The Grand Prize
By David Caldwell
It all started at last years Boston Sea Rovers Show, a good friend of ours, Lee Livingston was in charge of selling the raffle tickets. He asked if I wanted to purchase some raffle tickets and not wanting to be a cheap skate, I opted to buy a few. I reached in my pocket and pulled out $20. Well, before I realized I had bought ten tickets and I started to fill out the blanks with my name and phone number, not thinking that I would ever win anything. We continued on through the show checking out the booths, some of the talks and most of all just having a great weekend of talking about diving and being around divers. The other thing that we did at the show was to plan a trip for Heather and I along with Marge Livingston and she decided that she would let Lee come along with us to dive the Bianca C with Evie Dudas. Evie had a trip planned out for November and Marge wanted to dive the Bianca C. I figured that we would make plans for all of us to go. Not to change the subject but we had a great trip and the dive report for that trip is posted.
Well the Sea Rovers weekend winded down and Heather and I decided to cut out a little early on Sunday and head home after a long fun filled weekend. No sooner then arriving at Heather’s house in Marblehead her cell phone rang and she said it was Lee and he is mumbling and needs to talk to me. I picked up the phone and he said "Dude, you and I are going to the Caymans," and that I just won the Grand Prize for an all inclusive weeks stay in Caymans for two, including air fare, and diving. I said this is a joke and he said "No way, it’s all legit" and that Judy Ackerman, the woman from the Caymans Tourism Bureau, pulled my ticket and we were going. I couldn’t believe it and I had to break the news to Lee before he had his bags packed that he wasn’t my type - I like younger women, not older men, and that I would think about taking Heather instead. In reality, Heather would be the one thinking about taking me, she would be making the decision if I could go with her. Guess what? she picked me - so I got to go with her.
After working out our schedules we made our plans to travel the first week in February because we needed to work around our vacation time. We’ve had a long cold winter here and February was looking to be a great time to travel. Heather and I have been doing a lot of traveling the past few years, mostly to wrecks along the eastern seaboard, along with a trip to Florida for some cave diving. Being wreck divers we have tendency to travel to wrecks and not to places like Grand Cayman, after all Caymans are known for reef bashing, not necessarily wreck diving. It has been a few years since I’ve done reef diving and I was looking forward to relaxing recreational diving, which we really haven’t been doing much of. I kept telling Heather that she wasn’t going to need her 5lb hammer, chisel and her 200lb lift bag, she stamped her feet a few times and finally I got her calmed down by promising her at least one trimix wreck dive while we were there. Now the presser was on - I had to find a wreck for Heather to dive while we were there... that’s another story.
The time finally arrived it was time to go, all our gear was packed and everything was going as planned without flaw. Before we knew it we were in a taxi in Grand Cayman heading towards Spanish Bay Reef Resort, an all inclusive secluded hotel on the West End of the island. The prize package gave us a choice of two hotels, one being Spanish Bay and the other being the Beach Club on Seven mile beach. We decided on Spanish Bay because it was a quieter resort and it offered shore-based diving, which the other one did not. Later that week we found it was dubbed the place where the "newly weds and the nearly deads" hang out - but it was a great place located right on the water and the staff were really so nice.
We arrived late in the afternoon, we checked into the desk and they gave us these bands that we had to wear for the week. Where it was a all inclusive that offered different packages we ended up with these cool lime green bands that meant we were divers on the dive package. These cool lime bands also did not come off - not without a lot of soap and a near thumb-dislocation. The woman in charge of guest services showed us our room and explained how everything worked. We were hoping to do a beach dive so we checked in at the dive shop and got the low down on how the dives were arranged. The way it ended up working out is that you had to check out tanks before 3:45 and you would have to be out of the water by 5:00 before the shop closed. Considering it was after 4:00 shore diving was out but we were all set for doing the boat dive the next day. We got the time and they told us a van would meet us and take us to the location where we were going to meet the boat. We mentioned that for the first day we would need transportation just to get the routine, but that we had rented a jeep for the week and we would be able to get where we would need to meet the boat.
Both Heather and I were kind of bummed about the shore diving limitations since we imagined doing like 4-6 dives per day/night, but we figured "oh well"- that’s the way it worked. The other thing was by the end of the week we were extremely happy that we got a jeep for the week, otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to do all the extra things that we did. There really isn’t much around the Spanish Bay and everything is really happening around Seven mile beach, but to be honest the resort has everything you need and if you wanted to get a ride down to the other resort they would take you there. The East end of the island was definitely worth the drive - but beware of the "Pirates Cave" - there are no pirates or caves, just a guy trying to sell knock off Rolex watches and trinkets!
We met the van first thing in the morning with all of our gear and video camera, as I mentioned before it has been a few years since I’ve done warm water reef diving and I knew what was ahead for us. In other words "Cattle Boat" diving, plain and simple we would be herded around like cattle. At least Heather and I were the only two in the van, so it wasn’t starting out as being packed into a van full of people like it became towards the end of the week, but like I said we had our own jeep to get around and we wouldn’t need to be transported around by the resort after the first day. They took us over to the Beach Club where we would meet the boat on the first day, we checked in at the shop and like every dive shop they said,"Hang out, the boat’s coming soon."
