Utila
— — where the whale sharks come up to feed.
Not only on a wall.
“The smallest of Honduras's Bay Islands, an hour by ferry from La Ceiba. Forty-one square kilometres of coral, mangrove, and a single harbour street where most of the island still walks. The water off the north shore goes from sand-pale to indigo in one step off the reef wall. Divers come for the whale sharks. The rest come for the quiet between dives.
Utila, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Utila is the smallest of the three Bay Islands lying off the northern coast of Honduras, sitting about 29 kilometres from the mainland port of La Ceiba. The island covers roughly 41 square kilometres and rises only a few metres above sea level at its highest point, Pumpkin Hill. It sits on the southern edge of the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, the second-largest reef system in the world after Australia's Great Barrier. The main settlement, East Harbour, holds nearly all of the island's roughly 4,000 residents.
The reef wall off Utila's north and east shores drops sharply from shallow turtle grass into deep Caribbean blue. Visibility regularly runs past 25 metres. From February through April, whale sharks gather in the channel between Utila and Roatán, drawn by plankton blooms above the underwater seamount known locally as the Pinnacle. Utila is one of the few places on earth where the sharks appear with enough reliability that researchers have built a long-term sighting registry around them.
Most travellers reach Utila on the Utila Princess ferry from La Ceiba, an hour each way, twice daily. There are essentially no cars on the island; people move by foot, scooter, golf cart, or water taxi. Open-water dive certifications run roughly 300-400 US dollars and are among the cheapest in the Caribbean, which is why Utila has held its reputation as a backpacker dive hub since the 1990s. The surrounding waters fall under the Bay Islands Marine Park.