Utila, Honduras and the Rush into March and the dive season

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Hello, and welcome to Diversync, the Netcast and podcast for scuba divers. My name is Rich Synowiec, and you're listening to episode 521, recorded in April of 2024. And I'm gonna try to do a couple of different episodes this week and make sure that they all are under a certain time. So we'll try to divide it out because I've had nothing but good news. I've been doing really well as far as being busy at the dive center, and I have been diving quite a bit, and I have not had a whole lot of time for podcasting because I'm trying to do a bunch of different things on social media.

So if you're following me on social media, especially if you're following me in Patreon, you've seen a lot of stuff that has been going on, and you've seen a lot of what I've been trying as far as little experimentations and things like that. So I'm having as much fun as I can to be able to get everything done. But the problem with being a little bit successful is that sometimes it takes up a lot more time than you want it to, and sometimes it becomes a machine that's a little bit bigger than what you want. So I'm rushing to get a bunch of stuff done because we have some cool things that have happened in the past, but they were coming up. So take you back to March of 2024.

And what we did was were able to open White star Quarry early. And for those of you that are just tuning in, I own two dive centers. It is divers incorporated, Ann Arbor, Michigan. And I run White Star Quarry, which is in Gibsonburg, Ohio. And with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek. White Star Quarry is a resort at a paddy resort, and it's where people come to learn how to dive and when we can open early because weather is inclementally warm and really good, I get excited because it gives us an extra month of diving. Well, I'm going to tell you, the weather does not know what to do. And with diving, I have noticed in the 20 some odd years that I've been doing this, it's pretty amazing how cyclical diving can be.

First thing is that with diving in the springtime, everyone who is not a diving family, meaning that we have a husband or a wife or a boyfriend or girlfriend who doesn't dive as much as the other one of them is really into it, and one of them might only be a vacation person. The same thing happens every year. We have to start on the first really nice weekend. And sometimes that first really nice weekend is in February, which makes a great year for me. Sometimes the really nice weekend doesn't come till March. Well, this year, the first nice weekend we got was towards the end of March. And with the nice weekend, the first one, everybody goes out to the garage and goes, wow, I got to clean out my garage. And so that's the first weekend blown.

The second weekend, they say, well, man, I should go diving. And then they have a list of honeydews because they cleaned out the garage. And the reason they cleaned out the garage is because their lawn started looking like it needed to be cut. And so now the lawn started needing to be cut, and that pretty much goes into, let's go ahead and spread mulch and let's go do the dive later. And then the third weekend, that's really nice, everybody comes out and says, okay, time to pull out the dive gear. And they realize they didn't rinse it really well the last time they went. And it was in saltwater during their winter vacation, and they completely screwed up their gear.

And now they have to go wait a couple weeks for us to get it done or rent gear, which most people don't want, which is why I really like when march opens up, because then the water is warm by the time the third weekend rolls around. Well, the problem is we haven't had a really third weekend yet, and so we're still waiting for the water to get above 50 degrees, which it kind of did. I think last week somebody else posted that it did get up above 30 above 50 degrees. And that usually starts bringing out the people that are wanting to jump in early, the people who are taking care of their early bird, students who wanted to get away for spring break.

So that's kind of the way that things are going for me, is I have had to try to rush a little bit early. Now, the other thing that get rushed is we had, and I'll talk about this in the next episode, but we had a trip planned early in the season, and it is a copy of what we do in Munising, except it's at White Star Quarry. So it was all called our eclipse camping weekend. And what we did was went out and we did an eclipse weekend. And I'll tell you a little bit about that because it was spectacular. But that was part of what I had to get going. So a month early, I had to get the compressors up and running. I had to change all the filters.

I had to buy a whole bunch of stuff with no money because we're on the end of our slow season and it starts picking back up. And now we have to get all the stuff ready for the quarry to be able to go. Now here's another rub, is that in the next week, I'm going to be in truck Lagoon, and this is the last of the 2020 COVID casualties. And I'll talk about this in another episode because I'm going to try to make three episodes today. So I'm going to keep them under 20 to 30 minutes apiece. But I have hours worth of cool stuff to talk about.

