27 February Diving Grand Cayman

What do you think of when someone says Cayman Islands? Offshore banking or diving? For us it was diving. Their reputation is world class wall dives in crystal clear water and we intend to do a completely biased and extensive investigation into these claims.

Our first call was to a local dive shop to investigate the sites, the conditions and whether we might go out on one of their boats. We were lucky in finding Blue Octopus Dive centre is staffed almost entirely by Brits and all very friendly and willing to help us. They explained the cost for a two tank dive was £110 / $ 135 each without kit, £145 / $174 with kit, but if we have a compressor on board why did we need to go out with them? All the 365 dive sites have a mooring ball which we can use and they are public moorings for all to use and rated for boats up to 60 feet in length. The dive shop also emailed me a list of the GPS co-ordinates for all the sites.

Checking with the Harbour Pilot boat they confirmed a private yacht can use all the dive moorings as long as we limit our stay to no more than three hours during the day but we can also stay overnight. Let the diving begin!

The diving is easy; The water is warm, 27C, visibility of more than 30m and no current. Each dive begins at the bottom of the mooring line and all the moorings we used were in at least 6m depth and all were in good condition. Harbour Pilot told us the lines are replaced each year and checked regularly giving us confidence Jackster would be waiting for us when we surfaced. We began diving the wall on the west side of Grand Cayman because this offered the most protection from the prevailing southerly swell. Swell would be the least comfortable factor for us – getting back up the ladder when the boat was rolling and bouncing took careful timing to avoid a mishap.

The topography of each wall dive varied, but not substantially. From a base depth at about 16m we dropped over the wall through swim throughs and tunnels into the blue. It was like exploring a grotto with the sun streaming through and lighting the rocks. In our opinion there isn't much sealife compared to other places we have been. The hard and soft corals are pristine, and with no current to cause concern about getting back to the boat. We saw a green moray free swimming, a couple of turtles, an eagle ray, a stingray, a few anemones but no clown fish in the Med, a lobster the size of a small dog and a couple of large crabs. The big schools of fishing are absent and the numbers of reef fish are low.

On the west side there are three wrecks. The Kittiwake, a former US submarine support vessel, was sunk as an artificial reef and dive attraction in 2011. The mooring we picked up was directly above the bow which we could see from the deck of Jackster. It's a nice little dive with plenty of holes cut in the hull to allow you to explore inside safely. We also dived the Doc Poulson tug which is older and thus more fish living in it.

The third type of dive we did were shallow reef dives. The walls are good; the depth means your profile is a square, ie down, along, back to the mooring line and ascend to 5m for your safety stop. I like a shallower profile for our second dive of the day because I enjoy pootling, looking under ledges and in corners for the smaller critters. Her we found some large barrel sponges, some shrimp, took time to watch the cleaning stations and smile at the waves of sand eels in the patches of sand. In all our dives and with plenty of dive boats around we never saw another diver underwater. There is room for all here.

Our conclusion of diving in Grand Cayman was that the topography is interesting, the clarity superb and ease of finding sites and being able to moor Jackster rather than travelling in the dinghy fantastic. Five stars for ease of diving. For us, and this is a personal observation, there aren't many fish, or the variety of fish. Cayman is very good for the Caribbean. However, we feel the Bay islands of Honduras sneak a few extra points for having the deep walls, pristine coral, clear and warm water and for having more sea life. Honduras looses points for only being able to access the sites by dinghy or going out with a professional boat.