Belize Blog – Belizeadventure.com

Adventure travel to Belize just got cheaper. The next 30 reservations that we receive for ANY trip that visits our island between now and June can take 11% off the regular rate. And groups of 4 that sign up together can take 16% off (our regular group discount for 4+ is 10%). To learn more and to see if you qualify, visit our vacations to Belize specials page on our website: http://www.slickrock.com/belizevacationdeals.html.

Here are our island packages with the discounts applied:

Adventure Island at Glover’s Reef Full Week, Fri – Sat, 9 nights
Arrive in Belize Friday, fly home Sunday
11% off: $1846.75 US per person! ($2075 regular rate)

Adventure Island at Glover’s Reef First Half, Fri – Wed, 5 nights
Arrive in Belize Friday, fly home Thursday
11% off: $1152.55 US per person! ($1295 regular rate)

Adventure Island at Glover’s Reef Second Half, Tue – Sat, 5 nights
Arrive in Belize Tuesday, fly home Sunday
11% off: $1152.55 US per person! ($1295 regular rate)

Belize Adventure Week, Sat – Sat, 8 nights
Arrive in Belize Saturday, fly home Sunday
11% off: $2131.55 US per person! ($2395 regular rate)

You can sign up anytime by calling us at our toll free number (800.390.5715) during office hours or simply fill out our secure, on-line reservation form: https://slickrock.hosting-advantage.com/belizeislandreservation.html

Years ago I wanted to find a place like our place; an island outdoor center with snorkeling right from shore, all the sport toys, great guides, and located somewhere in the world where the water is warm and clear. In short, I wanted a busman’s holiday; I wanted to take an adventure vacation full of adventure activities where I wasn’t in charge. I wanted someone to guide me for a change.

That’s when I found out just how special our place is. Guess what: I couldn’t find it. I spent at least 20 hours online looking along the entire 3000 mile long Great Barrier Reef in Australia searching for an island like ours, and it didn’t exist.

We really lucked out when we got Long Caye. We first started in Belize in 1986 paddling sea kayaks from island to island, with all our gear in our boats, camping out on Laughing Bird Caye, the Silk Cayes, Pumpkin Caye, and Ranguana Caye. These are beautiful, tiny islands, and back in those days it was magical. But as time moved on they got crowded as others copied the itinerary we pioneered. We looked for another location to base out of, and found Glover’s Reef.

Our gear on Northeast Caye, Glover's Reef, in 1991

When we first went out there, we rented Northeast Caye. But still we only had sea kayaking and snorkeling to offer. After the first year we brought down one windsurf board and sail. But that was it. It took moving over to Long Caye, with its’ private surf spot to discover that what we really wanted to do was operate a sports center. Slowly over the years we have added new sports and now our spots array includes sea kayaking, snorkeling, diving, kitesurfing, windsurfing, kayak surfing, sport fishing, kayak fishing, paddleboarding, and surfing. We even throw in hammock surfing to recover from all of the activities!

If you are looking for a sport vacation, learn to ask the revealing questions. What kind of kayaks do they have? Do they also have life jackets, spray skirts, helmets (if kayak surfing)… do they provide instruction? What are the resumes of the instructors? Are you really going to learn to paddle, or are they just going to give you a recreational boat with a lousy paddle and no lifejacket and push you out to sea and you are on your own?

On our week long island packages you can learn to kayak, learn to surf, learn to windsurf, and catch the most bonefish of your life! Visit our island sport activities page to see a list of our gear. Or call us up if you have questions!

Here’s a hint: watch this blog for an adventurous travel offer.

Slickrock’s outdoor trips run through early May this season. A lot of our Belize trips are filling, but many of them still have lots of room. If you want the best deal of the season for a Belize private island package, keep your eyes on this blog. Just think: in just a month or two you can be hopping out of your kayak to access incredible coral snorkel spots in 80 degree water! Or catching your own private wave way out in the middle of the Caribbean. Or feasting on seafood and enjoying Belikin beer with your newest friends, watching the sun sink below the horizon. Join us this winter for a vacation trip of a lifetime.

It’s coming up soon. Check back for more.

We have been customers of Google since they first started the pay-per-click adwords program. I don’t even want to tell you how much we spend on those little ads that show up on the right of your screen when you Google something like “outdoor vacation“. And we are surely a tiny advertiser in the grand scheme of all-things-Google. Over the years, Google has made a habit of sending us a present around Christmas-time. I don’t know how much you have to spend to qualify for this, but clearly we are in the running. I have a Google flash drive, a Google kitchen apron, and my favorite present of all time was a $100 gift card to donorschoose.org, a website where you choose a schoolroom project that a classroom teacher is seeking financial help with. Thanks to that initial $100 from Google, I have continued to give to this great organization. (I used to be an art teacher, so I always choose an art project that appeals to me.) I have helped fund art projects in Albuquerque, Massachusetts, and in rural Utah. The teacher sends you a thank you, and once I even received drawings in a big envelope from the kids in the Albuquerque art program. This year we received… (wait for it)… a video thank you. Google tells us that they projected our company name on the moon, and provided the proof (see image below). If you want to see the full video, here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/adwords10?x=2926623391f84a2b8937df7c290e816d

We do feel special, thanks Google.

The internet is amazing. When we first moved to Long Caye in 1996, there were no on-line tools for watching the wind and waves off the coast of Belize. Now there are a whole host of websites that we watch to check the swell and wind. If you are planning a Belize surfing trip, you will want to check out the sites that we use.

