The Sandy Bay and West End / West Bay Marine Park Monthly Newsletter
December 2007 in Roatan, Honduras

Welcome all to 2007

From everyone at the Roatan Marine Park , we would like to wish you all a belated Merry Christmas and the Best New Year and hope that the holiday season was as enjoyable for you as it was for some of us.

Those that are lucky enough to still be on Roatan and are diving every day, an apology must go out to you all for the lack of moorings at present. Don’t worry though, this is all part of the grand scheme of things and the upcoming infrastructure renovation is going to be legendary. Now that the Northerlies seem to have given up stealing all of our buoys and channel markers (knock on wood) we are ready to start installing the new gear. The new dive buoys are quite expensive and indestructible, so we wanted to make sure not to lose any. In addition, after the new buoys were initially lost they have been through customs and are now missing again, although we have received word that they may resurface (excuse the pun) on Tuesday. We have all GPS coordinates of the established dive sites but we also know that there are a lot of vacant pins out there. We know there are sites between West End and West Bay but are unaware of their position, any help on their depth and location would be greatly appreciated. What some have started doing is attaching pop bottles to existing vacant pins using a length of line and informing us after the dive. This is a great service as we have been able to install these buoys within hours of their report.

This year we are introducing a new annual park user fee, with prices increasing from $5 to $10 due to the demand of the General Assembly. The bracelets have now changed colour, from the expired 2006 yellow to new hip 2007 blue. Any dive shops still selling the yellow bracelets, please contact us so we can exchange them. The new 2007 key tags will also be available around the 12th and will be blue in conjunction with the bracelets. We have recently implemented a daily charge of $3, so visitors have an option of paying either daily or just buying the annual bracelet. Currently we are using the 2006 green tokens as day passes but should be getting hospital bracelets in the near future.

Attached as usual is the complete break down of the accounts, and having done a quick bit of math, we are happy to announce that the Park managed to generate over $100,000 in revenue during 2006. The actual figure was $100,212, not bad for a non-governmental, community based, grass roots initiative, born from a bunch of do- gooders and still very much in its infancy. Much of this money has come from the tags system introduced in November 2005, amassing a total of $41,245. We have also received grants from CORAL, WWF and PADI totalling approximately $20,000. In early 2007, we hope to be receiving quite a lot of money from PMAIB for various projects as well as assistance in our daily operations. PMAIB is an environmental management project for the Bay Islands operated through the Ministry of Tourism and funded by the International Development Bank. They have been working for years to figure out where money can best be utilized and now they are ready to start distributing those funds. Fortunately, we will be a major recipient of these funds.

Our expenses for the year however were $101,184.00, a minor difference of $972; very impressive if you think about all the things the park has achieved since the new management took over in April. We always have new projects on the go, are working on organizing a sustainable recycling program for plastics on Roatan, are now members of the inspection teams that issue permits for new and old development projects, have a program for university students from the mainland, a school education program planned for the near future, we have set standards and regulations for marine recreational users of the park and much much more.

We are very aware that without the help and support of you all, our conservation efforts would be struggling and likely ineffective. Thanks to all of you we are now internationally recognized as a successful conservation project, anticipating our NGO status within this month.

Relevant web sites:

For more information regarding park fees see paper entitled "Recreational scuba diving in Caribbean Marine Protected Area: Do users pay?" at
http://www.dfg.ca.gov/mrd/mlpa/pdfs/comments/kfc_072905a.pdf

If you want to know more about fish you see out in the park, visit www.fishbase.org, which has an index of almost 30,000 species of fish.

If you want to know more about the reefs, go to www.reefbase.org which contains global information regarding coral reefs.