So what we did, though, in March was that in all of this, in the opening early, then having to get everything together and then having to get everything going, we had a trip to Utila. Now, Utila, Honduras, is a little itty bitty island off the coast of Honduras. If you know of roatan, it is a little bit smaller island than roatan that sits about an hour boat ride from Roatan. And for the last couple of years, we've been going now since 2019, we missed COVID year, but then we did 21, 22, 23, and now 24. And what we've been able to do is we've been able to turn that into a rebreather friendly place. And we've been able to make it something pretty darn spectacular throughout our entire history with them. It's a very small lodge.

We use Utila Lodge in the Bay Island College of Diving. And the Utila Lodge is something, I went out there in 2019 in the fall, and were using another resort at the time, but 2019 in the fall, what we did was I went out there and taught them open circuit trimix, instructor and Trimix. So I realized that they had everything we needed for rebreather diving except for the Sorb. And so we shipped down Sorb, they bought tanks. And so the last four years, we've been able to go down there and do rebreather diving along with open circuit diving. But it's an only, the lodge is only eight rooms, so we have very small groups, they give us our own dive master and our own boat, and we very rarely have other people on the boat, which isn't bad if we do.

But it's been really an awesome time every time. The food is incredible. I gained so much weight and it's basically homemade honduran food. And it is just some of the best diving on the planet and also some of the best hospitality you could ever hope for. But with lately what I've done, because this one, I take my whole family, so I have to deal with four airfares and four of the ways that we do things. And so what we try to do is we try to do it the most economical way possible. Now, if you're like me, we have been able to find that there's some economy minded airfares that we're able to do without jumping off of spirit. Now, I'm a big fan of delta. I'm a big fan of anything other than spirit or jetblue because it costs the same.

It just seems like it's cheap. Now, if you're carrying on, spirit is really cheap. But if you are actually checking baggage or you actually have something that you have to carry on, I guess they charge for carry ons now that it comes out to be awash with Delta. So were on Delta, but we found out that Delta, when you fly out of Cleveland, tends to be a lot cheaper than when you fly out of Detroit, which doesn't make any sense because Delta's hub is in Detroit. So, like, went to Cabo San Lucas for a thing last year, and I may have talked about this already, but it was, the flight nonstop out of Detroit was like dollar 900. And then the flight out of Cleveland was like, it was one stop in Detroit on the same flight for about half that.

So what we did was we found a really good flight and then we found out we could get really good tickets if we left a few days early and went into Roatan. It was enough money saved to be able to justify the hotel to stay in Roatan three days one side and four days on the other. But it was still 15 days out of the store, 14 days out of the store for me, which is rough, but I was able to get a lot of my social media stuff done and it's office days for me. When were in Roatan, were basically sitting at the pool or enjoying ourselves. It was a little bit chilly for that. It was just awesome.

But when you're trying to be up against time, not being around your own home, not being around your own office, not being around the studio that I use in my office to be able to get things working, things get set to the side, and that's where this podcast has ended up. Is it set? Got set aside. But Roatan was, really fun. And it's just, it's a neat thing in that the only thing bad about it is we only had one restaurant to basically go to because we didn't rent a car there and so, but we walked around the marketplace and it's a neat little village. I think I'd like to do a trip there someday. The island's bigger than I thought and it did do a good job. The ferry ride was fun. Over to Utila, too. That worked out really well.

The taxis were great. And then Utila itself, I'm gonna tell you, we had six days of spectacular weather and the 7th day was just a little bit windy. And the people are just great. I. Some of my best friends are there that work there. Some of the best friends that ever have in this industry were there that week. And Rebecca and Nick and Stephen and Jose and everybody that's on the island for us are just wonderful people. And it's always something. I really get more relaxed when I know things are going to go well. And when I say I know things are going to go well when I go to a place over and over again. There are people that say, rich, don't you want to try something new?

