Hondureño Shipwreck in Isla Mujeres
- Tracy Sharlene Gunn
- May 2, 2025
- 2 min read
Updated: May 10, 2025
Near Isla Mujeres, you can find the shipwreck of The Hondureño, a massive shrimp boat that sank while trying to escape one of the island's most ferocious hurricanes. The site is located not far from North Beach and offers excellent visibility, but due to the challenging conditions, it is best suited for experienced divers.
The Hondureño is a shipwreck on the National Park's outskirts, just 3 kilometres (2 miles) from North Beach. A quick 25-minute boat ride will take you to the remains of this large shipwreck, one of the biggest in the area. Once a remarkable 36-meter (120-foot) shrimp boat, it has a poignant history.
Unlike many other shipwrecks around Isla Mujeres, which were intentionally sunk to create artificial reefs and dive sites, the story of the Hondureño is different. This ship fell victim to Hurricane Gilbert in 1988, one of the strongest hurricanes to strike the area. The captain was out in the open ocean during the fierce storm and attempted to outrun it, but tragically, the boat sank while battling the relentless waves. Hurricane Gilbert devastated the island, and the locals still remember this event vividly.
The wreck is located 21 meters (70 feet) below the surface and offers excellent visibility of up to 20 meters (65 feet), making it a fantastic yet challenging dive site. Due to its depth and the often medium to strong currents, this location is recommended for advanced or experienced divers.
The wreck's remains have become a habitat for a diverse array of marine life. While diving at this site, you can expect to encounter various species, such as cobia fish, rainbow parrotfish, stonefish, green moray eels, nurse sharks, and, like all the wrecks around the island, it is a popular spot for eagle rays.
Depth
21 meters / 70 feet
Boat Ride
20-25 min
Dive Type
Drift - Medium to Strong Current
Deep Dive
Artificial Reef - Wreck
Experience Level
Advanced Open Water, Experienced Diver
Recent Dive Experience
Average Visibility Underwater
20 mt / 65 feet
Average Water Temp
26 C°/ 79F°
Dive Time
30-35 min (Safety Stop Required)
Tracy Gunn is the founder and owner of Pocna Dive Center on Isla Mujeres, Mexico. A former banker turned adventurer, Tracy left a decade-long corporate career to pursue her passion for diving and island life. With over 35 years of diving experience and 24 years of living on Isla Mujeres, she now serves as a PADI Course Director, training the next generation of divers at her dive school. When she’s not underwater, Tracy shares her love for the island and the ocean through engaging blogs about diving, marine life, and the culture of Isla Mujeres.
Interested in reading more from this author?
Blogs about Isla Mujeres, Mexico, and Recreational Scuba Diving: click here
Blogs about Instructor Development Courses and Professional Scuba Diving: click here
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What Tracy Gunn has built at Pocna Dive Center is ultimately a testament to the proposition that authentic expertise and genuine community connection are more durable competitive advantages than marketing budget or facility scale. The Hondureño write-up exemplifies this — it is not a promotional piece dressed up as information but a genuinely informative piece that happens to make you want to book a dive. That distinction matters enormously to experienced divers who can tell the difference immediately. A collection of motivational quotes from ocean and adventure films is a rich resource for the dive community's social content, and quotes for pushing through fear and challenge resonates with every diver who has stood on the back of a boat above a challenging…
The infrastructure of a dive operation serving a site like the Hondureño — 25 minutes offshore, 21 meters deep, requiring advanced certification management and safety stop protocols — is more complex than casual observers realise. The shore-side facilities, equipment storage, boat maintenance, and briefing spaces that support safe operations at a site of this difficulty require thoughtful physical planning. A square footage layout planner optimises the arrangement of dive center facilities for the flow of equipment, divers, and support staff. A concrete volume calculator and a paver surface estimator support the hardstanding and boat ramp infrastructure that a serious dive operation requires. A fence perimeter calculator handles the security and safety boundary planning for equipment storage areas, and a tree removal cost estimator budgets the…
The dive center experience at Pocna is clearly built around genuine expertise rather than volume throughput, and Tracy Gunn's background as a former banker who made a deliberate life pivot toward diving and island community is the kind of founder story that shapes an organisation's culture in lasting ways. The decision to leave a decade-long corporate career for 24 years of island life and PADI Course Director work is not a small thing, and the quality of the site write-ups on the Pocna blog reflects the depth of knowledge that only comes from that kind of sustained commitment. For divers building their own dive log documentation and travel writing, the creative tools available are worth investing in. A gothic font…
The physical preparation required for a dive like the Hondureño is something that recreational diving culture tends to underemphasise relative to the certification requirements, but the two are genuinely complementary rather than substitutable. Being Advanced Open Water certified tells you that you have the skills for this dive; being physically fit tells you that you have the endurance to execute those skills under the stress of medium to strong current at depth. A protein intake calculator for active divers helps structure the nutritional approach that supports the cardiovascular demands of drift diving, and a body type fitness calculator personalises that approach based on individual metabolic profile. A strength training calculator for divers builds the core and upper body strength that makes finning against…