Nice pics! Where did you stay and who did you dive with?
I finally found the time to finish my trip report. It's a bit long though so I'll break it up into several posts. Ignore the stuff that you're not interested in.
Part 1.
For the second year in a row my wife Karen and I took advantage of being in Florida after getting off the Blues Cruise to take an extra week and do some diving in the Caribbean. We are both relative beginners, I had 19 dives before this trip and she was about 14. We did Dominica last year and loved everything about that trip. (Well, everything except the 40 minute drive each way from where we were staying to the dive shop.)
After some research which included info on Scubaboard we picked Little Cayman. We wanted high quality diving and it sounded like LC would be a good spot for it. We checked out the few resorts/dive operators and it seemed like Pirate's Point would fit our style. It is smaller than some, the diving starts a little later and they only do a two tank morning dive. We wanted to do things besides diving so this schedule looked good. They advertise that because they let you dive your computer instead of limiting the dive time that you get the same amount of bottom time as 3 tanks at the other resorts. This may be true for better divers than me but I'm still learning to conserve air so my typical dives were 50-60 minutes.
There are many regulars at Pirate’s Point that come back year after year. While we were there, there was a couple who had been there 12 of the last 16 years and another couple who has been going there for 20 years.
The Diving
They do a two tank dive each day and leave the resort at 9:00AM which is nice if you don’t like to get up too early. Everyone is responsible for getting their gear into the van and once at the dock the staff transfers all the gear to the boat. The boat is large and well maintained and handles the 20-30 minute ride to the dive sites with ease. There is probably room for about 20 divers but I think the most we had was about a dozen. They have a first aid kit and oxygen on board. There is also lots of cold water and snacks.
Once on the boat they assign you to a set of tanks and you set up your gear during the trip. Once at the dive site they do a site briefing and assign you to a group. When your group is up you get your gear on head to the back of the boat and after putting on your fins do a giant stride into the water. They have a good long ladder making for an easy exit after the dive. Once you are back on the boat and back to your seat you get your gear off and change tanks and then after the surface interval it’s on to the second dive site. It isn’t valet diving but I prefer to set up my own equipment. Karen would prefer the valet treatment. At the end of the day they recommend that you leave most of your gear on the boat and only take wetsuits and boots to be rinsed for sanitary reasons. We also took our cameras and computers for downloading each day.
One of our challenges was that Karen gets seasick and the first day wasn’t good for her. She managed to do both dives but was pretty sick by the time we got back to the dock. The second day seemed to be going the same way but fortunately the first dive was near one of the few locations you can do a shore exit so one of the dive masters offered to swim to shore with her after the first dive and had someone from the resort pick her up.
We dived 4 of 6 days and all the dives were done on the North side of the island on various sites on the wall. The two days we didn’t dive were by choice not because the boat didn’t go out.
Because we are inexperienced we had our own DM on the first day which was nice. All the DMs were very professional and safety was a priority. The DMs provided good feedback on things we did right and things we need to work on to improve our skills. The first dive is to a max depth of 100ft and the second to a max of 60ft. I dropped a little below on one dive to get closer to a turtle and got the tap, tap, tap from the DM to come back up.
Diving the wall was really interesting with lots of life hanging out there including lobster, crabs, sharks, turtles groupers and lots of colorful coral, some that I hadn’t seen before. I was hoping for some moray eels and eagle ray but didn’t see any although others did. The quantity of reef fish wasn’t as much as other places we’ve been but the variety was good. I recorded 81F water temperatures on every dive but Karen's computer was saying 78F. I think mine was correct.
On one dive we told our DM we planned to swim away from the wall a ways to get that blue water experience. He wanted to be with us so he got the group together before the dive and told them what we planned and the other 4 divers joined us. We were at about 75ft and swam out so we could just barely see the wall and hung out there for a couple of minutes. It was pretty cool but I was keeping a close eye on my depth gauge.
The only disappointment on the diving side is that we didn’t get to do a night dive. They have a 4 diver minimum and none of the other divers were interested. By the time we figured out that one of the other resorts does a night dive every Tuesday and Thursday it was too late.
