I actually liked the place, for the most part, though found Roatan diving
disappointing.  I had been working on a trip report but only got two
paragraphs into it before your post.  Might as well get it all off my chest:

(Food)

Breakfasts and lunches were usually very edible, though service was a bit
quirky.  I couldn't figure out how the waiter could mess up an order like
"two eggs over easy with toast", especially after he wrote everything down.
From the website, it sounds like they offer a dinner menu, but it was really
just a single nightly special of varying quality.  The fish in banana leaves
was tasty and the roasted tenderloin certainly more tender than the chewy
non-Argentinean beef served at the Argentinean Grill in West End.  Our group
had a couple birthdays during the week and the cooks whipped out cakes on
really short notice.

(Diving)

The dive operation ran smoothly enough, though our DM (Gustavo) swam a bit
too fast for my taste.  Our boat was slow, but we only had a really long
ride once when we went around the point to Herbie's Place, and snorkeling
with a whale shark on the way back made it worth every minute.  Dive times
of 50 or so minutes on most dives may seem restrictive to some, but adequate
for my air consumption rate (though I proudly lasted 63 minutes on the last
dive when they let us stay a bit longer).  The nitrox was a bit pricey at
$150 for the "unlimited" package, since "unlimited" really meant 16 boat
dives, though the dive shop made getting nitrox tanks analyzed and loaded on
the boat much easier than other places I've been and the two Inspiration
divers in our group got their O2 and diluent (air) bottles filled without
any glitches.  Spooky Channel was definitely oversold as it was a long swim
against current in one direction to see nothing more than a pretty rock
formation and almost no marine life.  We did it twice and that was once too
much.  Overall, I found the diving in Roatan disappointing.  The terrain was
very interesting with loads of crevices and channels and swim throughs, and
it was covered with enough corals and sponges to make it pretty, but I was
expecting a lot more fish 'n "stuff".  -- Dive Report appended below --

(Accommodations, etc.)

They put us up in a "deluxe ocean view" room, which, while not luxurious by
any means, was spacious enough and amazingly bug-free except for one little
roach on the bathroom counter.  When one of the shower knobs wouldn't turn
off because it was threaded, I told Ted and he had it replaced by the time
we were done with our morning dives.  The bed wasn't comfortable, but that's
par for mid-to-low-priced Latin American accommodations.  Bar drinks were
good enough and well priced, though they did close early.  One problem we
had was with Gilberto, one of the bartender/waiters, who was running a
little scam on his employers and the guests, pocketing cash for drinks that
would later appear on the guests' bar tabs.  Not wanting to complain
mid-trip and then meet up with the guy in town and get waylaid, I saved my
complaint for the end and just now received a follow-up call from Pam (Cam?
i.e. Ted's wife, whatever her name is) who took down all the details,
assured me that Gilberto will no longer be working there, and offered me a
refund for some of the overcharges, so it seems that the owners are
definitely responsive to guests' concerns.

What I liked most about the place was the relative seclusion.  Only 20-30 or
so guests at a time, accomodations spread out on the grounds, lots of
hammocks and chairs for contemplating the sunsets, hardly any boat or foot
traffic, I really felt like I "got away" from it all.  I definitely
appreciated the relative solitude each time our boat passed through the
massive (by comparison) Anthony's resort.  That said, I did have the
companionship of Janna and a large dive shop group, many of whom I've dove
with plenty of times before and consider friends.  Had I traveled alone, or
just with Janna, the place might have seemed too secluded.

(Overall)

Had the diving been better, I might even consider returning some day.
Anthony's seemed too big, I heard from another guest who just came from
Fantasy Island that the place was really dirty, and CocoView is, well,
CocoView.  It ain't luxury, but it's plenty good enough for the price.
However, I've experienced better diving in Cozumel, Bonaire, and even Grand
Cayman (north wall), and would repeat those spots and also give Little
Cayman, Saba, Turks & Caicos, Tobago, and possibly a few other places a try
before ever heading back to buggy Roatan.  And it was buggy, even though it
was probably the least buggy season there.  After generously spraying my
legs with Off twice a day, I still managed to collect a decent number of
bites of all sorts that are still keeping me scratching.  Also, many in our
group complained of intestinal problems, and a cold virus seemed to be
making the rounds as well, which kept me out of the water for two scheduled
dives - I don't know whether that has anything to do with BIBR in particular
or malarial Roatan in general, but I sure am glad to be back in the healthy
Californian desert so I can fully recuperate before my next adventure.

In March, I'm on the Nekton Pilot's southern Belize itinerary, to give
Belize one more chance after my disappointing Ambergris Caye dives a couple
years ago.  Nekton is now sending the Rorqual to the Caymans for part of the
year.  For those that don't mind the confines of a boat and could care less
about top-side activities and nightlife, I believe a liveaboard is far
preferable to a dive resort like BIBR, one of several reasons why I'm not
headed on my dive shop's April trip to LCBR instead.

