Grand Cayman adventure!

 Hey all!

Stacy and I just got back from a week on Grand Cayman!  We flew out last Friday night doing an awesome redeye to Charlotte before catching the plane to Georgetown, the main city on Grand Cayman.  Redeyes suck in general but going to the Caribbean from Portland means you either do a redeye or you have a layover in Dallas or Charlotte.  Neither option is all that great.  We did split a sleepy gummy for the flight but the flight attendants had their chat group going at the front of the plane (yes, we were in first class) and weren’t the quietest bunch in the world.  We both got a little sleep but it wasn’t that great.  The nice thing about all this was we arrived on Grand Cayman at around 11:30 in the morning raring to go.  I have to say deplaning, going through customs and getting the rental car that was included in our package took maybe 45 minutes?  For sure the fastest we have ever gotten into a country and on our way.  Nice.

Fun fact: the Cayman Islands are a British territory (or were) so they drive on the left side of the road.  Left is right and right is wrong.  On top of that fun our rental car had the wheel on the right side of the car.  I will admit that I got in on the passenger side multiple times when I was getting ready to drive through habit and the blinkers/wipers switches were reversed too so I kept kicking off the wipers when I was trying to turn signal.  Although I was a little worried about driving on the left side, I think I actually did a pretty good job.  No dings on the car anyway, so we will call it a win.

Leaving the airport we hit the nearest super market along with the rest of the island.  Super busy but we picked up lunch stuff and snacks and the needed diet coke.  Breakfast was included in our package and we planned on just going out for dinner during the week.  We also hit a liquor store to pick up some gin for me.  The super markets don’t even have beer or wine that I could see.  Another fun fact: the Cayman dollar is 1.25x higher than the US dollar and everything was in Cayman $$.  So while things appeared a little expensive, once you multiplied by 1.25 they became pretty expensive.  Stacy has a problem with Starbucks in that she is trying to collect a mug from every place she goes.  Good hobby and nice reminder of her travels.  These mugs are usually $10.  There it was $20.  Yeah…cost of living is for sure higher there.

We stayed at Compass Point Dive Resort on the east end of the island.  Its around 40 minutes from the airport and after a few hair raising round abouts where Stacy was sure we were going to die, it was one road going the rest of the way so no worries on turning and what not.  Our package was for a week with 6 days of 2 tank diving in the morning with a rental car and breakfast and an ocean front condo.  The dive boats are right there so every morning we would eat breakfast, grab our gear and jump on the dive boats a few steps away from our ocean front condo.  Not a bad life.  We heard about this place from Craig and Patty who we met in Grand Turk in February.  They own 5 weeks in one of the condos each year and were heading there the same week so while we were in Grand Turk we booked the trip too.  It was great seeing them again.  Fun times diving.

I will say the dive operation at the resort was awesome.  Really friendly people.  They set up your gear every morning and rinsed and hung it up each evening.  They would switch your tanks over and all the other stuff that you normally do for yourself.  Totally 5 star/thumbs up for them!  The water was also 84 degrees!!!  We brought our 3mm wetsuits cause we knew it was going to be warm but it was so warm we both ended up diving in rash guards and board shorts. Visibility was great and, for the most part, the other divers were a joy to be around.  I would say my one gripe is less sea life than what I was expecting.  There were fish, don’t get me wrong, but I guess I was expecting a denser population?

I dove Grand Cayman back in 2008 or so on my first sabbatical.  I stayed on the west end of the island at sunset divers which is also an awesome dive resort…at least then.  I just seem to remember a denser population of sea life on those dives.  It could be east vs. west end of the island or maybe my memory is playing tricks on me but while the dives were otherwise great, I was a little let down from lack o’ fish this time.

