Cayman Islands Diving Notes

  1. We used as reference "The Dive Sites of The Cayman Islands" by Lawson Wood. (We actually met Lawson and his wife Leslie on Cayman Brac.)
  2. The Cayman Tourist Association web site has a dive site database that includes GPS coordinates. I looked up all the sites in the book and wrote the GPS coordinates next to each one. We could then find and identify the sites both in the big boat and in the dinghy.

Cayman Brac

  1. We mainly dived the dive site moorings on the south side within a couple of miles of our anchorage. We used our dinghy. We tried one dive on the north side but it was hard finding a safe anchorage for our big boat. There are no Aggressor moorings on the north side (that's a clue). The dive was good but not great.

Little Cayman

  1. Bloody Bay Marine Park is excellent. There are good dives elsewhere, but we found that the dives on the south side of the island tended to be deeper. We like the top of the drop-off to be under 50'.
  2. We only moor our big boat to dive moorings designed for the liveaboard (Cayman Aggressor IV). These are double-pin moorings which have larger balls and typically 1.5" black/yellow mooring whips. We're probably not too heavy for the regular moorings but these do fail from time to time, and since we leave the boat unattended this would be a big problem. We found 7 double-pin moorings in Bloody Bay Marine Park.
  3. The Marine Park is pretty busy with dive boats from both Little Cayman and Cayman Brac.
  4. We would leave our anchorage on the south side around 10am and get to the Marine Park around 11am when the local dive boats are leaving after their two dives. We do one dive, have lunch and are on our second mooring when a few afternoon boats turn up. We were the last boat to leave the park and the last back into the anchorage.
  5. We dived the dive moorings on the south side from our dinghy, but we preferred Bloody Bay.

Grand Cayman

  1. The west side of Grand Cayman is well dived. There are many resort dive operations, plus divers from the cruise ships. Most of the dives are spur and groove patch reefs with a few average walls.
  2. Our two dives on the north side were good but Grand Cayman diving does not match up to Bloody Bay.
  3. Stingray City was fun for a different sort of dive. It's in 15-20'. Another similar site (Sandbar) is shallower and generally has hundreds of snorkelers there watching the stingrays.
  4. Our last dive was near the anchorage and about 1/4 mile from a cruise ship. It was incredibly noisy under water!