So who won?

-- THE DIVES --

Except for the shark dive, all dives were done from BIBR's boat, the Miss
Katie, following DM Gustavo, using 32-33% nitrox in single aluminum 80s.
Water was 79-80 degrees F, weather was sunny and breezy with scattered
clouds, and water conditions were almost flat most days with little to no
current, except for light swells when we dove around the point at Herbie's
Place.  Visibility was 50-80'.

12/27/05

Dive 1:  Bear's Den. 67' for 49 minutes.  This was our "check-out" dive on
the reef just out in front of the resort.  Roatan has some great-shaped
walls, gently sloping from depths almost breaking the surface down to 30-50'
or so, where the wall starts to drop steeply to an (unmeasured) bottom of
150' or so.  This made for nice profiles, going deep as our nitrox mix would
allow at the start of the dives.  I found a cute little baby turtle hidden
in a crevice, pointed it out to Janna, and then we left it alone so that the
rest of the group wouldn't discover and molest it.

Dive 2:  Green Outhouse.  66' for 51 minutes.

The reefs were covered with a nice colorful selection of hard and soft
corals, though they were a bit battered in spots.  BIBR enforced a no-gloves
policy, yet our DM puffed up a puffer on one dive and gave absolutely no
"suggestions" to several clueless divers on our boat about keeping their
fins off the reef or manhandling the marine life that shouldn't be
manhandled.  Fortunately the turtle that one idjit tried to grab for a ride
swiftly got away.  The same guy grabbed the whale shark we saw later in the
trip, which scared it away for the rest of us to enjoy longer and for anyone
else on the island that week to enjoy at all.  It wasn't spotted again as
far as we heard, probably fleeing back to Utila.

The fish were pretty similar across the reefs we dove.  A basic selection of
Caribbean reef fish.  I rarely noted what we saw on any particular dive, but
in general we encountered a fair number of fairy basslets, blue chromis, a
few linear schools of initial phase creole wrasse, lots of parrotfish of
various types (blue, stoplight, princess, and a few midnights), loads of
juvenile wrasses, various snappers, a couple nassau and black groupers,
graysbys, squirrelfish in the cavelets, banded and two-spot butterflies,
porkfish, spanish hogfish, lots of black durgons, a few whitespotted and one
scrawled file fish, juvie trunkfish, various damselfish, and some indigo
hamlets.  Of special note were a little school of atlantic spadefish, a
couple baby spotted drums and one large adult, a couple pompanos, several
giant barracudas, one southern stingray, one spotted eagle ray, and a couple
ocean triggers.  Nothing really rare except the cool toadfish on the night
dive (see below).

Dive 3:  Spooky Channel.  68' for 41 minutes.  This one made me suck my air
down in no time at all as we swam against the current after the boat dropped
us on the reef outside the channel's entrance.  Very boring looking down and
to the sides, but rolling on one's back and doing the dive upside down made
all the difference in the world.  Sunlight filtering down through jagged
interwoven overhangs.  Beautiful.  But only really worth doing once.  A few
in our group did a couple night dives in the channel and reported more
marine life, but the rest of us preferred to drink our nights away instead.
The only fish I remember from this dive was a sand tilefish that the DM dug
out of his burrow so we could all see him dive in again.

12/28/05

Dive 4:  El Aguila wreck.  106' for 46 minutes.  This was a nice dive.  The
wreck is rather large, though broken into three pieces.  We didn't do any
penetration, but a friendly green moray came over to play with us and swam
through my hands.  Finished the dive in the adjacent reef, making for a
nicer profile than most wrecks I've dove.

Dive 5:  Wayne's Place.  63' for 55 minutes.

Dive 6:  Cara a Cara.  51' for 53 minutes.  After lunch, we collected our
gear and boarded the vans for a ride to La Palma on the south coast.  BIBR
had set up our group with a shark dive.  Normally I pass on the "artificial"
dives, but this one didn't sound too horrible and it was my only chance to
see the offshore reef.  They took us a mile out to the end of a finger reef
jutting our perpendicularly from the main barrier reef to a site where the
Carribean reef sharks congregate in expectation of their daily free meals.
The briefing was administered by a French-accented guy who explained that
they've determined that the feedings constitute no more than 10% of the
sharks' daily diet, so they don't feel like they're skewing the ecosystem
too much.  We went down to a sandy patch at 50' and sat with our backs to
the reef wall while watching ten or so medium-large sharks (6-8 feet) circle
around waiting for their meal.  Inside the reef was a big green moray and a
couple nassau groupers nosed around.  Eventually they opened the bucket and
the fish inside was quickly devoured by the vicious killers, and then we
were instructed to swim around with them for a bit.  I liked getting up
close and personal with one of them for a while, making some great eye
contact with the big fish that would otherwise love to tear me to shreds but
for the fact he'd be sacrificing future free meals, but after getting kicked
in the face twice by overexcited divers and then having my regulator almost
pulled out of my mouth by the case of one of the Inspirations passing too
closely, I got bored and headed away from the group to look for little stuff
until the dive was over.

