Hurricane Gustav damage in Cayman Brac?
- Thread starter Jebour
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diverrick
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I would also like to hear about the reefs condition post gustave
-hh
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I'm just back from 2 weeks of diving on the Brac. In a nutshell,
No obvious changes, and clearly less impact than Ivan did in 2004.
The one region that I wanted to dive but didn't get a chance to were the southside shallow reefs. This is where I would expect there to have been the greatest potential for diving. I do know that Reef Divers did do some shallow southside dives...saw boats at Sgt Major and at Tarpon; I just had the bad luck of not being on that diveboat on that particular day to see it firsthand.
I was told by a local friend that there was some hard coral damage here, but by the way it was described, I wasn't really able to determine if it was just Elkhorn (aka "the usual suspects") or something more. A frequent visitor did dive on one of these sites and he didn't make any comment to me about reef conditions, so I'm inclined to believe that someone who hasn't ever seen the reefs wouldn't really be able to tell what was new damage (if any).
The reason why I say "clearly less than Ivan" for the Brac was that Ivan tore up a lot of algae which ended up settling in the sandy bottoms of spur/groove formations as "pooge" for several months on nearly every dive site on LC and the Brac. There was none of this evident anywhere I dived on Cayman Brac, nor did I see anything cluttering up on four (4) dives we did on Little Cayman. Similarly, past storm damage has included broken loose smaller sponges that get scattered around and are obvious on large open sandy areas (such as the one behind Magic Roundabout on LC) but this time, I saw virtually none of this anywhere either.
Based on the storm's path and meterology, I would say that the worst affected area should have been the shallow reefs on the southwest tip of Little Cayman, such as at Grundy's Garden. If you offer to pay for the trip, I'll go do that research
-hh
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