Day 8 – Ocean Frontiers

For some reason my mind decided to wake me at 3:30am and tell me I was done sleeping. I attempted to close my eyes for 30 more minutes or so, but finally gave up and got up. I spent the better of an hour going through some of our pictures and wrote several posts on the blog.

As 6:30am rolled around, I woke Olivia. Today we were going on a morning two tank dive at 7:45am with Ocean Frontiers. It is the dive shop and outfitter for the entire East End. Their main facility was local right by Eagle Rays Grill. The place is a dive resort and is perfectly suited for divers to go out all day long on multiple dives. We however, were only going to go for two dives.

First stop was High Rock Drop-off. The dive was a either a 100ft or 60ft dive, depending if you chose to go through a small narrow cavernous tunnel on the ocean floor. I decide we would not be trying to squeeze this petit figure through an even petiter passage this morning. Olivia and I opted to swim above the narrow passage. The passage swim only took about 5 minutes, so when the two people were done they joined back with us at around 60 feet.

Sea life has always amazing and fascinated me my entire life. The beauty and sheer variety is simply mind boggling. So as soon as we starting descending, my photo finger went to work. It was long before the battery died. On our second day on the island I noticed that our charger for the underwater cameras was not working properly. I attempted to repair it and thought I had fixed it, but quickly realized my repair job was lacking. Oh well, time for the mental snapshots to kick it. Luckily I was able to get a few shots of Olivia in the water and managed to get a few videos.

We dove the first dive for 45 minutes and were the last persons back on the boat. Both Olivia and I still had quite a bit of air left, so Eve (our dive master), signaled we could still stay down on the bottom a bit longer. Taking advantage of the opportunity we continued to snorkel away on the reef before finally rising back up 5-10 minutes later and starting to decompress.

Second site was Iron Station, a gorgeous coral formation sprawled out like a hand’s fingers. Olivia’s ears were bothering her on the first dive so on this dive we stayed at around a 30ft depth and decide not to go any deeper. Better safe than sorry. Like before, this was awesome, but with a 10x factor. There was so many varieties of coral, fish, fans, etc… The captain had told us this was the employee’s favorite dive site out of all the 55 dive site in Grand Cayman and I could see why.

Around 30 minutes into the dive, my tank loosened from my BCV. Olivia tried to fix it, but we headed back to the boat and were going to get one of the crew to change it out. Apparently the dive shop just had gotten these BCVs not but three days ago and they had not been broken in. Instead on going back in, we both just hung out on the boat. Swaying in the boat for 15 minutes or so, I could feel the sickness starting to drift in, but I managed to fight it off.

Arrived back at the dock around 11:30am and was greeted by Anna and Thomas. With all that exercise, our bellies were rumbling. So after taking LT back to the house, Anna, Olivia and I went to Tukka for lunch. Olivia made the best choice by ordering the daily special – Wahoo. Mama and mine weren’t too shabby either.