Dive 7:  Mike's Place.  55' for 52 minutes.  This was our scheduled boat
night dive.  Not as much life on this night dive as I've encountered on the
other Caribbean night dives I've done (Cozumel, Grand Cayman, Bonaire,
Cuba).  No one found an octopus.  A few spiny lobsters (Caribbean and
spotted), a clinging channel (aka "king") crab, a banded coral shrimp and a
few Pederson's and lots of red shrimp that looked like good eating.  The
exciting note was when Janna spotted a camouflaged creature that I at first
took to be a big scorpionfish, but it had the eyes on top of its head and
was more elongated than a regular fish.  It turned out to be a large eye
toadfish, something that's "uncommon Caribbean coast of Central America"
according to Humann & DeLoach, so we kept its whereaboats secret from the
rest of the group so it too could remain unmolested.  That was one of the
only two moments on this trip when I missed having my camera.

12/29/05

I finally succumbed to whatever bug I had been fighting off since we
disembarked from the third leg of our TACA adventure.  It didn't help that
Janna and I and my buddy Brian had gone to town that night to eat at the
Argentinean Grill.  Brian had already been wending his way through Nicaragua
for a week before meeting us in Roatan and he was hungry for some night
life.  After a decent steak dinner sitting at a table on the beach, who did
I spot inside the restaurant when I went for a pee break but the queen of
rec.scuba nightlife herself, accompanied by her friend from NYC.  We drank
while they dined, then hit the Twisted Toucan for a couple hours.  It was
jam packed with people of all creeds and colors, and the highlight of the
evening was when the well-endowed and well-liquored blond girl seated at the
bar slowly pulled down her top showing her attributes to all for much longer
than the typical "flash".  Very exciting indeed.  Otherwise, we could barely
hear each other talk even when huddled by the half-open wall in order to
catch the cooling breeze.  A few minutes after midnight, the place suddenly
went dark and we all piled out onto the street, the owner of the place being
dragged away by the policia.  Apparently she had let too many customers
leave with bottles of beer, which is a no-no there, and the cops wanted to
teach her a lesson.  Plastic cups full of intoxicating beverages, however,
are completely legal, so we could continue to quench our thirst as
practically as the entire barful paraded its way through the town on the way
to the Black Pearl.  As it was approaching 1 a.m. by the time we got there,
Janna and I caught a cab at the Black Pearl to BIBR, leaving Brian with the
women.  He made it back sometime early the next morning.

(Side bitch:  Most of our luggage was delayed until the evening of our
morning arrival day, a couple in the group got theirs the next day, and one
woman had her clothes bag disappear entirely - on the way back it took four
legs, with an unscheduled stop in La Ceiba to change plans on route to San
Pedro Sula - I hope to never have to fly TACA again).

In the morning my head was completely stuffed up and there was no way I was
making the boat.  I said my goodbye to Janna, took a couple of her Nyquil
capsules, and went back to sleep.  Around 11 a.m., I felt much better, and
made my way over to meet the returning boat.  They got to do the other wreck
site (the Odyssey) and Barry's Reef.

Dive 8:  Pillar Coral.  71' for 51 minutes.  Only five of our group made the
afternoon dive, as most everyone had succumbed by this time to something
intestinal or upper-respiratory.  I don't remember much of this dive, except
that we were supposed to see a big pillar of coral or something.  Instead,
while my headache instantly cleared at depth on the 32%, my ears were still
a bit pluggy notwithstanding the Nyquil's pseudoephedrine and the Afrin I
snorted pre-dive, and I got a nasty case of alternobaric vertigo on the way
back up.  I was taking it very slow and at 30' just felt a bit lightheaded
and dizzy, but then the DM had us go through a swimthrough which abruptly
ended in a vertical plume that took us right up to 10', making that final
bit of ascent quicker than I usually like since we were herded through one
at a time.  I sat at 10' for a while to compensate, but felt like the world
was spinning, then when I couldn't take that any longer, got back on the
boat and vomited for a while.  A half hour later, I felt good as new, but we
passed on going out with the other three divers for a Spooky Channel night
dive.

