My Apology to Cayman Brac:
A Non-diver’s Perspective to a Dive Destination
What a whirlwind travel schedule we’ve had at Sub-Aquatic Sports this winter. Even I’m surprised by the numbers. In a past three months, we've been to four locations (Roatan, Socorro, Cococs Islands and Cayman Brac) with 117 divers and completed 98 boat dives. So what does all these numbers have to do with the title ‘My Apology to Cayman Brac?’ Well, for the first time in 35 years, I find myself as a ‘non-diver’. It isn’t by choice. Due to a nagging medical condition, hardly life threatening but definitely dive limiting, I find myself on an island that I’ve never promoted for non-divers. Customers often come into the store and say, I want to dive Cayman Brac and take my non-diving spouse with me. My standard reply was…. ‘well they better be happy doing serious hammock time with a good book.’ To me, Brac has always been about the diving. It’s wonderfully easy, the water clear, the marine life plentiful and the reefs healthy, but topside, humm, hardly a place I would promote for anyone who doesn’t own a BCD.
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Well, here I am, vacation day #3 as a non-diver and am offering up apologies. There is plenty to do on Brac for people like me, who think sitting by the pool for a week is a waste of time. In fairness to Brac Reef Resort, they have a gorgeous pool and I sit here now blogging. Blogging is something I never found time to do as a diver; I was always underwater. I just had a refreshing swim in the pool which was needed after finishing a scenic, 12-mile bike ride around the island. My partner-in-crime is Sarah, the only other non-diver in my group. Sarah is the 14 year old daughter of longtime dive friends. The resort offers complimentary bikes and they gave us the two newest bikes, but we are still going old-school here. You know the kind, where you back peddle to brake. Add that minor factor to having to ride on the left side of the road (a.k.a. the wrong side to us Americans) ended up requiring a little adjustment time.
Sarah and I quickly found Rebecca’s Cave, named after a child who perished during a hurricane in 1932. A little burial stone is found inside the small cave, which brought us, probably like many other visitors, to ponder if this cave would be our first choice of refuge during a hurricane. You see, Cayman Brac is blessed with a pristine fringing reef, that unfortunately offers very little protect against 30ft ocean swells. Brac sits only 60ft above sea level so where exactly is the safest place if a hurricane hit? Tragically, Rebecca’s parents chose wrong. But enough about sad stories, back to biking. We followed the coastline until finally reaching the sign for Bat Cave. I welcomed the false advertising, for there were no bats in Bat Cave. What you found instead was a rather new stair structure built into the hillside to take you into the cave. This is a site worth visiting. On previous dive trips, I had found time to visit both of these caves on the ‘outgassing’ day before flying home. But now, I explored them at leisure and continued onward and that's where things got interesting. First, who knew there were so many nice beaches and I’m defining ‘nice’ as scenic and snorkel worthy. Some beaches were rocky, some are made of ironshore so they are not exactly a sunbather's dream. The first beach is just a short bike or an 8 minute walk west from the resort. The rocky beach, called Sunset Point overlooks the Caribbean Sea with Little Cayman island. We watched the dive boat carrying our group to ‘Little’ for the dive day and for a slight moment, I confessed to being sad about not joining the adventure. But again, enough about the sad, back on the bikes. Back tracking past the resort, we found another beach, creatively called ‘Public Beach,’ about 1.5 miles down the road. It is said to have great snorkeling. I will have to check it out. We then headed across island, past the airport, and stumbled across another public access called Buccaneer Beach. A sign I could not resist, pointed the way to MV Captain Keith Tibbetts shipwreck. This is a signature dive site for the island and who knew it had beach access? Not I until now. FYI: the Tibbetts was intentional sunk as a dive site in 1996. It was originally a Russian Destroyer and one of the few Soviet Union wrecks to visit in the Western Hemisphere. The tourism board has put significant effort into cutting a lagoon into the ironshore so that swimmers, snorkelers and divers can safely do a beach entry here. Bring beach walker shoes though because the area is all ironshore. Note, the wreck is about 200 yards off shore so understand the conditions before doing a beach dive. Unfortunately, I didn’t bring any snorkeling gear on this bike trip but won’t make that mistake again. Speaking of snorkeling, I have found my way to the water and what a different perspective it was. In fact, it was crazy good. I joined the dive boat on the third dive of the first day. It was a shallow site, suitable for snorkelers, so Sarah, again my partner-in-crime, joined me for some water time. We watched the scuba group weave through the finger and grove coral formations; they saw lots of tropical fish. From a snorkelers perspective though, we saw multiple sea turtles swim up for an occasional breath. There was a huge barracuda lurking beside a school of grunts and a curious smaller barracuda who was intrigued by my finger snapping. He briefly came in close enough for a photo but soon left, disappointed that the noise wasn’t a food source. The highlight, however, was a feeding eagle ray. We watched the same ray circle an area, always focusing on a sandy point and feeding on something buried. I’ve rarely seen this behavior while on scuba. Probably, on scuba, we’re too loud with all that bubble making and certainly we get too close because… well, after all, one must capture the perfect underwater image. Neither factor was problem here. There was 30ft of water separating me and the eagle rays and bobbing in a buoyant wetsuit with no weight belt made it quite impossible for me to disturb the creature. A younger, fitter version of myself would have gone for it but the older wiser me, relaxed and enjoyed the show. So again, my apologies to Cayman Brac. My new found non-diving status has allowed me ample time to observe marine life from a different perspective, discover new beach locations suitable for swimming, snorkeling and diving plus take a relaxing bike tour. Maybe tomorrow, I’ll actually grab a book and relax in one of the hammocks I always touted. Humm…. probably not though. There’s still much to explore here. Kim Sass |
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