Grand Cayman Island

Wednesday: Grand Cayman Island

The port in Georgetown is too shallow for our cruise ship which means we disembark by ‘tender’.  In other words we anchor offshore and board ‘shuttles’ to and from the dock throughout the day.

 

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The water is is so blue its unbelievable.  Our Itinerary for the day included Stingray City [Sandbar], Barrier Reef & Rum Point Beach.  Kelly booked our day with Native Way Watersports.

Our guide was Captain Chris and our boat was the ‘Trippin Out’, a 43 foot torres vessel.  There were only a couple, a family of 5 [from England], Kelly, me and Chris so we had plenty of room on the boat.  As you can see some of the other boats at the sandbar were packed, standing room only and didn’t have a enough guides to assist them in handling the rays.

Stingray Sandbar: The Stingray City Sandbar, located inside the Barrier Reef, is teeming with 30 to 40 Southern Atlantic stingrays. The only place in the world where you can enjoy the thrill of swimming with and feeding the ‘rays.

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When we first pulled up to the sandbar I was like a little kid, I had expected those little stingrays that we used to accidently hook when fishing at Uncle Rubin’s in Fort Meyers.  But these things were huge, 4 to 5 feet across and they were everywhere, gliding by individually and in pairs. As we were all climbing into the water, only waste deep in spite of how far away from shore we were, Chris jumped in and caught a stingray by hand for us to handle it, feed it, hold it, etc.  IT WAS AWSOME!

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After we had played with and fed the rays we cruised around over to the reef which was about a hundred yards away and snorkeled for about an hour.  We have visited ‘better’ reefs before but the smallness of our group made for a much more relaxed and un-crowded experience.

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After snorkeling we cruised over to the pier at Rays Rum Point shopped and ate lunch on the beach [included in our tour]. The beach was beautiful, the shopping was decent and the food good and they had hammocks.  Did I mention we ate there?

Some of in our group walked around, some took a nap on the ‘Trippin Out until it as time to go.  We had such complete run of the boat that it was no problem for some of us to lay out either napping or sunning.

We did some more shopping back at the ships dock and then returned to the boat, exhausted and happy.  Then to be safe we ate some more.  Love Grand Cayman.