Tuesday evenings, there is an all you can eat seafood dinner and they also showed the videos from Monday's dives with the videographer.
Here is our dive boat that we used all week (except for the night dive).
Thursday afternoon, I went for a walk and visited the East End Lighthouse park. The many signs gave a great history of the east end, which has been and continues to be very different from the rest of the island.
On my way up and down the staircase that goes from the road up to the park, I noticed these trees with exceptionally large beans. I am used to the legumonous trees here in Phoenix, some of which have beans as long as nine or ten inches - but these were closer to two feet long.
Thursday evening, Patty and I had signed up for the "blacklight dives" where there are special lights for us to use. On the way out, I got this nice photo of the sunset.
The night dive was amazing. The black lights showed the bioluminescent sea creatures in a way we had not seen them before - the anemones were most interesting.
On Friday, we did our regular two dives in the morning, then all of us went on a third dive in the afternoon. We tied up at one location, then jumped in and descended to the base of the line holding the mooring ball. As a group, when then swam on to two more mooring sites; at the same time, the captain moved the boat to that site and tied up there. Along the way and at that site, we saw many sharks. I stopped counting shark sightings at 10. A great dive.
Friday evening, we all went together to the Kaibo Beach Cafe for our last dinner in Grand Cayman.
Saturday, we made it to the airport early enough to avoid the crowd. We checked our bags, went through security and immigration quickly and then had a couple of hours for lunch and to wait for our flight. We boarded our flight on time but then sat there for more than an hour. It turns out that there was a worldwide outage of United's computer system so the last half of the passengers were slowly processed and we waited for them.
That delay meant we landed with only 50 minutes to catch our flight to Phoenix. Patty zipped through the Global Entry kiosks, but my passport would not read. I tried entering info manually and it then said I was not in the system. I then went to the agent and showed my NEXUS card, he could not see a problem. He took me to another machine which finally worked. I quickly answered the four questions, but then remembered that I had one small apple left in my backpack. So I was now flagged to go to secondary. I caught up with Patty, our bags came, we went through secondary and gave up the apple, then rechecked our bags, managed to get through TSA pre-check and then ran to the airplane. Amazingly, we made it there in time. We got back to Phoenix, but our luggage did not. But we were home safe and sound.
Here are some additional photos from the trip. These were taken by Gerry and Tom.
These are some of a hundred plus taken by Tom.
And these photos were taken by Emily.
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Here is our dive boat that we used all week (except for the night dive).
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| Ski and Emily |
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| Emily |
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| One of our divemasters, Tom And Bob |
Thursday afternoon, I went for a walk and visited the East End Lighthouse park. The many signs gave a great history of the east end, which has been and continues to be very different from the rest of the island.
On my way up and down the staircase that goes from the road up to the park, I noticed these trees with exceptionally large beans. I am used to the legumonous trees here in Phoenix, some of which have beans as long as nine or ten inches - but these were closer to two feet long.
Thursday evening, Patty and I had signed up for the "blacklight dives" where there are special lights for us to use. On the way out, I got this nice photo of the sunset.
The night dive was amazing. The black lights showed the bioluminescent sea creatures in a way we had not seen them before - the anemones were most interesting.
On Friday, we did our regular two dives in the morning, then all of us went on a third dive in the afternoon. We tied up at one location, then jumped in and descended to the base of the line holding the mooring ball. As a group, when then swam on to two more mooring sites; at the same time, the captain moved the boat to that site and tied up there. Along the way and at that site, we saw many sharks. I stopped counting shark sightings at 10. A great dive.
Friday evening, we all went together to the Kaibo Beach Cafe for our last dinner in Grand Cayman.
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| Tom, Dennis and Bob |
Saturday, we made it to the airport early enough to avoid the crowd. We checked our bags, went through security and immigration quickly and then had a couple of hours for lunch and to wait for our flight. We boarded our flight on time but then sat there for more than an hour. It turns out that there was a worldwide outage of United's computer system so the last half of the passengers were slowly processed and we waited for them.
That delay meant we landed with only 50 minutes to catch our flight to Phoenix. Patty zipped through the Global Entry kiosks, but my passport would not read. I tried entering info manually and it then said I was not in the system. I then went to the agent and showed my NEXUS card, he could not see a problem. He took me to another machine which finally worked. I quickly answered the four questions, but then remembered that I had one small apple left in my backpack. So I was now flagged to go to secondary. I caught up with Patty, our bags came, we went through secondary and gave up the apple, then rechecked our bags, managed to get through TSA pre-check and then ran to the airplane. Amazingly, we made it there in time. We got back to Phoenix, but our luggage did not. But we were home safe and sound.
Here are some additional photos from the trip. These were taken by Gerry and Tom.
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| Here's Tom |
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| Here I am |
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| Patty and me swimming along |
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| Angelfish |
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| Lionfish |
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| Dennis clowning around |
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| Another angelfish |