Magic Seaweed! Our #1 favorite (screen shot in the image above), you can check swell, wind, sea temperature, pressure and period.

Swellwatch This one is cool because the maps are actually zoomed in to Belize.

Swellwatch also has a satellite image for the entire Caribbean coast.

And I love the graphics on Stormsurf, look at the waves streaming through the channel between Hispanola, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands!

Swellinfo We also regularly refer to this one, even though it has Cancun surf, not Belize. We have to extrapolate a bit to use it.

Mark Hopkins, one of our lead guides in Belize, was interviewed on Friday on Fish Talk Radio. If you want to hear some fish talk about our resident bonefish school, check out this interview. You can “fast-forward” to Mark’s interview, go to 34:00 and listen through to 40:24. FishTalkRadio

Victor just came in off the island yesterday and emailed these shots of Meg, our Belize kitesurfing instructor. Victor has an amazing waterproof camera he mounts all over the place to create these fantastic shots. Meg has only been on the island a few weeks. She is from North Wales, and spends about half of each year traveling and kiting all over the globe. A sailing, kiteboarding, and windsurfing instructor for over 10 years, she competes professionally on the pro circuit. We are excited to have her on our team!

Now that the season is in full swing and I am on the phone all day talking about Belize and our island, I am reminded how people searching the internet for Belize vacation trips just don’t understand what it means to go to a very remote part of the globe. Everyone wants to go to an exclusive location with no one else around, but they all expect it to be easy to get to. Guess what: if it’s easy to get to, there will be a lot of other people there. The harder a vacation spot is to travel to, the less people you will find when you arrive!

Our island, Long Caye at Glover’s Reef (pictured at left, above), is 35 miles off the shore of Belize, and is due east from Dangriga, Belize, which is about 50 miles south of Belize City. If you travel from Dangriga to Glover’s it’s a 35-mile boat ride. If you go directly from Belize City as we do, it’s a 65-mile diagonal route. Glover’s Reef is an atoll out past the Belize Barrier Reef (see our blog post What is an Atoll? or our Belize maps page on our website), so the first part of the boat ride is inside of the Belize Barrier Reef and the second part of the ride is outside the barrier reef. Regardless of whether you start in Dangriga or Belize City, you still have to do this open sea crossing to get to the atoll. It’s far, and it can be rough, and few private boats or really any boats at all that don’t own an island at Glover’s go out there. Glover’s Reef Atoll is the most remote ocean location in the entire country.

This is why if you want to go to Glover’s Reef, and you don’t want to charter you own boat (at a cost of approximately $650 US) you have to go on the days that the ferry to your island destination is scheduled to go. We operate our boat two days a week, on Saturday and on Wednesday. Some facilities at Glover’s only offer trips once a week. Our boat is based in Belize City, and the price of our travel package includes this boat ride. The price is based on a shared boat between 2 groups. The just-arriving group goes out on the same boat that takes the departing group off the island. Because of this, the boat must leave Belize City first thing in the morning to make the 3.5 hour ride out there, get unloaded, get reloaded, and get back to Belize City before dark. No international flight arrives that early, so you have to arrive the night before and stay in Belize City so that you can get up early to catch that boat ride.

If the boat you are using is out of Dangriga, you have to get there first; by bus, private vehicle, or plane. The roads in Belize are also rough in spots, so getting there by vehicle takes a while. Don’t be fooled by the term “highway”, such as the Western Highway or the Hummingbird Highway. We have seen some improvement to the roads in Belize since we first started guiding there in 1986, but this is still largely a rural road.

When joining any tour company that accesses a remote island by boat, make sure lifejackets are required, and make sure that the boat has more than one engine (if a single engine fails, you are in trouble). If the boat is covered, you will be much more comfortable in bad weather, and the larger the boat, the better. Our boat is a 41-foot, fully-covered, triple-engine outboard. We purchased Batfish in 2004, and have upgraded the engines and hull several times. We haven’t regretted this purchase for a minute since then. The importance of having the right boat for this kind of crossing cannot be over-emphasized.

So when planning your vacation, don’t purchase your air tickets and then look for a package to a remote island. Do it the other way around. Decide where you want to go and who you want to go with, and base your schedule on theirs. It’s the only way to join a company who offers trips to the least visited parts of this amazing planet.

Out in the island last week the wind was up and the skies cleared after our recent storm, so the crew was out on the water trying out our new kitesurfing equipment. Our guests from Vela and our kitesurf instructor ripped it up in the bay of the island before heading out across the sand flats to the next island, 3 miles down the reef. The sand flats between the islands provide a stunning area for sailing, racing above this shallow, coral-free bottom. The reflection of the sun off the bright white sand creates an illusion of floating above the surface. Large rays and fish are constantly encountered and easily seen as they try to bolt out of the way, always an exciting moment for both the kitesurfer and the fish…

We saw a few days of light winds on the island last week, but the surf came up so we jumped in for a few sessions of riding our break in almost glassy conditions. We have an excellent point break where we are able to get long rides down a continuously breaking shoulder. We had riders on surf boards, paddle boards, and surf kayaks. There’s nothing like surfing in 80 degree water, so clear you can watch the bottom rip by underneath your feet, while spotting the occasional ray or silver streaks of fish darting out of the way.

You can read more about Belize surfing on our website.