Honduras may not be the first name that springs to mind when you are with scuba divers discussing the great diving sites. In fact it may not even feature in the top twenty places you want to go. There is however one compelling reason to visit Honduras, and especially the island of Utila, and that is the why this article has been written.

The island of Utila, off the coast of Honduras, isn\’t your ordinary scuba-diving base, Sure, there\’s plenty of stunningly beautiful marine life to be seen. It isn\’t the beautiful, though, that draws many diving enthusiasts here. Rather, It\’s the exotlcally monstrous because Utila is one of the few places on Earth that the whale shark, the world\’s largest fish, can be spotted year round.

The whale shark has a kind of fearsome resonance behind the name, even the thought is enough to terrify the uninitiated. There are however a few quite surprising facts that the lay person ought to know and understand.

Whale sharks, which are harmless to humans, remain elusive creatures and relatively little is known about them, and their scientific name rhincodon typhus wasn\’t even established until 1984. Measuring up to an estimated fifteen metres, and twenty tonnes, they are filter feeders, sieving tropical seas for nutrients and migrating across oceans and up and down the coast of Central America. Oceanic upswells close to Utila consistently sweep together a rich soup of plankton and krill, making them a prime feeding ground for the immense creatures.

This is why most mornings, dive boats scour the seas north of Utila between reef dives looking for \”boils\” which are feeding frenzies created by bonito tuna rounding up huge schools of baitfish, or krill. Hungry sharks home in on the boils, gliding just beiow the surface, mouths agape as they scythe through the sea. Their blue-grey upper bodies are sprinkled with intricate patterns of white spots, which appear electric blue from a distance in the sunlight, interspersed with chessboard style markings.

Often, they feed upright, an astonishing sight – watch as the great fish manoeuvre themselves into a vertical position, bobbing up and down and gulping sea water into two-metre-wide mouths. If you\’d like, you can slip into the water with them. But do it white you can, because the chance to swim among them is usually fleeting, as the boils disintegrate rapidly and the sharks disappear as quickly as they came.

Hopefully this article will have dispelled the chilling thoughts that the words whale shark may have brought. Perhaps like the author, the word shark is simply synonymous with the movie ‘Jaws’ and it doesn’t really matter how often you are told that the Great White Shark’ is a completely different thing to something like a whale shark the fear remains. Well with any luck no longer will this be true, and if this article fascinates you as much as the subject of whale sharks fascinated me, then you owe it to yourself to travel to Honduras to see it all for yourself.

Ian Smith hopes you have enjoyed this article. You will find more interesting articles on travel if you go to Worldwide vacation Spots and if you are looking for great places to stay then check out Worldwide Vacation Rentals

Ian Smith hopes you have enjoyed this article. You will find more interesting articles on travel if you go to http://www.worldwidevacationspots.com and if you are looking for great places to stay then check out http://www.worldwidevacationspots.com/worldwide-vacation-rentals.html

Author Bio: Ian Smith hopes you have enjoyed this article. You will find more interesting articles on travel if you go to Worldwide vacation Spots and if you are looking for great places to stay then check out Worldwide Vacation Rentals

Category: Travel
Keywords: whale shark, scuba diving, honduras vacation, utila