We had a pretty good first couple of days diving but after the first dive day, Stacy went on a 4 mile walk to keep in shape for the Koman 3 day 20 mile per day thing she is doing in November.  It was hot as hell and she drank a ton of water but exercise close after diving I guess isn’t a good idea.  After day 2 of diving, Stacy started complaining about her hip aching like she hit it on something.  She laid down for a nap and when she awoke she complained that it itched a ton.  She had me look at it and it looked bruised but mottled too.  A quick google search semi-confirmed that she had decompression sickness type 1.  The Skin bends.  That’s right, my baby got the bends….oh no!  She went to the office to ask for advice and they got her on an oxygen mask and had us head to the hospital to have it looked over by a doctor.  Type 1 is the lightest of bends but getting bent is nothing to play around with.  Symptoms get to be stroke-like when you have really bad bends so medical attention was a must. 

We checked in and the hospital kept her on oxygen while we waited for a doc to come in and see her.  It was probably an hour and a half before the doc came but he was great.  Really good bedside manner as he put her through an evaluation.  Stacy and I are going through a diver CPR/first aid course because we dive the Oregon zoo and its one of their requirements.  The evaluation the doctor put Stacy through to evaluate how bad she was bent was straight out of the training course we have been taking.  It was cool in a this sucks for Stacy but its neat to see it applied kind of way.  Oxygen is the first thing to do.  What he was evaluating was if she needed to go into a hyperbaric chamber where they would jack up the pressure to help with getting the nitrogen out of her.  We have dive insurance through DAN mainly because they will pay the $20k bill if we had to do the chamber but the doctor determined it wasn’t really needed.  He did recommend that Stacy not dive the rest of the time but called the specialist dive doctor for a second opinion. 

That second opinion was to make an appointment to see that doctor the next day at 10am.  That meant we had to not dive on Tuesday but it also meant that maybe she would only have to sit out 72 hours or something like that instead of missing the entire week.  That doctor is THE main dive doctor for the Cayman islands.  Super nice lady who evaluated Stacy trying to determine why she was bent.  We dove together and had pretty much the same profile but I didn’t have any issues.  Plus we dive using dive computers that tell you how much time you can spend at various depths to be safe and we didn’t come close to those limits.  Its totally a non exact science on this stuff and the only thing we could think of that was out of the ordinary was that 4 mile walk in the heat after the first day of diving which is why I mentioned it.  Foreshadowing….I do it all in these blogs.  The great thing was this doc cleared her to dive 1 shallow dive the next day and if that went well, she was cleared to resume the 2 dives per day.  That dive the next day went fine and she was able to dive the rest of the time.  Good ending, but for sure a scare there for a while.

What else….mostly after diving we would eat lunch, laze around the condo and then hit the pool with cocktails in the afternoon.  Second or third day there my phone died a tragic death.  Not sure what happened.  It may have over heated or might have gotten some moisture in the USB slot and I plugged it in or something else.  Doesn’t matter cause I was without a phone and while I had coverage (google fi for the win!) Stacy didn’t.  She had to purchase a package from Verizon for $10 per day after my phone died to get us around the island and what not.  Good Times.

The resort has a restaurant that was okay but we did that the first night.  There are other places within a few miles so we had Mexican, Caribbean, another place that had half priced tacos on Tuesday (that were awesome!) plus a couple others.  I had some blackened Mahi that was the bomb!  We stopped at a locals place after the hospital trip and had their chicken curry.  It had tons of bones so you had to work for your meat, but it was also the cheapest at around $30 for the both of us.  All the other meals were in the $90-100 range.  Cost o’ living. 

Grand Cayman has a couple of breweries and a distillery too!.  We did a tour one afternoon after diving with Craig and Patty.  First there is Cayman Island Brewery who’s flagship beer is Caybrew for obvious reasons.  They are heavy on the lagers but do have an IPA that was okay-ish and this Mango beer that was pretty good in a weird mango-ey way.  Worth a stop if you are going to hit the breweries.  The other one is called 1981 after the latitude and longitude of Grand Cayman.  Although their site and their front door said they were open Tues-Sun from 3-9 and we hit it on Wednesday at 3:08, they apparently changed their hours due to the slow season and didn’t open till Thursday.  There were production crew there and while they didn’t let us in, they did bring out some cans of their lager for us to enjoy.  So thumbs down on not being open, but thumbs up for free beer!  We also hit the distillery where they mainly make rum.  Super nice guy who let us do a tasting even though we were ~20 minutes late for their last scheduled one but it was just okay.  Unless you are super into rums, I would say skip it but that’s me.

