Cayman Islands

The Cayman Islands are one of the top diving destinations in the Caribbean, if not the world. Mark Evans explains the attraction of these three very ...

With the Brac being so close, you can even nip across with a Little Cayman dive centre to dive the Tibbetts, meaning you can tick off many of the major dive draws in one trip. A great combo is to spend a week on Grand Cayman, diving the north point, the East End and the Kittiwake, and then hop over to Little Cayman for a few days, so you can absorb the wonderful wall diving in Bloody Bay. The wall is ablaze with vibrant sponges, encrusting soft corals, hard corals, whip corals and bright algaes, so much so that it appears not one section is not colonised by one form of life or another. The west and southwest has some great wall diving, but is also the location of some shallow wreck dives and other sunken attractions. The island may be small, but it still has some 60 dives sites, and chief among these is one of the world’s most-revered wall diving areas, Bloody Bay. Life here is much more laidback, and it is a great place to get away from it all, chill out and relax, with some excellent diving added in. Cayman Brac lies about 89 miles northeast of Grand Cayman, and is about 12 miles long with an average width of 1.25 miles. The only diveable Russian warship in the Western Hemisphere, this 110-metre Koni II-class frigate was renamed the Keith Tibbetts after a local politician and purpose-sunk off the west coast in 1996. The island is approximately 22 miles long with an average width of four miles, and it has a huge 35 square mile shallow, reef-protected lagoon, the North Sound, which is the home of arguably the island’s most-famous dive site, Stingray City. Multiple holes and hatches were cut out to allow for maximum light penetration, and while you can find your way around the five deck levels with this ambient light, a torch helps you spot all the details and little critters that call the wreck home. [Dive Resort](https://www.scubadivermag.com/affiliate/sky-scanner) house reef, near George Town, and is actually named after the centre’s first Divemaster. The infamous Cayman Trench, the deepest part of the Caribbean at a whopping depth of over four miles, separates the three islands from Jamaica.