Act III:The Resort

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth

Mike Tyson

I had a plan:

• Immediate needs:
• New website
• Solar power—the power here is extremely expensive and extremely unreliable.
• Make sure boats are fixed and running and stay that way.
• Finish owner’s quarters on 3rd floor.
• Redecorate–new fans and lights, new art, decorative pillows, etc.
• revamp landscaping–all plantings cleaned up, landscaping lights.
• Trees–banana, avocados, mango, papaya, lime, breadfruit.
• Repair and/or replace dive equipment as needed.
• More water storage tanks (water is always a nice thing to have).

• Someday needs:
• Beach.
• New Dive boat.
• Rinse sinks for dive gear.
• Fix dock.
• Extend dock.
• New kitchen on back porch.
• New and bigger pool.
• More rooms (enough rooms for 20 people comfortably).
• Ability to offer fishing (on sight).
• More and better patio and pool furniture.
• Beach!!! (worth saying twice).

There is a beach somewhere under this mess!

Now that’s a lot of needs for someone who’s already spent a big chunk of his money!

I knew I was going to spend a lot of our available money on solar and it had to be done. The municipal power is some of the most expensive in the world (I’ve been told) and it is very unreliable. The power outages were so common that I truly believed the night guy at the power plant was shutting off the island’s power when he went to lunch or the bathroom.

We have a generator large enough to run the critical stuff—refrigeration and some lights—but not everything. Almost all our guests are American and as you know, us Americans love our……..air conditioning so we spent a large portion of our money installing the solar and it’s up and running. It isn’t enough, but it’s a good start.

ten lithium batteries. I figure we need 5 more batteries plus lots more panels and inverters to be truely “off grid”

Budget blow #1

The beginning of last fall the ferry shut down unexpectedly. Fall is the slow/rainy season and the ferry decided to shut down and this left us and a lot of others pretty-much screwed.

It’s bad enough that the ferry runs just 2 days a week, and there is only one day people can get here same day—we learned to live with that. But, POW! Stop completely, with no warning?  Our biggest competitor, who runs groups non-stop went from paying about $1,000 to get people from Roatan to Guanaja to having to use a $6,000 charter flight–each way!

Being the new kid on the block, we only had a few small groups on the books.  We were forced to go pick them up in our boat. Our big boat is way too unreliable to make that trip which meant we had to use the panga. And folks, a 26 foot panga bouncing around the open sea on a windy day ain’t no fun! And if it’s the rainy season, add driving, stinging rain to the mix.

The ferry owners informed us that they will do the same thing next year—at least they warned us this time—so we were in serious need of coming up with alternatives for people to get here.

My solution (right or wrong) was to move the new dive boat from “someday need” to “immediate need,” and the boat needed to be big enough, strong enough, and fast enough to make the trip to and from Roatan. The boat would also give us the ability to book people during the busy season for days other than Saturday-Saturday.

Coming soon: there will be a blog about the dive boat fiasco caused by a bit of seriously poor judgement on my part.

Nice enough boat but not big and powerful enough for open water passages.

Budget blow #2

After the DEMA show, I stayed in Kansas City through the holidays. Elizabeth handled the few guests we had (with aplomb) so I was able to stay home and work on marketing stuff. When I arrived back on the island after the holidays, I stepped out of the boat and my foot went through the dock. That is never good.

In an instant, the boat dock went from “someday need” to “immediate need.”

If you’re masochist enough to read everything I write, you will read multiple times that this place might be paradise, but it is also a very harsh environment. Everything here lives in one of two states:  Broken or about to break. I thought I had six months to a year before I needed to address the dock. Instead, the dock addressed my leg about up to my knee.

So, the dock and the new boat really blew the budget out of the water. One of the other “immediate needs”—finishing the owner quarters—is now quickly approaching that same budget-busting status. Finishing those rooms is a must because we are living in 2 guest rooms and Elizabeth is getting very tired of that. She needs her own space where she can get away from the hubbub. It isn’t quite so bad for Laurie and me because we are not here full time, but we need the guest rooms for the guests. We don’t have enough rooms as it is, and us living in two of them is a problem.

And me being me, I can’t do a building project and stay within a budget.

“When doing this, we should go ahead and do that…and oh, wouldn’t it cool to change that over there? Oh, and…what do you think about adding….”

Down the rabbit hole I go.

Next week’s blog–the dock gets partially rebuilt!