Cayman trips

[nipi]

[Well said, although there are some subtle differences. A few years ago, I was on the Brac and diving with some Instructors from Grand Cayman (they was taking a dive vacation to the Brac) who were thrilled to see Queen triggers. From my perspective, they're common on Brac/Little, but they claimed that they were locally rare on Grand, supposedly due to there being more development & human-based pollution. Ditto for some of the soft corals. I've not dived enough on Grand to really say if he is right or wrong.]

I do not consider queen triggerfish rare in GCM. We see one every 2-3 dives. Depends perhaps where these instructors do most of their dives - could be that that's the west wall where we dive occasionally whereas we dive mostly south coast & north coast.

 

[EastEndDiver]

Here is a pic of a Queen Trigger I took on Grand Cayman.

 

[-hh]

I'm taking Cayman Air later this month; round trip from GCM to LYB is $131.25 each. Did you really get it for $132.50 for two? What am I doing wrong?

IIRC, we hit a sale (bought them back in February for this month), but it might also be that we're flying midweek and not weekend. You can sign up with Cayman Airways to receive email based news, which announces their sales.

I do not consider queen triggerfish rare in GCM. We see one every 2-3 dives. Depends perhaps where these instructors do most of their dives - could be that that's the west wall where we dive occasionally whereas we dive mostly south coast & north coast.

Agreed & understood; our interpretations of rare-uncommon-frequent-common-etc are imprecise...by your scale, perhaps I should have only said 'uncommon. In the Sister Islands, I'd say a 75% chance on a dive; IIRC, my record is ~10 unique individuals on a single dive.


-hh

 

[-hh]

Just as a quick follow-up, I was just down on Cayman Brac for two weeks of diving. Once work gets caught-up some, I'll work in the UW photo album.

First, I did apparently catch a very good sale on Cayman Airways. They're reportedly happening fairly frequently, so keep an eye out.

Also, be aware that the official flight itinerary isn't necessarily being followed faithfully right now, because because the Postmaster on Little Cayman is currently ill, so they're flying a post officer who lives on the Brac over to Little every morning, and back home to the Bracevery afternoon, and the official flight schedule doesn't always have a LYB --> CYB afternoon flight, so they have to "make one" right now. What happened with us was that our flight from Grand to Brac was on Wednesday ~5pm and they combined our flight with the Grand-Little flight ... and everyone's checked baggage to the Brac was left behind on Grand without telling us. Fortunately, all of our checked baggage arrived that same evening on the ~8pm (Brac arrival time) flight.


On the subject of Queen triggers, I previously said:

Agreed & understood; our interpretations of rare-uncommon-frequent-common-etc are imprecise...by your scale, perhaps I should have only said 'uncommon. In the Sister Islands, I'd say a 75% chance on a dive; IIRC, my record is ~10 unique individuals on a single dive.

Purely by coincidence, I dived the first week with a Marine Biologist from Colgate and we talked about reef health, human impact factors & Queen triggers. What she explained was that they are a minor "indicator species" of a sort (by absence) because they prefer to eat a specific type of algae, and this algae tends to decline from human development. Thus, the flow-down causality is: (more humans) --> (less algae of the type that QT's like) --> (fewer Queen Triggers).

I also tried to remember to keep an eye out for Queens during my dives to try to gage frequency. I did so pretty well for the first several days, but didn't remember to do so for every single dive. For the dives in which that I did remember to specifically look, I saw at least one Queen on nearly each of them...call it close to a 90% success rate.

In other news, I didn't see the killer whale pod this year, but future visitors to BRBR might see the print of one my photos of them from last year that I gave to Mick now hanging up in the dive shop.


-hh