Photo by Jochem Wijnands
Stingray City, off Rum Point on Grand Cayman, is regularly voted the world’s best dive spot. Given the remarkable diving in the Cayman islands alone, including the spectacular wreck of the USS Kittiwake, it’s a claim I am keen to put to the test.
We dive off the boat and gather as a group to sit on the sandy bottom at five meters, carrying extra weights and blowing masses of air out of our buoyancy vests to find equilibrium. After our OK signals, the divemaster produces fresh squid from a sealed bottle. Within moments, a large group of stingrays is swimming around and among us. We have been carefully briefed to make no sudden movements and have left off our snorkels to remove the risk of an accidental bump displacing our masks.
As barbed tails swish past my naked chest, I recall being told that they are one-off weapons and hence the rays are reluctant to use them. Guided by the divemaster, I feel their leathery skin on top and velvety undersides as they ripple gracefully past, unconcerned by my clumsy attempts to stroke them with one hand as my other protects my regulator.
As time passes and even more rays join us, I begin to feel part of their element. We have kicked up a cloud of sand, reducing visibility, so it is a shock when a bright green moray eel suddenly appears, its ghostly white eyes clouded by cataracts. Diving offers the real thrill of being in an environment as alien to us as another planet.
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There used to be vast numbers of turtles in the waters of the three Cayman Islands, so much so that when Christopher Columbus passed by in 1503, he nicknamed the smaller two islands Las Tortugas, "the turtles".
With modern digital cameras, the technical challenges of underwater photography can be overcome fairly easily.
The three Cayman Islands lie just west of Cuba in the Caribbean Sea. Most of the 56,000 inhabitants live on Grand Cayman, where ramshackle housing developments and an untidy jumble of electric lines blight the capital, George Town.
Hello Cayman Islands, best-known as an offshore financial haven but also punching above its weight in the field of conservation. With some of the world's best diving, this tiny trio of islands is leading the way in the battle against the lionfish, which has invaded Caribbean waters from its home in Asia, as well as bringing its own native blue iguana back from the brink of extinction on land.
“We watched them coming through the Bahamas, which they just devastated,” she says. “They lay 25,000 eggs every four days and have no predators here. They will literally eat everything on the reef.”
At the Cayman Turtle Farm, which was set up to breed turtles in captivity for the table and also release adults into the ocean, I see many visitors taking photos of another prehistoric creature, the iguana.
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