13 March Little Cayman

Sometimes getting what you want takes a little effort, sometimes it takes a lot of effort. To sail from Grand Cayman to Little Cayman took a lot of effort – 24 hours of tacking upwind to dive Bloody Wall.

When we reached Little Cayman there was a good size ocean swell coming in from the east. The island has a north-east to South west alignment and finding a place to tuck in is impossible if you happen to draw more than 6'. There's a lagoon on the south side but the controlling depth is to shallow for us. We picked up a dive mooring to the south of the lagoon which we felt did give some protection.

Before we left Grand Cayman the forecast had been for 6 days of benign weather. This evaporated on arrival and we waited and rolled. After three days the wind and swell shifted to south allowing us to move onto the north shore where we found much better protection from the swell a mile north of Bloody Wall at 19.41.365N 80.04.213W. Jackster was finally sitting upright but in winds gusting over twenty knots.

Two more days and the wind dropped a few knots. We really wanted to dive so left our sheltered mooring and motored a mile to West Bloody Wall, but as we picked up the mooring line it snapped off. Undeterred we lined up for the East Bloody Wall ball. This time David picked up the line and attached ours, but before he could tie on our second line this too gave way. With the wind back up to 20 knots we reluctantly decided this was not meant to be and returned to our original, less used, mooring.

I did do a dive one dive on the shallow wall under Jackster and saw a ray and a big friendly lobster – he came out to wave to me as I swam passed, but not much more.

All I can say is we tried to dive Little Cayman but it wasn't meant to be. A big disappointment.