All too soon it was time to leave.  I guess to pay us back for the quick entry, Stacy and I were both “randomly” picked for enhanced security screening while we were leaving.  The lady checking us in was having a hard time printing our luggage tags and boarding passes.  It took her around 25 minutes of poking at the keyboard over and over before she was successful.  I suspect something she did triggered both of us to be “randomly” targeted but on top of having all our things gone through, the boarding pass for the Dallas to Portland flight didn’t have our TSA precheck on it.  When coming in from out of the country, you have to go through US customs, get your bags, re-check them in assuming you are flying somewhere else and then go back through security.  They claimed that since we were “randomly” selected for enhanced screening they couldn’t print precheck on the other passes.  Not sure why American Airlines allows a country to dictate what a boarding pass can have on it that has nothing to do with that county but that’s what they claimed anyway.  I think its because it makes them look like dumbasses to “randomly” select people who have enough of a background check to have TSA precheck (and really it’s global entry that also covers precheck) but that’s just my working theory.  The irony is that Dallas TSA lines close at 7PM and we didn’t arrive until after 8 but it still doesn’t explain the boarding passes.

To make matters more fun, Karma decided to delay our flight out of Dallas back to Portland.  First it was ~30 minutes, then 3 hours and then they said fuck it: tomorrow!  Luckily we were in the admirals lounge (Stacy has the lounge access card that is AWESOME) and the lounge people were able to give us food and hotel vouchers for the evening rather than us having to stand in the very long line at the American service desk.  We went to the hotel for a 5 hour nap before heading back to the airport for an early morning flight that was also delayed a bit while they waited for a flight attendant.  To be fair both the pilots and the attendants volunteered to do this flight to get us back (and a plane into Portland to service the flight our plane from the night before was supposed to).  We made it back safe and sound yesterday.  Tired but reunited with the dogs.

That’s about it other than the photos.  I didn’t take my camera on all the dives so I missed out on some goodness and it took me a couple of days to get back into dialing in the lighting and what not but I got some decent ones.  As always, click to embiggen.

An anemone.  There was a cool furry crab hiding under it but I couldn't get a photo...or a good photo anyway.  Still like the anemone.

Caribbean reef shark.  This one has had a bit of color enhancement to bring out the shark better.  We had 3 or 4 dives where there were sharks.  Pretty cool

Banded coral shrimp hanging out

Fire worm.  apparently the spiny sides sting like jellyfish if you touch them...so don't

Green moray eel 

This is called a nimble spray crab.  Only second time I have seen one and still haven't gotten a great photo.  He would skitter back into the rocks if you got too close

Lion fish.  They are invasive to the Caribbean so they go on lion fish hunts all the time and make tacos.  I haven't had one yet....

Large crab checking things out.  Little washed out but still not too bad

Juvenile drum fish.  They are really cool and flit about in at this stage.  Fun to watch

Tiny hermit crab on a piece of fire coral

Peacock flounder

Pederson cleaner shrimp.  They hang out at fish cleaning stations and sometimes will come out to your finger if you are patient enough

Purple crown sea goddess.  Not the most in focus but still a cool looking nudibranch

Scorpion fish.  

This nudi is a tritoniid.  They exclusively eat sea fans and are maybe half an inch long.  This is super zoomed.

A pair of tritoniids on that same fan.  The swirly thing above the left one is their eggs.  

If you get 2 tritoniids, why not 3?  Like I said, they were all over this sea fan.  Pretty cool

Remember how I said if you were patient enough the pederson shrimp would come out to your finger?  Here is one on Stacy's ring finger.  There were a TON of cleaner shrimp in the area and if I hadn't run out of room on my card I would have had an even better photo.  Oh well.

And there you have it!  Great trip with great people and some pretty good warm diving.  Love it!

Hope everyone is doing well and remember: it's our time, the peoples' time!

Jim