The Bay Islands popularly ( mistakenly )are associated with Roatan , Utila and Guanaja ; I say mistakenly because the Wyke – Cruz treaty ( 1859 )refers to the “the Islands of Ruatan , Guanaca , Elena , Utile , Barbarete and Morat “. The remotest and indeed the most isolated of these is Elena or St. Helene to its inhabitants. The Helenians have had it hard to make a living from farming when they first arrived in the 1830’s much like the earlier inhabitants , the Payan Indians. Fishing , turtling , lobstering and conching on a subsistence level was and is as much part of the Helene culture as each man having his smallholding or ‘ground’ where he would have a couple hundred plaintain ‘suckers’ , dozens of ‘holes’ of cassava ( yucca ) and watermelons ‘melon’ in season. Much of this economic activity ( or methods of survival ) was pretty commonplace in all of the Bay Islands with the exception of lobstering and conching which were developed extensively in St. Helene mainly due to the island’s proximity to the extensive reefs surrounding Barbarat , Morat and Helene itself.
In the 1950’s and 60’s and long before that lobsters and conchs were abundant .A short walk along the shallow bar at any given time would get you a family sized meal. The wealthy people in the thriving city of La Ceiba learned of this and opened a window of opportunity for the Helenians buying all the conch and lobster they could get over there ( a 6 to 8 hour sail away ). There was one problem , the lobsters had to be kept alive ! But we will talk about that in a bit. The catching was the first task . Scuba diving was not even mainstream in the first world let alone on a small third world island and so rudimentary diving equipment , mask , snorkel and fins were unheard of and so small open wooden boxes with a glass bottom were built and inserted into the water where the lobster fishermen could see the antennae or ‘whips’ of the lobsters extending from the rocks. Once identified , a long wooden pole with a wire snare on it would be dropped down slowly , the lobster slowly teased out of its ‘hole’ and snared . This sounds easy but imagine doing all of this while holding the small wooden dory steady over the rock in question. But the struggle didn’t end here , as I mentioned , the lobster had to be kept alive and so instead of pulling the lobster in the dory they were placed in onion sacks which allowed the water to circulate and which in turn were towed along besides the dory . It was not worth making the odyssey to La Ceiba for just a handful of lobsters and so a trip over would represent several days worth of lobstering ; where were the lobster’s kept after they were snared and towed alongside the dory you might ask ? ……..yes , a pen or corral was built using palmetto logs. The lobsters travelled over to La Ceiba using the same onion sacks . Imagine all this work and the Lobsters used to fetch 10US cents ( granted , a dollar in those days could buy quite a bit ) and that’s what the lobster fishermen did , bought goods with the proceeds ( small luxuries like yellow cheese ) to sell back home.
In the 70’s and 80’s enterprising islander’s who had gone to work on shrimp boats in the Gulf of Mexico with US fleets came back with investors and started up seafood packing plants and the Bay Islands shrimping ( and later lobster trapping , more recently diving ) fleets sprang up. A couple of enterprising Helenians , Norin and Iverson Bodden ( later Victor James joined in ) obtained kerosene powered freezers ( there was no electricity besides private generators ) and started purchasing Lobster tails ( for export to the US market ) which made the process much easier. With the demand rising , the lobsters in turn slowly moved deeper to avoid the increasing number of eager divers and could no longer be reached with the old wooden pole and snare. Freediving started in earnest. The general stores in Oakridge such as Gough’s and Lem Ebanks started carrying masks , snorkel’s and fins. Those that had relatives ‘steamshipping’ overseas would have diving equipment brought down. Hooksticks became the popular tool for catching the lobster and freediving became popular and besides a way of making a living , a sport. Helenians developed techniques of expanding the lungs before diving down which would allow them to go deeper and stay down longer ; ear clearing techniques were developed and acquired to allow the divers to go deeper without having to pause to equalize. At the height of the free diving sub-culture in the mid 80’s successful freedivers were capable of diving to depths of 12 – 14 fathoms ( 6ft to a fathom for the uninitiated – fathom being the popular term used by Helenians to guage depth ) and hooking 3 lobsters before returning to the surface , a process that took several minutes. These fit young men were able to keep this up for several hours a day , 3 or 4 days a week. Once word got around of the Helenian’s skill , shrimp boats reconditioned to sleep 30 or 40 men began arriving at Helene to hire divers to go to the ‘banks’ where lobster were more abundant. Honduran banks or reefs such as Alligator Reef , Coxcomb Reef , Hobbies and further away in Colombian waters to magical places days away from here such as Quita Sueño , Seranilla , Serrano Banks and further south into Sandinista waters to Martinez Reefs. Divers were paid by the ‘box’ ( 100pounds ) and this price per box would be negotiated with the boat Captain depending on the diver’s skill. A boat in a 30 day trip could bring back 60 boxes ( 6000pounds ) which could net a good diver LPS.3,000 which was quite a lot of money then when the exchange rate was 2 to 1.