12/30/05

Dive 9:  Herbie's Place.  123' for 50 minutes.  This was the highlight of
our trip.  Lots of schooling creole wrasses, the aforementioned spadefish
and barracuda, lots of lobsters and a couple "king" crabs, and some of the
healthiest coral we saw that week, it was easily worth driving almost an
hour out to the end of the island.  D9 didn't seem to mind that I hit 1.6
for a minute or so, other than beeping a couple times and flashing.  We did
a surface interval at a beach populated by cruisers, then, headed back to
the next site, stopped where a few other boats were circled around a swarm
of feeding tunas.  Someone had spotted a whale shark.  Our DM climbed atop
the boat to look, and at one pointed we all jumped in at his command, but to
no avail.  Eventually we gave up and headed back.

Dive 10:  Turtle Crossing.  72' for 54 minutes.  Only one turtle seen at the
"crossing".  After my last dive trip in Kauai, where I could sit next to 5
or 6 at a time, big ho hum.  But we had a surprise in store for us:

Back on the boat and on the way back to the resort, we again spotted a swarm
of tunas.  The DM gave us the option of heading back for lunch and the third
dive, or wasting time searching for a whale shark.  We opted to waste time,
or at least that's what I thought we were doing as we kept searching from
one tuna swarm to another.  Finally, after an hour and a half of this,
Gustavo spotted one and we got in the water with our snorkels (except that I
didn't have one) and swam where he was pointing.  I got there first and thar
she was:  an adolescent, about 20-25 feet.  She was heading to the surface
right toward me, then veered toward the rest of our group.  On her second
pass, she got really close - I was almost within touching distance, maybe 5
feet away - but when she got near the others, three swam real close by its
tail and one grabbed the back of its dorsal fin.  With a great swish of its
tail (that I secretly hoped would knock the offending grabber senseless, but
instead merely grazed his leg), it took off away and down and not to be
spotted again.  Certainly not to be spotted by the other boat our group was
occupying, which went out after lunch searching for two hours.

Dive 11:  Spooky Channel.  91' for 42 minutes.  Since we missed our
afternoon boat dive with our whale shark encounter, the DM offered to drop
us off at the lagoon entrance to the channel to save us a surface swim.
Four of us took him up on the offer and we headed as far as the ocean
entrance against the current, then followed the line back all the way to
about 5 feet of water back in the turtlegrass flats right off the beach.  An
orange hogfish followed us in the shallows.  Again, some pretty rock, but
that's about it.

12/31/05 - New Year's Eve

Dive 12:  Fish Den.  107' for 46 minutes.

Dive 13.  Bear's Den.  57' for 63 minutes.  I felt like being alone on this
dive and eventually Janna decided to blow off the group and join me.  We
lagged so far behind that when we got to the fork about 30 feet inside the
"cave", I chose to back out rather than picking the wrong way.  By this
time, I had had enough with the none-too-exciting Roatan reef diving, and
opted to join Janna in skipping the afternoon dive, a decision emulated by
all but four hardcore souls.  Thirteen is my lucky number, and also happens
to be 31 reversed, so that seemed a fine way to end the diving portion of
the trip and get on with the partying.

We had our dinner and lots of drinks and champagne at BIBR, then five of us
joined a family from Arizona that had just arrived that morning for a ride
in a BIBR van down to West End.  As soon as we made a left at the
crossroads, who did I spot walking along the road but chilly and her friend.
The driver let us out and we accompanied them to Sundowners for part one of
our New Year's celebration.  A few beers and rum & pineapples later, and
meeting a friendly Brit DM who was soon headed back to Dressel Divers in
Cozumel (at the Iberostar, which I'd like try someday), it was getting close
to countdown time.  We mosied on over down to the Black Pearl, where I
caught up with chilly and Janna just in time to skip the ever-growing line,
and made it upstairs just in time to buy a few drinks and start the
countdown.  There was a great band playing and we danced and drank away
until calling it a night at 3 a.m.  At BIBR, some neighbor was still having
a very loud party, so we snuck up the hillside a ways to see if we could
crash it.  Fearing getting shot or worse, we finally gave up and went to
bed.   The next day was restful as most of the group went off for the
afternoon to do the dolphin snorkel at Anthony's Key, then we flew home the
next morning.

Now I have to find where I hid my videocamera so I can be sure to bring it
to Belize.  I was actually relieved I didn't find it in time to bring it to
Roatan since it would have taken up a luggage allotment that we didn't have.
Janna now acknowledges that she packs too many clothes for a dive trip, so I
shouldn't have trouble getting it on the plane to Belize so long as it turns
up somewhere.  We're flying good 'ole Continental then, so I get 70 lbs per
bag and shouldn't have a problem even if we decide to check-in an extra bag,
besides paying an exhorbitant $100 fee.  If anyone else from the NG is down
there, we'll be at the Princess Hotel in Belize City from noon 'til 6 on
3/18/06, and all day on 3/25/06, residing on the Pilot the week in between.