Grand Cayman Diving

For the last three years in a row I've taken a trip to Grand Cayman with my brother Pete and his lovely wife Jill, in the second week of December, just before the mad Christmas rush.

I spend the mornings scuba diving and the afternoons lazing around on the beach.
It's a tough life, but you get used to it... just like Stingray ™ beer.

A few words about the Cayman Islands are in order. These are three islands administered by Great Britain ( they drive on the left, speak proper English, and report to the Queen ) located in the middle of the Caribbean Sea due south of Cuba. They are actually the coral-topped summits of a giant underwater mountain that soars 25,000 feet above the Cayman Trench - the deepest part of the Caribbean.

This gives rise to the famous Cayman Wall. The edge of the mountaintop can be seen about 100 feet below the surface if you swim out from shore aways. And if you dive to that depth you can hover along the Wall and see lots of cool stuff... giant plate corals and gorgonias and huge barrel sponges and other weird animals masquerading as plants... and, of course, fish.
Or... you can just float along, gazing down into the cobalt blue Abyss, and wonder how you ever got up here !

This year I brought something new with me - a digital camera with an underwater casing. My photography experience until now has been exclusively with 35mm film cameras, slide and flatbed scanners, and, of course, Photoshop. So I didn't have great expectations going into this, just hopes for a few good images I could clean up later.

I guess you could say I'm now sold on underwater digital photography !
And judging by the interest shown in my camera (a Canon Powershot A20) by my fellow divers, I think I sold about a dozen more of these babies ! (Message for Canon: You're paying for my trip next year or I'm switching to Nikon !)

I hope you enjoy these images, too. I wish I could take full credit for the results, but technology has finally caught up with amateurs like me. Still, there's something to be said for being in the right place at the right time, isn't there ?
Right, Greg ?

"90% of life is just showing up."
- Woody Allen

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