Last time we took a cruise that was supposed to stop at Grand Cayman, the weather was against us. The seas were too high to berth safely at the George Town port, and the other port was full, so we ended up skipping the place. Which was sad, because we really wanted to do something we’d done before, which is to snorkel off the coast at the Eden Rock Dive Shop. You can rent all the necessary equipment and a locker there, and go into the sea right behind the shop.

But this trip, all went well, and we managed to have a leisurely late breakfast and joing the crowds getting tendered off the ship. IT’s too shallow near the island to park the ships right next to it, so they drop anchor some way out and smaller boats called tenders work as, basically, water taxis taking you to and from the island.

As usual, I stuck around near the shore while Toby swam out farther. We saw a lot more fish this time than we did the first time we were here, which was nice.

Anyway, on to the pictures!

WordPress chose to load these out of order, which is why there’s a fish pic, then two shore pics, then more fish pics. Oh well. I have made it so they should all link to alrger versions, if you want to click on them.

This dude is a blue tang, They’re ubiquitous. You may find references to blue tangs on the intartubes that say they’re blue, yellow, and black–those are Regal Blue Tangs. Plebian blue tangs are blue with some yellow bits on the tail, I think depending on how old they are.

And now we have the answer to the age-old question: why did the chicken cross the road?

To get away from the person trying to take a picture of it, of course! No, I did not chase it into traffic: this was a side drive with parked cars. Grand Cayman is full of feral chickens, as we learned the first time we came here. A hurricane blew through some years back and destroyed a bunch of chicken coops, and the surviving escapees have gone feral.

And fish. Lots of fish. The two in the center seemed inseparable; I assume one was a male trying to stick close to a female for breeding purposes.

SQUIIIIID!

A WHOLE BUNCH OF SQUID! The guy at the dive shop told us a school of squid is more properly referred to as a squad. A squad of squid. Squid squad. We saw a squid squad.

No idea what this spotty dude is, but we saw it.

Another spotty dude, or maybe the same spotty dude.

A long-spined sea urchin. There were a lot of sea urchins…

…as you can tell from this pic of a blurry sergeant major fish and a bunch of sea urchins.

You’ll have to click on the picture to see the mottled fish in the middle, as it blends into the coral reef in the smaller version. No idea what it is, but it was pretty.

Not sure what these guys are, maybe the four-eyed butterflyfish? If so, Wikipedia claims they mate for life, so you probably have a small family unit there.

Another long-spined sea urchin.

No idea what these fish are.

Toby’s flippers and a sergeant major fish. This fish and I made friends. The waves were a bit high, so I was hanging around the ladder getting a rest and the sergeant major was hanging around there, too, feeding on the algae growing on the underwater bits of the ladder. It was slightly cautious of me at first, but seemed to realize I wasn’t going to try to eat it, and then decided that I might feed it, so it got pretty close to me in between nibbles of algae.

A grey-pink fish. No idea what kind.

Bright blue and orange on one side, a dark one on the other. Don’t know what they are, either. I was trying to take a picture of each different type of fish I saw.

Toby took the camera and swam out farther to get some shots of the coral formations, which is what these last three pictures are. At least one has a school of sergeant majors.