New to Board - seeking Little Cayman info

[Damselfish]

I stayed at the Little Cayman Beach Resort in April. The diving was nice. I was lucky; there weren't that many divers. The boats typically had 8 divers on them. They look like they can probably accommodate 20 divers each, which would be too many. The dive operation is efficiently run, if a bit regimented. They will limit your dives to 50 minutes and 100 feet, and enforce the buddy system. The divemasters are professional, helpful and friendly.

yes, the boats can get more crowded here than the other places. It's a trade off. I wish they weren't a pain about the dive times and I didn't feel so scheduled. (At least some of it has to do with making it to meals.)

The food is good. The rooms aren't luxe, but adequate. I stayed in one of the beachfront rooms, which are supposed to be better. It was ok--no major complaints.

I've stayed in both, the beachfront rooms are indeed nicer, I think the main thing is having a real deck or patio with more privacy and a nice view, and the room itself is larger with much more of a sitting area and the sink/fridge area. Not the Ritz.

The booby pond smells. You get used to it, but it's a lot like vacationing near a garbage dump. It didn't bother me, but my girlfriend is still complaining.

This depends on the time of year and maybe the prevailing winds, but I forget which time it smells ...

 

[-hh]

It's fabulous diving on Little Cayman.

True, although some people are looking for topside entertainment as well, and LC has....mosquito's As such, Little Cayman is not for everyone. We're going to be staying at Pirate's Point on our forthcoming LC visit.

You will have to make a connection in Grand Cayman, but you may be able to get a non-stop flight to GCM from Newark.

Maybe, maybe not.

Continental runs a EWR-GCM nonstop on their schedule (CO-1907 & return CO-1908), but it runs on Saturdays only, and CO doesn't commit to this flight's schedule too far in advance.

For example, as of today, flights CO-1907/1908 only "exist" out to September 4th...only 12 weeks in advance. This is OK for "quickie" vacations, but not for longer-term vacation planners.

Continental's "alternative" (ha!) is to fly GCM to Houston, spend the night (on your own $), then take a late morning flight back to NJ. All this really does is encourage people to take other airlines that have better connecting schedules.

AA is one, US Air and Delta are the others. If you must have your Continental FFM's, you can fly to Ft. Lauderdale and then take Cayman Airways the rest of the way from there, and these flights are already committed to run for the rest of 2004's calendar. Their current price is over $800/pp-RT, which is significantly more than I've had to pay for airfare versus past years, but with the current high oil prices...


-hh

 

[jlandersn]

Thanks for the Southern Cross recommendation. I had checked them out last week, and they are closed for one month during the time we are traveling. They like to give their staff some time off the island. It was our first choice, and now we are zooming in on the Little Cayman Beach Resort.

 

[zf2nt]

The booby pond smells. You get used to it, but it's a lot like vacationing near a garbage dump. It didn't bother me, but my girlfriend is still complaining.

I don't think anybody understands what happened with the Booby Pond last winter. It was, as several people have mentioned, absolutely awful. Very early in the season I noticed the Whistling Ducks were covered with green slime, then they all moved to other ponds on the east and north sides of the island. Shortly afterward, all of the egrets disappeared..and then the herons. By November, the only inhabitants left were the Boobies and the Frigatebirds, neither of which depend on the pond itself but instead nest in the adjacent mangroves.

One theory, put out by the Department of the Environment, was that very heavy fall rains washed the bird droppings out of the mangroves into the pond, and then the unusually high water level slowed decomposition of the droppings. I don't buy that, because the rainfall last fall was absolutely normal and I don't think the water level in the pond was different from recent years. Gladdys Howard (the owner of Pirate's Point) believes in the conspiracy theory--somebody put something in the water that killed the small crustaceans, and it was their decomposing carcasses that caused the stink. This one is also hard to swallow, because the stink lasted for many months and in any case I don't buy conspiracy theories.

Whatever the cause, it was pretty awful last year. I spend one day a week as the docent at the Booby Pond, and whereas I normally have a ball explaining that ecosystem to the tourists this past year it was real drudgery. If the pond hasn't recovered when I go back in October, they're just going to have to find somebody else to sit the Trust House on my day!

Anyway, to set the record straight, last winter was a fluke. I've been on Little Cayman for six years now, and visited there many years before that, and last year was the first time I've ever seen the Booby Pond such a mess. Old-timers on the island all had the same comment. Nobody can remember the pond stinking so badly as it did last winter.

 

[AggieDiver]

I heard some story about a guy building his own house on the beach, and his septic tank also acts as the anchor for some great big ol electric antenna thingamajig. Storys goes the electricity and the sewage in his septic combined to run all the birds off and caused the stink...


Just Kidding ZF2NT!! Since reading your house building saga on the net while planning my upcoming trip there in September, I have lost all dreams I ever had of building my own LC house...lol. I greatly admire your persistence and imagine that it is quite satisfying to sit on your porch and watch the waves after a day of diving, having been through it all like that.

AggieDiver