Whale Shark Week
Manta Resort, Glover’s Atoll, Belize
Manta Resort is located on Southeast Caye, a 12-acre island at Glover’s Atoll.
Getting there:
We flew from Miami to Belize City, where we were promptly met by a representative of Manta and its sister resort, Blackbird Caye. From there, an air-conditioned bus took us to the Belize Tourism Village docks, where we had a bit of a wait for the boat ride to the island. We stopped for lunch at the nearby Smokey Mermaid at the Great House Hotel and then sat around at the shuttered tourism village for a couple hours before the boat was ready to depart. The village is set up primarily to cater to the cruise ship industry, so when no boats are in port, it’s pretty much a ghost town.
Once everyone was accounted for, we boarded “Pelagic,” Manta’s 50-foot boat, for a pleasant three-hour ride out to the island. The boat has enough space to accommodate our sold-out group, and complimentary soda, water and beer were served on the way. The ride out also provides a good opportunity to get to know everyone you’ll be spending a week with on a fairly small chunk of sand.
The accommodations:
Wooden cabanas are spread out nicely around the island in two sizes. We were in one of the smaller, less expensive cabanas and it suited our needs just fine. The units are all air conditioned with private porches which include a hammock, and the smaller ones have two double beds. Bathrooms have cold and somewhat vaguely lukewarm running water, but you don’t really need water to be all that hot in a place like this. More important than temperature is the water quality, and the island has a very good system for providing reverse-osmosis and UV filtered purified water. It was nice not to have to worry about getting sick from drinking the wrong water.
The food and such:
Meals are served in a large dining facility built out on the end of a long pier. A good variety of food is served buffet style for breakfast and lunch. At lunch, you’re asked for your choice for dinner that evening, generally a meat, fish or combination choice, and not a bad dish was served all week. The pleasant and personable staff does a great job of serving.
The dining hall also serves as the gathering spot both between dives and in the evening, and features a decently stocked bar. Bar service is sometimes provided by a bartender, and at other times the honor system is in effect. Then, you simply mark off the drinks or soft drinks you’re taking on a list atop the bar. Each evening, the deck around the dining hall became the gathering spot after dinner. A video and music system is also in the building, and several of the digital underwater photographers were able to show their work throughout the week. Co-managers Don and Debbie were frequently nearby to make sure things went smoothly, and they do a great job of keeping things working.
The regular dives:
The 25 or so divers on the island were split up into two groups for the week, some diving off “Pelagic” and the others using the smaller “Dolphin” for the local reef and wall diving. For trips to the whale shark zone at Gladden Spit, about an hour away by boat, “Pelagic” was used and the groups switched boats as needed.
All the nearby diving is incredibly close to the island and each trip took just a few minutes. Two dives are scheduled each morning at 8:00 and 11:00 and we came back to the island for a leisurely surface interval between dives each day. A third dive is scheduled each afternoon at 3:00. Local dives were a mix of wall and reef diving, with visibility in the 80- to 100-foot range and temperatures staying around a steady 82 degrees.
Most of our dives were led by Glen and Nadia, who were both superb at letting divers move at their own slow pace. Nadia (NAY dee ah) is an employee of the resort, while Glen was there on contract for whale shark week. The resort’s dive operation would be even better if Glen was a permanent fixture there. All dives were drift dives, and were planned to be an hour long. Individual buddy teams could easily surface when they wanted, and strict time limits were never in place. A couple dives even pushed the hour-and-fifteen-minute mark.
On days when the other group was off to Gladden Spit, we were led by James and Don the co-manager, who also did a fine job of leading the group.
The whale shark dives:
Glen and Nadia were also the trip leaders on our three dives in the whale shark zone. Strict rules have been put in place to strike a balance between the needs of local fisherman, the desires of divers to see the sharks and the protection of the sharks themselves. Group size on each dive is limited to 12 divers, and it seems there are no exceptions. One diver staying at the resort had to be taken to nearby Isla Marisol Resort so he could do the whale shark dives with their smaller group. The resort is issued tickets allowing divers to enter the zone at set times, and determining when they must be out. The tickets are given to staff regulating the zone in a boat anchored at one end.
On our first dive day in the zone, we were given tickets for a two-tank dive with an hour surface interval between them. We descended for our first dive and were led by Glen through the water at about 50 feet, with the bottom a couple hundred feet below. As a result, we pretty much saw… blue. A couple schools of fish caught our attention, but we saw no sign of the huge schools of spawning snapper said to be in the area during the full-moon weeks of April, May and June each year. As a result of the absence of spawning snapper, we also saw no whale sharks on that dive. We did see one snapper swimming in an odd upward spiral, and got excited thinking it was perhaps some part of the spawning process, but it turned out it was just caught by a nearby fisherman and was being slowly pulled to the surface.
On our second dive we saw… less. Just a single barracuda and a jellyfish broke the monotony of swimming through the blue. Divers began doing flips and striking poses to pass the time as we watched in vain for a whale shark.
Two days later, we were allowed one more shot into the zone, this time just a single-tank dive. On the plus side, Glen had procured the last slot in the late afternoon, just before the zone is closed to divers, and it’s said to be the best time to go. The first 30 minutes of the dive was deja vu… just a lot of blue. Then we heard a clicking sound from a nearby group of divers and turned to see a huge mouth appear out of the blue. Glen estimated the whale shark to be in the 30-foot range, and it slowly cruised through our group, seemingly intentionally turning to give everyone a straight-on look into its mouth, and then gliding by quite literally close enough to touch before getting tired of us and moving on. Seconds later, another smaller shark around 20 feet paid a fleeting visit before disappearing.
The highlights:
Whale sharks were obviously the highlight of the trip, and I now have a new answer for the occasional non-diver question: "What's the coolest thing you've ever seen underwater?" Equally great though, was meeting a fabulous group of people, and we already have plans for another trip with four of them. The weather was also astoundingly perfect, with highs around 90 and almost flat seas every day. Just a day before we left, Hurricane Adrian was heading across Central America and looking to stir things up, so our perfect weather was a delightful surprise.
The couple things that would make the resort even better:
I’d consider Manta a very well run resort if it were located on the mainland with easy access to supplies. When its remote location is factored in, the place rates superb overall.
A couple things would be welcome additions though, including a rinse station on the dive dock. The crew does make sure to hose off everybody’s BC and regs on the boat, but for wetsuits and such, you’re pretty much on your own. We hauled them back to our cabanas, rinsed them on the porch in the little footbath and hung them to dry on the provided line. Some sort of shelter near the dive dock for hanging gear to dry would also be a nice addition.
One final note regarding Whale Shark Week. The resort used to state on its website that a spotter plane would be used during whale shark week in order to increase the chances of an encounter. No plane was used during our stay, and I believe that must have been a holdover from before the Gladden Spit zone was so highly regulated. A spotter plane would serve no purpose now, because your visits to the zone are so regulated. While we went there with the understanding that a plane would be used during this week, the reference to the spotter plane has since been removed from Manta's website. It probably should have been removed sooner to avoid confusion and the appearance they were being misleading.
This review is the subjective opinion of a TripAdvisor member and not of TripAdvisor LLC
