Hi gang,
We're back from our vacation at the Grand K-Mon Islands. We had lots of fun, although the weather could have cooperated a little better. Highlights, day by day if I can remember them are:

Friday night, we left a pickup call for the Airport Door-to-Door service for 7:15 p.m.. After 2 calls to the service they figured out that they had us down for Sunday instead of Friday. At 7:45 p.m. when they figured it out, they said they would send another car out right away and it would be there within 10 minutes. It never showed up. After 3 more calls we decided to take the car at 8:25 p.m.. We made it to the flight with 25 minutes to spare and boarded the red eye to Miami. We had a five hour layover in Miami but what can you do at 6:30 am

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Saturday morning (especially when it's 3:30 am to your body). We arrived at our hotel at 1:15 and were zombies. John took a nap and we laid by the pool and ocean and went to bed early. The water was warm, about 80 degrees but the pool was cold.

Sunday was a day of laying around, snorkeling in the ocean, reading by the pool and watching the sunset. We walked a mile down to a Kirk's grocery store and bought breakfast and sodas. It takes $1.25 US dollars to equal one Cayman dollar. Therefore, everything was always more expensive then it already seemed. Dinner entries, which were pricey to start with at 15.00 to 20.00 CI (Cayman Island dollars) were even more expensive when converted to $19 to $25 US dollars. We tried to go to a different restaurant for dinner each night. It started raining that night.

 

Monday was a partially rainy and windy day so we decided to take the resort scuba course they offer. If we were to be wet, we might as well be really wet. We trained in the morning in the pool with the instructor, Zak, and then he took us out to the ocean to see the fish. The ride out on the boat was in rough seas. Larry, one of the other trainees, got sick on the ride out in the boat and did not have a good time. The rest of us tried to avoid Larry for fear that sea sickness would be contagious. With Larry slowing us all down, we only had about 15 minutes of ocean bottom time. Poor Larry even got sick in his scuba regulator underwater where it was calm. Zak, had to take him, and his dutiful wife by his side, back to the surface. It was really fun but short.

 

Blow hole.

Tuesday was also a bit windy and overcast, but a less rainy day as you can see of the coudy picture at the blow hole at left. We took the sight seeing tour around the Island. Grand Cayman is shaped like your right hand if you were to cup it as if you were picking up a cup. The left part of the thumb would be the 7 mile beach and resort area. There is a large sound, protected by the reef in the middle between the thumb and forefinger and swamp and farm land where the four fingers are. It was an all day trip and the guide, a native islander, was a hoot. He loved to get off on how the islander natives are so strict and law breakers were not tolerated. His Mom would beat him if he told a lie or stole anything. Mostly, it seemed as if his Mom would beat him for just about any little infraction.
He even said that the police are required to treat everyone with respect. They can not use force to subdue anybody unless they have tried talking first. Any police caught using force without trying to talk it out first is put in jail and kicked off the force. Too bad that can't be exported to the states.

This is John helping to make rope out of tops of fronz at Pedro St. James Castle. The weave them into everything from baskets, hats and rope shown here.

These are pictures from the botanical gardens.

Here we are at Rum Point, the furtherest North point on the Island. You can see that the blue sky actually came out for a time both here at Rum point and at the Turtle farm below. From Rum point, the tour backtracked to George Town and then up past 7 mile beach to the turtle farm.

At the Turtle farm they raise green sea turtles for both consumption and release, mostly consumption. Cute little buggers. The Cayman islands became known in the 1700's as the place you could stock up on Turtles for food on your ship. The turtles kept well in the hold and could be butchered for meat when needed. It just about wiped out the turtle population on the island.

 

We visited Hell City and sent a few post cards from Hell. They said we would beat the cards back to the states by 4-6 weeks.

Actually the picture at right is three photographs pasted together. One of Cathie and the kids, one of me and one of the Hell rock area. I superimposed the three pictures together so we could all go to Hell
Wednesday we walked to the main city of George Town for some shopping. The weather was better, only partly cloudy and a lot more sun. John wasn't feeling well. He started coming down with a head cold. After lunch, we took a local jitney bus up to a snorkel spot behind a cemetery that our tour guide said was good. We talked to the locals on the bus and they also said it was good, although the rough weather of late might have stirred it up a little. We took some fish food along with us. What a mistake. The fish know the food and basically go into a feeding frenzy biting anything they can, including me. The food was small and brown sort of the size of a good freckle. Every time I stopped swimming I would get bitten by one of those groupies that mistook a freckle for food. I had five or six bite marks on my legs from the damn buggers. If you lifted the food out of the water, they lost track of it and would drift away. As soon as you brought it down underwater, it was like someone blew a whistle and they all came swarming back to me. I got rid of the food fast.

