Roatan

Winter storms have hit Roatan hard this rainy season and left the beaches trashed with mounds of seaweed mixed with multicolored plastics. Plastic bottles, containers, bottle caps, flip flops, cosmetics, travel size everything, and just about anything else you can think of! We found a nice 5 gallon gas container one day walking along the Sandy Bay beach and a top for it the next day on West Bay beach!

Now, if you don’t know where Roatan Island is, let me give you a clue. Roatan Island is part of The Bay Islands 40 miles off the coast of Honduras in The Bay of Honduras, in Central America . Roatan along with Utila and Guanaja is one of the three main Islands that inhabit the shallow Caribbean waters that sport The Great Western Barrier Reef. Roatan is the new “hot spot” for scuba divers and cruise ship vacationers. It makes for an easy cruise ship stop before or after the Belize stop just North of Roatan. With the growing demand for “closer to home” travel destinations for Americans and Canadians, Central America is changing. Tourism is quickly becoming a noteworthy source of income for many of the countries. More tourists mean more people and more people mean more trash! Every country faces the problem of what to do with trash, but not Central America! They just dump it in the ocean! After all, isn’t that what’s the ocean for? Most of the plastic on the beach in Roatan comes from currents that sweep by Belize and mainland Honduras. The many rainy season storms churn up the shallow Caribbean sea floor and  take the light weight trash right over the reef and onto the beaches. Just what everyone wants to see when they visit here right! Wrong! Roatan, Bay Island, Honduran workers spend a significant amount of time cleaning up the beaches after each storm. This gets expensive for beach front property owners as well as tiresome for the workers. Wet seaweed is heavy seaweed. Some resorts rake the seaweed and have it carried off in wheelbarrows to a central property dump for compost. It makes surprisingly great fertilizer if you can sift out all the plastic! An impossible task. Some beach front folks dig holes in the sand every few feet and burry the seaweed and plastic. So, when it rains and the water runs off the Island into the reef eroding the sand away, the colorful plastic appears once again! This is in case you did not find your treasure the first time! Needless to say Roatan Winter Storms are a problem, but only because of the Trash!