Marathon Cayman's post...with pictures!

First off, I gotta brag a bit and say I ate Dolphin for dinner last night! A big juicy dolphin burger with fries. It had this sort of tangy sauce with it that made everything go down real good. F’ Flipper is all I gotta say about that! Of course dolphin is another name for Mahi Mahi so you can all put the phone down and stop the calls to ASPCA or Greenpeace or whatever. It WAS good though.

Second, in case you didn't know or try, the photos I am posting can be clicked upon and you will see the original (big) photo.
Geiko anyone? These guys were all over the place sunning themselves.

This is my last day in the Caymans. I head out to Curacao tomorrow morning for more fun and excitement. Actually I don’t dive again until…uhm…Saturday (had to think about what day it is today. It is pretty awesome when you don’t have to know or care about that stuff). On the plus side, I did take my camera out the past couple of days here and got some pretty good pictures so this blog should be chock full of them! The blog says it has an 8MB limit, but I think that is per picture. We will see how much we can stretch it out.

I am a little happy not to have to dive with the dude (Paul) I have been diving with anymore. He is a nice enough guy, but given what I know now, I wouldn’t have buddied up with him given a choice. He is, in my opinion, a selfish diver. He swims around to look at things that interest him and expects me to follow him and stay within his sight (which is what you want to do as a buddy diver [keeping your buddy in sight, that is], but generally the where to swim and what to look at is a mutual thing). If I got too far away from him (due to him swimming willy nilly) he would say something once we surfaced. Also he wants to cover some ground on the dives. I mean he paddles his fins constantly to cover as much area as he can…this causes him/us to blow through air much faster than if you are calm and more mellow. Yesterday, I was ending the dives with more air than he was…which is odd considering the discrepancy in the number of dives we have done. Finally, he is no scout. Dude had no idea where we would be in relation to the boat. On the plus side, I started paying more attention and my internal compass (or whatever) was pretty good with which direction the boat was at any given moment. For obvious reasons this is a good thing to know. I don't want to totally bag on the poor guy cause, again, he isn't THAT bad, but I think I want a more mellow "let's mosey around and see whats here" kind of dive buddy and he ain't that.

There was an older guy diving named Mike that was out all the days I was there. He owns a dive shop on Long Island (pronounced almost like LonGa Island if you are from there) and has been diving for probably longer than I have been alive. I have been asking people with more experience their suggestions on not blowing through air and his were:
1) Don’t carry too much weight. Sounds weird, but apparently the less weight that you carry (you have to carry some in order to sink down), the better. He said most people put too much weight in and that causes them to work harder and use more air in the BCD (the vest you wear). I think I will play with this a bit in Curacao.
2) Don’t use your arms at all. Doesn’t do any good (I already knew this part). Fins can get you wherever you want to go…it just takes practice. And if you look at people who have been diving for a long time, most of the time they are swimming with their arms crossed to just keep them out of the way.
3) Breath slowly. Which makes sense and is relatively obvious, but it’s sort of hard to do. I think it also matches up well with “remain calm” since that is conducive to breathing slowly.
He was down with a group of guys who were constantly making corny jokes and trying, not very successfully, to be funny. Nice bunch of guys even though. The one cool thing is Mike had a video camera the whole time including when we went to Stingray City (yes I did go). He took my address and said he would send me a DVD of at least that part. I said throw as much as you can on there…its all good, so we will see.

Speaking of diving, we had some good ones on Monday. We first went to this site called Big tunnels that was on the wall. At around 100 feet there are these swim through tunnels that we swam through as well as this pinnacle that rose up to around 40 feet or so. We saw some pretty big tarpon that were 3 feet long (at a guess). The camera survived a maximum depth of 105 feet (what my dive computer said I got down to at one point) which is good since the case says its good up to 130 feet (deeper than I plan on diving any time soon).

View looking up the wall from 100 feet down. Remember, you can click on the picture to get the larger version (or even shift+click on the picture to open in a new window...at least in Windows, you Mac people are on your own)
Tarpon swimming around. On the lower left side, you can see a fin one of the other divers was wearing. The fins are 1.5 to 2 feet long so you can get a little scale on these things...they were pretty big.

Yellow finned something-or-others....fish were everywhere

The next dive was at a place called the Devil’s Grotto or Eden Point. Not sure why its named that, but it basically is in around 40 feet of water and these rocks and reefs have all these pass throughs (tunnels that generally don’t have complete ceilings so some light comes down). Saw a turtle right off the bat and then one of the dive masters found a pretty awesome looking scorpion fish. We also saw a southern stingray swimming about. The grotto itself was pretty cool with some huge fish taking it easy in there. I would say this is my favorite spot out of all of them. It’s over near where the cruise ships come in to the harbor so apparently its only good if there are none in port (and there weren’t). For sure if you ever come here, this is a must see.

Look...a turtle!!

One of the pass throughs near the grotto. That's Paul right in front of me and one of the dive masters in front of him

Do you see the Scorpion fish? Pretty cool, huh? Poisonous too

In the Devil's Grotto itself:

Tons of fish all over the reef. The sea life here is unreal.