 

 

Zak explaining the sting ray's

Thursday, John was feeling really bad so we left him at the hotel and the rest of us went on a scuba dive to Sting Ray City. Sting Ray City is in the North sound about half way between the top of the thumb and the tip of the index finger in my Right Hand analogy I used earlier. What a blast we had. If you ever get there, this is a must do activity. Again the sky was overcast as you can see from the picture of Zak to the left. The wind was pushing the water over the coral into the lagoon causing a current when the water makes its way back from the lagoon to the sea again. Zak was again our instructor/guide but this time we spend about 40 minutes underwater, since we were more experienced and he didn't have to show us all the ropes again. He showed us how to take some squid in our closed fist and put it on the Ray's nose. For the record, these are basically domesticated rays that know that they are going to be fed by the people.

Zak explained that once you get the Ray's attention with the squid, you own the ray, you can make it go forward, backwards, sit on your head and/or do loop-de-loops if you want and Christy did all that and more with them. All they want is the squid that they smell in your hand. They are part of the shark family, but are bottom dwellers sucking up stuff they smell on the bottom but squid is their favorite. They have a very powerful suction but no teeth. They were really smooth on the white bottom and more like leather on the top with small spikes along the spine. The tail held the stinger but they would only use that if something were to climb on top of them. They were a blast and we have video to prove it. Elspeth was our videographer for each of our three scuba trips that we went on and she put all three trips onto one tape for us. Hey want to see an hour video of our vacation?
Then Zak took us over to a green moray eel that lived near by. It too would chase Zak's bucket of squid, climbing over his shoulders around his torso and through his legs. Once the business end of the eel went by you could pet it. It went past me four or five times so I reached out and petted it. It was silky smooth like a silk stuffed animal. It too was basically domesticated as it entertained multiple tours each day. Zak says there's another more docile one but it wasn't out today. On the way back to the marina we got to talking about the houses going in there. They run about $7,000,000 US for some of the nicer ones. There was a huge yacht in the harbor and we were told that one of their dive masters was just hired onto it to show the owner all the best diving spots around the Caribbean. He was offered a lot more money then the dive shop could pay and was just at the right spot at the right time.

I don't have pictures to put with the rest of the text, so plain text will have to do. I do have video that would fill in the blanks, perhaps it's time for a video capture device (maybe next Christmas).

Friday we rented a car to go around the island to Rum Point again. That would be on the tip of your index finger. It was cold, windy and slightly rainy. We snorkeled anyway, but it was so shallow you could sit on your knees and half your body would be out of the water. We did pick up a lot of shells for Christy. That night another thunder storm hit and it poured rain in buckets. Since we had a car we went around to a restaurant on the right side of the tip of the thumb that we would not have been able to get to without the car. Boy the roads flood easily when it rains. The food was excellent and since it was not on 7-mile beach, the prices were more reasonable. Since the Cayman Islands are aligned with the British (British West Indies) they drive on the Left. Left is Right and Right is Wrong we were told. However, they count their money in tenth of a dollar and they measure distance and speed limits in Miles not Kilometers. There are a mixture of cars with right hand drive and left hand drive. They really wanted to be aligned with the states, however, due to an old tale of saving a member of the Royal family some time back they were granted no tax status. If they aligned themselves with the states, they would get taxed. Sounds logical.

Saturday we were getting anxious about leaving the next day but wanted to do one more dive. Christy and I wanted to see a wreck. John couldn't dive since his sinuses were plugged with the cold, but he was feeling better then before. Therefore, Cathie and John took the submarine that went down to 112 feet and Christy and I took another suba dive. Some of the divers on our boat had already been to the wreck and as it turns out, all it's moorings were already taken, so we ended up at an area called the Wild Life Reef. We spent about 35-40 minutes in the water and saw a barracuda, eagle ray (very rare in the daytime), a lobster, a crab, some conch (pronounced konk), puffer fish, and a whole array of other fish whose names I don't remember. It was probably the most dazzling dive for beauty and fish we did.
That night we reconfirmed our charter bus ride to the airport for the next morning and set a wake up call for 5:45 am so we could catch the bus between 6:00 and 6:15 a.m.

Sunday every time I woke up to go to the bathroom Cathie would ask what time it was. She was afraid we would miss our wake up call. Good thing too, as it turned out. At 2:45 a.m. I gave her the time but she got up a few minutes later anyway and said no, it was 6:01! Good thing she checked since we did not get a wake up call. When I checked my watch, I realized that I had pushed the button to revert back to Mode 1 time zone (west coast time) instead of the second time zone mode that I had set for East Coast time. Once we realized that they had not called us, we had to scramble to get to the lobby to catch the bus. We reached the lobby at 6:10 and were assured the bus had not come yet. By 6:30 we finally took a taxi. We were not going to go through the rush of waiting too long again. Good thing, because we had to wait in line at the airport to check the bags. We had another 4 hour layover in Miami and we just sat around playing rummy and reading our books. We got home just in time to see the last 2 minutes of the Super Bowl.

Wow, what a trip. I wish the weather had been better. I guess those two storms that hit Georgia and the rest of the East Coast affected our weather as well. Well, that's the trip. Thanks for sitting through it again with me. It was probably a lot more fun then what I've described but you had to be there. Anyway, I'll have to work the rest of the year just to pay it off.