My mother always said “Spring Forward, Fall Back!” when it came to resetting our clocks for each season.
However, we don’t change our clocks here in Honduras. There’s no “Falling Back” here! What does that mean? Although we haven’t changed our time for Daylight Savings Time, we HAVE changed time zones. We are now on Central Time UTC-6:00, or Central American Time. In the spring, we’ll change back to Mountain Time UTC-7:00.
Why am I writing about this? Well, this can affect your travel plans. From Spring to Fall, most flights arrive with plenty of time to get to Utila via the Utila Dream Ferry departing Roatan and Coxen Hole at 2 pm.
For example, American Airlines flights from Miami arrive at 12:40 pm from spring to fall. After the world changes for Daylight Savings Time in the fall, the flights now arrive at 1:40 pm. This makes it tight when trying to catch the ferry to Utila.
I’ve been living in Utila for about 22 years and I recall one year when the country temporarily adopted Daylight Savings Time. At that time we were running a dive center and some Utilian captains did not want to change their clocks, so we ran the dive center using two time zones! It was quite amusing and confusing! Some captains needed to arrive at 7am, while others were told 8am, depending on whether they were on the ‘old time’ or the ‘new time’.
This photo was taken at 5:24pm last month, and the sun was already quite low. I had to take this picture because the sky was filled with beautiful hues of pink and purple!
Since the sun sets quite early here in Honduras, and rises about 5:30 am, Daylight Savings Time actually turned to Daylight Lost Time. So the workers in the country had to go to awaken in the morning and get moving while it was still dark. This was completely opposite to why the world took on Daylight Savings Time in the first place! So a few months later, we changed back to the ‘old time’ and never changed our clocks again.