Went to a site called Table top yesterday. It looks like a table top, I guess. It was okay….saw a turtle right off the boat as well as another scorpion fish. It was a fine site, but I guess a bit of a let down after the Grotto. We also did a place called Kent’s Caves that was just tons of pass throughs that have been worn out of the reefs/rock over time. It’s sort of funny, I went into a little cave in Thailand and was FREAKING out at the time. I blew through my air from hyperventilating. For some reason here it has been all cool. It’s actually sort of neat to swim under these shelves looking for stuff that might be hiding out.

Its turtle paparazzi! See the poor thing trying to get away in the middle of the crowd

Another Where's Waldo with a scorpion fish

Its a red banded rock (or maybe coral) shrimp hanging out

I think they said this was a boxfish...could be wrong, but it was cool looking

And finally, we went to Stingray City. Its in the north sound of Grand Cayman. The story goes that fishermen would come in from their day of fishing into this sound (one of the largest natural lagoons in the world) and pull onto the calm side of the barrier reef and clean their fish. The stingrays, not being stupid, would come in for the free food. Divers heard about this and came out to check it out. Over the last 20-30 years they have been getting the rays used to seeing people so they are actually pretty docile….in Theory.

My friends Tam and Sophia went when they were here, although they went to a shallow, snorkel/stand area. We went to a spot that had about 10 feet of water, sat around on the bottom in a circle and then the dive master would give us little chinks of calamari to hold in our fist. You rub your fist in the stingrays nose (pretty much the entire front of the ray) and he will then follow your fist around wherever it goes. It’s pretty cool although at one point I had 2 or 3 rays around me and I got a little nervous. Of course, this was after one of the little bastids bit me trying to get to the squid goodness inside my fist. They don’t have teeth but instead suck the food in and use bony plates to grind up their food…he bony plated me a bit. I got some video footage too and like I said above, Mike claims he will send me a DVD of it all. If you wanted to know, the top side has a little bit of grittiness to it, but the undersides are really smooth.

The dive master doing a "Stingray Sombrero" leading it around with a fist full of calimari

Here kitty kitty...

One of the little F'ers bit me! Or bony plated me, anyway

There is also this large green moray eel that lives out there. Apparently it’s so old it has cataracts (and it looked like it too). When most of the squid was gone the dive master led us over to a little rock reef area and out comes this 4 or 5 foot eel looking for some snacks. We were told in the boat before the dive (you always have pre-dive briefings to cover what the dive will be doing and safety stuff….its just the way good dive operations roll) that if he comes towards you to cross your arms and put your fingers under your arms (to avoid providing tempting wiggling bits). Of course, after the eel gets all the remaining goodies from the dive master, he starts making a beeline towards me. I was watching him approach thinking “oh shit” and then I remembered the briefing and all was well. He just sort of sniffed around me and swam away. As he was leaving, I did reach out and pet him. He was super smooth. Really a cool sensation. That’s right, people! I petted some stingrays AND a moray eel. I would say you can call me Steve Irwin Jr., but I didn’t try to stick my thumb up their butts (South Park joke).

The big green moray eel. The dive master right next to it shows how big it was

Walked into George Town this morning to see what was there. Unfortunately, there were also 4, count ‘em 4 cruise ships in port so me and 1000000000 of my closest friends were wandering around looking at the stuff there. I was sort of amazed about the number of jewelry/watch stores there were. I think they outnumber the souvenir shops…although I suppose they could be considered really expensive souvenirs.

Since this is a British colony or territory or whatever, they drive on the left (or wrong) side of the road here. I am sort of glad I didn’t get a rental car while I was here because I am sure I would have ended up in the wrong lane at some point. I didn’t really need it although I have had to eat all my meals here at My Bar (the name of the bar…lots of locals hanging out there too, btw). I suppose I could have walked into town, but I was usually pretty tired by the end of the day. Plus, they have had some really good food here (Indian food was the special Monday night. Really good).

Anyway, driving on the left side of the road. The GTJTTOTD could be: don’t go into town when there are 4 cruise ships docked unless you want to deal with a lot of clueless people, but I think that one should be fairly obvious. Instead, today’s GTJTTOTD is: when you are in a country that drives on the wrong side of the road, the locals tend to expect you to walk the same way too….at least here they do. For instance, in the States, it is generally accepted that when you are walking down a hall, sidewalk, or other walkway, and you see someone approaching you going the other way, you keep to the right so pedestrians flow smoothly. Here, you want to stay on the left side. I wasn’t thinking about this while happily walking down the right side of a sidewalk until someone going the other way was approaching me in “my” lane doing a super slow version of chicken. I was thinking “what is this fool doing?” when I realized I was the fool in this instance and got over. I have no idea if this is also the case in England or India (chime in if you have experience!), but it would make sense.

Finally while I was walking, I think I found my new catch phrase…or at least the standard answer when someone asks me what time it is:

That's right, friends, it's our time, the People's time!

Hope everyone is doing well! Love to all and remember:

It's our time, the People's time!