Everyone was extremely friendly and we just chit chatted while we wanted a short time for the boat to pick us up off the beach. While we waited, Heather had all the dive staff checking out the new video camera. On our first day diving, we loaded the boat and to our surprise there was only six divers on this huge platform boat, in other words no cattle. Like every boat you get on for the first time none of the divers say much until after the first dive and then you figure out what peoples skill levels are and who you want to hang with and who you want to stay away from. Considering one couple didn’t speak any English... we knew we wouldn’t be hanging with them. Not to mention the fact that they were diving in bathing suits, had rental gear was a dead give-away to stay away. Another couple had all their own gear and seemed to have their stuff together without even seeing them in the water.
Heather and I suited up and while we were donning our gear and pulling our hoods over our heads one of the dive masters asked if we were planning on getting cold and we replied no but we figured if we got hot we could take them off. I never took the hood off the whole week to give you an idea that the water wasn’t that warm. The dive master took us on a tour and we all followed along, the two people who had the rental gear followed close to the dive master, managing to get in just about every frame of the video - and Heather and I followed along with our newly found dive buddies Garath and Helen - a very nice couple from Wales. What’s more, they sort of spoke the same language! We learned a great new expression for "something stupid" - "That’s so Irish!". Garath and Helen were great divers and the way it worked out we ended up diving with them the whole week. The way the dives are planned is you do a maximum dive to 100' for 20 minutes and a second dive to 60' for 40 minutes.
The routine for the week was similar - we checked in with the dive shop at either of the locations and they would get word back to us as to where and when to meet for the following days dive.
Some of our favorite dives were the wall dives. Probably one of our two or three favorites of the whole week was the dive along the North Wall in a section called "Tarpon Alley", aptly named for the large population of Tarpon hanging around the area. The North side tends to be a bit rougher, at least in the "wintertime" when winds shift around, making certain parts of the island more diveable than others. The North side is also where "Stingray City" is located, though we didn’t do that one. The ride out to the North Wall was very bumpy, there was a solid 2-4' sea running and a lot of the newbies on the boat were sick. The boats are not designed to the do the Doria or anything, so they tend to bounce around a lot.
When we arrived on the site, we dropped into the water and swam up to the mooring waiting for the group. The newbies were having a lot of trouble as they were not swimming with their regs in their mouths. This is something I always do. It takes nothing at all to get smacked with a wave and take a bunch of water. We dropped down when the group got squared away and headed out a crevice to the wall.
The North Wall is very, very shear and pretty much drops straight off to 6000 feet with little sloping. The visibility was not quite as good but the massive wall and breathtaking drop made this one of my favorite dives. Swimming along the wall starting at about 100', you could look up all along the way and see the sun glistening down. On the wall dives there are not so many fish and colors to see, as the real focus of these dives to look at formations. Rising back up toward the mooring line, there were large schools of Tarpon, which were remarkably still even when you swam near them. Just sort of hovering in a pack hardly moving at all, they were very interesting fish to see.
Overall the dive operation was very organized and had us meeting in different locations around the island. We got to dive with another operation, Treasure Island, and they handled the over flow from Spanish Bay and the Beach Club Resort - overflow mostly being cruise boat day trippers and newbies on their first big dive trip. Nice enough people, but really clueless. As the week went on there people like one guy who needed 16 pounds of weight though he was only wearing a bathing suit and a weathered "Yu Betta Belize It!" tee shirt. As the week went on we dove with Garath and Helen and the boat progressively started picking up more and more people and it started feeling the cattle boat scene for sure. Its amazing to see the recreational divers survive from a day of diving, we kind of sat back and watched in amazement that the dive masters got everyone back on the boat alive and in one piece. But the four of us were able to hang back and kind of follow along as the dive masters figured that we were capable divers and that they didn’t have to be hand held through the week, thank god.
Over the week we totaled out doing 14 dives one being a night dive on the Balboa - a freighter sank in an ocean storm in about 40 feet of water, basically in the harbor off Georgetown. The wreck was set with explosives and broken up into several chunks of hull plates, boilers, a bow and some other debris. It still comes up to within about 10 feet of the surface, so its still a navigational hazard. As a result of boat traffic this wreck can only be dived at night and when there aren’t any commercial ships coming into the dock. This dive is definitely a "must do". It’s totally unappreciated as a wreck. In a matter of minutes, we had visited the propellers, swum through anything penetrable and found a brass window frame (no taking). The other dive was a trimix dive on the Carrie Lee, which was a cool dive though we were really not impressed with DiveTech and would not use them again.
All in all, the diving was excellent and the resort was great and we cant say enough good things about the Spanish Bay and the Beach Club. The resort was clean, the food was awesome and the staff was extremely friendly. Both Heather and I will someday return more then likely when we run out of steam from deep wreck diving and when we are more along the lines and closer to the "Nearly Deads." I would like to personally say a special thanks to Judy Ackerman, Caymans Tourism Bureau for pulling my name out of the hat and thanks to the Boston Sea Rovers for having a great raffle prize.