Beginning in the 1990’s diving boats started using fiberglass dories ( canoes ) which were lighter ( meaning fuel savings ) and easier to stack on the boats ( taking up less space ) ; prior to this all dories were wooden , solid carved out of a single tree trunk either mahogany or whitewood. Handling a dory proficiently was a skill in itself , paddling correctly and efficiently in order to follow a straight line towards a destination but the skill I personally found the hardest to master and was one of the proudest moments in my diving career when I did , was to enter into the dory after coming out of the water from a dive. The trick was to first ,grab both sides of the dory and launching oneself out of the water with a firm kick of the flippers ( fin-foot ) while swinging your rear-end ( bonke ) on to the seating plank ( thwart – pronounced ‘tort’ ). An experienced diver or dory man could perform this movement without his companion even feeling a shift in the equilibrium of the craft ! Of course there were those that could never master dory skills and who would be forever teased and berated by the experts. I made sure to practice and become skilled but it wasn’t after being called marble-bonke and crankey a few times.
The freedivers made hay while the sun shined but of course with the demand for lobster tails and more and more boats out on the banks and more divers around the islands ( Bonaccians had jumped on the bandwagon and were producing some very talented young divers as well as Calabash Bight , Fiddler’s Bight and Punta Gorda down the shore on Roatan ), lobsters became scarcer and were living even deeper. Only very skilled and experienced freedivers who had memorized their special holes could come up with a decent payday. There were special quirks and inside knowledge to lobster diving ; A diver looking down at coral rocks from above would see the sand whiter and cleaner with maybe a few shell fragments at the mouth of a rock crevice where a lobster was living ; of course if a lobster was in a crevice and fending off small fish it would wave its antennae ( whips ) to reveal its location to the diver who would be snorkelling above.
Tanking started to be practiced by the Helenians in the 1990’s following the Miskito Indians ( Waikna’s ) lead. But this was barebones tank diving , no buoyancy compensator ( BC ) , no depth guage and no pressure guage ! I learned to tank dive like this and was taught , just like I was taught to freedive by the best Helenian divers and the critical advice was 1. When the tank started to make a ringing sound it was getting empty and it was time to come up. 2. Never ascend faster than the speed of your bubbles and 3. If the air in your tank finishes on your way up don’t hold your breath but exhale as you float ( not swim )to the top. Needless to say there were fatalities and injuries with a few young men left to live the rest of their lives , bedridden or in wheelchairs , if their families could afford it.
Diving on Helene is still a way of life , both freediving and tanking ; in fact there are a few small locally owned boats that venture out to the banks and do quite well nowadays with the implementation and observance of a Lobster season. Freedivers do well at places like Alligator Reef and Half Moon Reef ( located about 70miles East of Barra Patuca ) where the lobsters are in relatively shallow waters . Rich lobster producing banks and reefs like Quita Sue~o ( 150miles east of Puerto Cabezas ), once frequented by Bay Islands boats and Miskito and Helene divers are now too far to travel to with the cost of fuel and fuel range of small boats prohibitive , not to mention the advanced technology of GPS surveillance which limits Honduran vessels to remain in national waters .
I was fortunate to have lived this life for a couple of years living in St.Helene , I was accepted by this community and my curiosity was rewarded by these humble yet very tough folk who taught me , unselfishly , all the skills I needed to survive and live the very basic life of a Helenian. I did a few trips out on the fishing banks , the first of which was on a small 60ft wooden hull called the Lady Hilda skippered by the owner Charles Tatum ( popularly known as ‘Uncle Pete’ ) who confidently navigated his vessel hundreds of miles from these islands placing the boat at exact points with just a compass , an old maritime chart yellow with age and a VHF radio. No Loran , no Satnav , quite incredible but we trusted him implicitly …….. but that’s for another story !