Well, we do try stuff new from time to time, but it's never as relaxing as when I am able to do something that I have dialed in. So you don't have to leave the resort in utila if you don't want to. You don't have to worry about going out and trying to find a restaurant. You don't have to try to get everybody together. This trip. On this particular one, out of the eight people that went, we had six that were repeats. And that just makes it so much better because when we have, I mean, not that the new people were any, I mean, they were wonderful. And hopefully there'll be repeats next year. But man, we had a good time. And I was able to shoot a whole lot of video.

I was able to work out some kinks with my camera system, I had a new lighting system. I was able to work out the kinks for the rebreather. Stuff went great, and the group and the crew and the dives were just amazing. And the food, I was hoping for more fish, but other than that. Everything else was great. I'm on a different kind of a diet now to try to lose some weight, and you guys have been struggling with that for ten years. We used to have the fat diver challenge. I'm just trying not to be a fat diver. I'm down a whiles, but I'm trying not to be.

But, so, but Utila, we basically, the family flew into roatan, we hopped in a taxi, went to the hotel, hopped in a taxi, came back to the boat, took the boat to Roatan or from roatan to Utila, spent a week in Utila. Wonderful week in Utila. We were trying, actually, I could have stayed in Utila because they didn't have hardly anybody. They had rooms available for the next week and it didn't work out with the hotel because we pre booked everything to save some money. But next year I'll know better to ask. But then we took the ferry back to Roatan, spent three or four days in Roatan, and then we hopped in the plane and came home. And my staff is wonderful. I have really good people and everything was taken care of. We had really good Internet connection.

I'm going to tell you, the fact that there's wifi on the plane makes my life a whole lot easier. I tend to try to stay connected with my clients and the people to ask questions just because if I can help somebody, I'd rather be your long distance dive center. And I've gotten a lot of people that for the long time have been telling me that I do a better job than their local dive center, that if I was local, they would be my customer. And I appreciate that support. So speaking of support, we do have ways that you can support us. The biggest thing is we are on every social media platform. So if you are on, if we are not on your favorite social media platform, we will soon be.

And I am segwaying my social media for you guys that have been following Diversync for years. I'll still have this stuff there, but I also ask that you follow divers incorporated, my dive shop, and I'm going to be doing stuff on both. The podcast is going to kind of remain on divers sinks YouTube page. I'm going to be doing some more snippets, some more behind the scenes stuff. The video podcast is probably never going to happen. Even though I have been recording a lot of this, I think what's going to happen more is it's going to be snippets of this podcast being used as social media stuff for TikTok and that I've put it out there to my Patreon people. And I do appreciate your support, guys. It's a, I am on Patreon. You get some extras there.

You get a lot of video extras. You get a lot of my ideas pop up. And so when you have, when we have things like that, we, I put it out there and I appreciate all the people that come back in private message me as well with things they'd like to see changed in that. But I am on TikTok. I am on Twitter. I am on Instagram. I am on LinkedIn. I'm looking at being on Twitch so that we can put some stuff live when time comes because we're rebuilding our classroom. We haven't been using our classroom as much at divers incorporated because since COVID we've only had a couple of in person stuff, mostly IDC's and divemaster stuff and that sort of thing. But the in person stuff, I think needs to be televised.

And to people at least, that have come back for those of you guys, and shout out in any of the social medias, shout out on YouTube if you are a original talk shoe person, because that was when it was a lot of fun to do this. The technology was really new. And I think that technology with Twitch and Twitter and Facebook live and the things that I haven't really delved into yet are going to be the future of diving, or future of diving podcast anyway. And, man, there's a lot of them out there now. So, I mean, the favorites are still there. As far as I know. There were four of us when we first started. Now there's hundreds.

And it's always fun and inspirational to be able to see what other people have done, even though I may not have stayed in it the way I should have during 2020. I'm happy to have a business and I'm happy to be around. So that is what happened in March. And we're just going to keep this as the March 2024 episode. As we got towards the end of March, I had people that wanted to start doing tech 40 and some cool stuff like that and being able to do weekday stuff and weekend stuff is all over. And I'm going to talk about that in just a bit. And until next time, I mean, it's going to be soon. So we'll see you.

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