Blazinator
Contributor
June 5 - 12th - The four of us got off the plane and immediately did one of my best all time dives at Eden rock - lots of bottom time, schools of jacks circling us, swim throughs, Fairy Basslets all around (love those colors!) etc etc - ALL for price of a tank rental.
Stayed at The Reef resort and dove with Ocean Frontiers - wayyy professional, wayy courteous, set up and cleaned gear for you, way accomodating to our changing schedule - top notch. The main reason I went with them was that they provided me with AL 100's and nitrox. Red Sail will only give you 72's. If you are big like me, and you spend lots of $ to get underwater for a prescious few hours of the week, why would you dive with an operation that limits you to only 1/2 hour BT? Our second dives were always about an hour. OF even gives you a personal print-out of all your dives, the site name, with your depth and BT at the end of your diving week.
If the wall dives on SE end are lesser than the North Wall, then I don't think I could have handled the North wall dives - too awesome. Imagine swimming through a cavern with a deep blue opening at the end, then exiting the opening at 100 ft to hover over an abyssal trench only to follow a vertical wall of wonder:
All the dives were way cool. I think the biggest thing for me was the canyon like structure of Cayman diving. The "big-ness" is what I loved compared to the Keys or Hawaii (although Molokini Crater's back wall was awesome). Almost every site had deep cuts and caverns. The silverside bait balls were so mesmerizing.
Topside was hot that week, and water temp was 86 - 87 at surface and 84 @ 100+ ft. Seas were pretty good to swelly on the SE side, and flat on the north - reverse of what I expected. I really wanted to shore dive Anchor Point and Babylon, but had no time, although I snorkeled to the wall at Anchor Point to scope it out (five minutes from Reef resort). Idyllic site for its remoteness.
Night dive at Sunset Reef, in front of Ocean Frontiers - super easy for new divers:
Night dives are cool, but add a black light filter to your monster HID light, and you get to see a hidden world WITHIN a hidden world.
There are proteins in the bodies of many species of coral, jellyfish, anemones, certain kinds of fish, and even nudibranchs (that eat anemones to pass their GFP into themselves) that fluoresce under UV light. Most of the time it is Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP), but sometimes you see red and orange fluorescence, and if your lucky, you'll see a coral displaying both green and orange (some brain coral and soft corals will do this).
The fluorescence shows up much brighter in actual viewing than the video can record due to the camera's auto-equalizing of light levels, so the actual scuba diver sees an unreal light show. Some corals fluoresce so bright that it literally looks like neon is inside, as the electrically charged photons of invisible UV light come back to your eye as energized visible light.
My light is a 24 watt HID that outputs a whopping 1750 lumens which is almost 40 times brighter than a large Mag Light, and some of that light is UV light. It even cures my UV glue in seconds in my shop (I'm a polymer scientist in UV resins). So I bought a dichroic "Wood's Glass" filter from Roscoe (through a theater lighting supplier) and fabricated a snap-fit ring to fit my light, and you see the results above.
Stingray city was well worth it, the Reef resort is a blast to snorkel under the pier at noon when they feed the fish, accomodations @ the Reef were great for the price ($1100.00 pp including RT airfare through AppleVacations), and the "Over The Edge" restaurant was excellent. We saved lots of $ by bringing spinach and wheat wraps and rice to cook in our room, and all the rest of our groceries were decent priced at the Fosters market. All in all, it was fun, but not for a non-diver unless you stay at 7Mile Beach. I would seriously consider Cobalt Coast next time for my non-divng wife.
Stayed at The Reef resort and dove with Ocean Frontiers - wayyy professional, wayy courteous, set up and cleaned gear for you, way accomodating to our changing schedule - top notch. The main reason I went with them was that they provided me with AL 100's and nitrox. Red Sail will only give you 72's. If you are big like me, and you spend lots of $ to get underwater for a prescious few hours of the week, why would you dive with an operation that limits you to only 1/2 hour BT? Our second dives were always about an hour. OF even gives you a personal print-out of all your dives, the site name, with your depth and BT at the end of your diving week.
If the wall dives on SE end are lesser than the North Wall, then I don't think I could have handled the North wall dives - too awesome. Imagine swimming through a cavern with a deep blue opening at the end, then exiting the opening at 100 ft to hover over an abyssal trench only to follow a vertical wall of wonder:
All the dives were way cool. I think the biggest thing for me was the canyon like structure of Cayman diving. The "big-ness" is what I loved compared to the Keys or Hawaii (although Molokini Crater's back wall was awesome). Almost every site had deep cuts and caverns. The silverside bait balls were so mesmerizing.
Topside was hot that week, and water temp was 86 - 87 at surface and 84 @ 100+ ft. Seas were pretty good to swelly on the SE side, and flat on the north - reverse of what I expected. I really wanted to shore dive Anchor Point and Babylon, but had no time, although I snorkeled to the wall at Anchor Point to scope it out (five minutes from Reef resort). Idyllic site for its remoteness.
Night dive at Sunset Reef, in front of Ocean Frontiers - super easy for new divers:
Night dives are cool, but add a black light filter to your monster HID light, and you get to see a hidden world WITHIN a hidden world.
There are proteins in the bodies of many species of coral, jellyfish, anemones, certain kinds of fish, and even nudibranchs (that eat anemones to pass their GFP into themselves) that fluoresce under UV light. Most of the time it is Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP), but sometimes you see red and orange fluorescence, and if your lucky, you'll see a coral displaying both green and orange (some brain coral and soft corals will do this).
The fluorescence shows up much brighter in actual viewing than the video can record due to the camera's auto-equalizing of light levels, so the actual scuba diver sees an unreal light show. Some corals fluoresce so bright that it literally looks like neon is inside, as the electrically charged photons of invisible UV light come back to your eye as energized visible light.
My light is a 24 watt HID that outputs a whopping 1750 lumens which is almost 40 times brighter than a large Mag Light, and some of that light is UV light. It even cures my UV glue in seconds in my shop (I'm a polymer scientist in UV resins). So I bought a dichroic "Wood's Glass" filter from Roscoe (through a theater lighting supplier) and fabricated a snap-fit ring to fit my light, and you see the results above.
Stingray city was well worth it, the Reef resort is a blast to snorkel under the pier at noon when they feed the fish, accomodations @ the Reef were great for the price ($1100.00 pp including RT airfare through AppleVacations), and the "Over The Edge" restaurant was excellent. We saved lots of $ by bringing spinach and wheat wraps and rice to cook in our room, and all the rest of our groceries were decent priced at the Fosters market. All in all, it was fun, but not for a non-diver unless you stay at 7Mile Beach. I would seriously consider Cobalt Coast next time for my non-divng wife.
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