Dive Trip Review: Little Cayman, British West Indies

Reef Shark rolling in the sand (to remove parasites-maybe?)

(This photo was entered into the Clearly Cayman Dive Resorts Photo Contest for the month of April. Please vote if you like it!)

We recently returned from a dive trip to Little Cayman, British West Indies. This was our 21^st visit to this small island south of Cuba. Little Cayman is primarily a vacation spot for SCUBA divers. It doesn’t really have long stretches of sandy beaches but what it does have is Bloody Bay Wall. Our trip trip was booked with Reef Divers, we've been diving with them for years, they are the BEST!

Bloody Bay Wall in Little Cayman is a world-renowned scuba diving site featuring a dramatic vertical coral wall that plunges from about 20-40 feet down to over 6,000 feet. Located within the Bloody Bay Marine Park, this site offers high visibility, vibrant coral reefs, and frequent sightings of sharks, turtles, and rays.

Containing about one-third of the dive sites in Little Cayman, Bloody Bay Wall Marine Park is one of the most sought-after spots for avid scuba divers. The park offers some of the most dramatic underwater scenery anywhere in the world.

On this trip, on almost every dive, we saw reef sharks. Sightings used to be rare but now it seems like these fish are making their presence known. But fear not, the don’t really mind divers. I’m not sure these prehistoric creatures know what a diver’s exhale bubbles are.

The usual suspects were seen: eagle rays, a couple of green morays, hawksbill turtles, and many Nassau Groupers.

Once heavily overfished, the Nassau Grouper population is slowly recovering thanks to strict protection, with the Little Cayman site being the largest known spawning aggregation of the species in the region. Read more at the Grouper Moon Project.

Before their recent decline, the Nassau grouper was once the most common species of grouper in U.S. waters. In 2016, the grouper was listed as ‘threatened’ in the United States under the Endangered Species Act.

In the same year, the government of the Cayman Islands enacted legislation for the protection and aided recovery of the fish. Perhaps most significantly, the legislation prohibited all fishing and selling of Nassau groupers during the fish’s 5-month spawning season.

“Refraining from taking marine life when they are spawning is a major component of a sustainable fishery,” John Bothwell, Senior Research Officer at the Cayman Islands Department of Environment told Cayman News in 2018. “It is one of the reasons why the Cayman Islands, and other fisheries jurisdictions around the world, have closed and open seasons, along with bag and size limits, for marine life that is at risk of being overfished.”

The Cayman Island government also enacted size and daily count limits during the now-limited fishing season, and spear-fishing for Nassau groupers was prohibited altogether. Together, these rules aimed to revitalize the Cayman Island’s Nassau grouper population, and it shows.

We did see some coral bleaching on a few dives. And some algae damage too. But overall the reefs were in pretty good shape considering the diving pressure (number of divers-experienced and inexperienced), a few hurricanes that hit the island over the past few years and ocean water temperature on the rise.

We had booked a 17-dive trip but the strong east/northeast winds made for very choppy water. Four of our scheduled dives were canceled due to small craft warnings.

On the morning of one of the canceled dive adventures, I walked around the west end of the island. I was very excited to see the baby Red-footed Boobies still on their nests. The National Trust Booby Ponds NatureReserve on Little Cayman boasts a colony of about 3500 pairs of Red-footed Boobies, and is the Cayman Islands only Ramsar site (a wetland of international significance).