whole time and getting back onto the boat after the dive (up a ladder onto that slamming platform, wearing our heavy gear) was going to be really hard.

Several people announced they were pulling out. We went down to speak to the representative and after the boat docked, the captain and the divemaster came up and said it was far too rough and they were cancelling. We were totally relieved by then although very disappointed. It would have been terrible though. It was quite impossible.

We went back to the ship and changed out of our wet clothes and had a shower to warm up. Then we took our books down to the atrium and read and drank tea for a couple of hours with Stuart and Fi. By 12, I was ready for a bit of lunch so we went upstairs for that. The rain had stopped and it was still cloudy but with small patches of sun.

We decided to go for an explore so we walked ashore, took a nature trail (saw a parrot) and then walked across the back of the beach quite a long way. Even when it had been cloudy, it was hot (27C) and of course pretty humid. We walked back and explored the shopping in the village. Bob got a new pair of tropical pattern swimming shorts.

This afternoon we just read and lazed around. Not sunbathing weather obviously. Such a shame.. I’d been so looking forward to seeing Anthony’s Key again after all these years. Very happy memories of staying there. The diving was fabulous and it was an idyllic place,

Tonight we met up for cocktails as usual and then went to dinner. It was an Italian menu – delicious. We were earliesh to bed as we are up early tomorrow for a river/jungle/temple trip in Belize.