So, here we are then. Day 2 of the holiday and day 1 of diving and oh boy what a day it's been.

Even before we got to the boat we had some excitement and saw Caymanians react in an unimaginably quick and efficient manner to sort out our little accident. The van taking us to the dive site drove over a work-man's (work-operative's???) hole in the road. This hole was covered by a sheet of metal as thin as a Ritz cracker, so the back wheel of the van ended up in the hole. Now, being a Carribean island, I would have expected the 'soon come' attitude to kick in, however, the digger thing could also be tranformed into a fork lift, and man, did they move! The van was out in a blink of an eye. No HSE investigation. No insurance claims. No one phoning you up over the next few months telling you to claim for non existent whip lash. Anyway, enough of that. We made it to the boat, and first dive was on Cable Reef. We dropped to about 30m, and could still see the surface. Huh?? Does that really happen?? Not in the UK it doesn't! Water temp 27 degrees celsius.... a veritable bath! Amazing marine life. Loads of corals, many fish, and a massive Moray eel grabbing a Lion fish from the spear gun. Not something you see everyday. Just to clarify, there's a Lion fish cull going on out here, 'cos they're not native and are killing a lot of other fish who are. Our dive guide for the first dive was Celeste from Cirencester. Small world! After a short break we were back in the water for our second dive on the Royal Palm reef. We dropped to about 18m, and had an amazing 51 minute pootle around some fabulous marine life and underwater landscape. Once again, loads of fish 'brands' and much to see. Due to our careful use of air we were able to stay down a little longer than others in the group, and it was amazing to have the peace and quiet of the reef without the crowds.

On the way back to shore it was lovely to be able to sit in the boat travelling at a few knots, being splashed by the water while wearing nothing but swimwear and actually being warm. A rare experience for those of us who do most of our diving in the UK. We passed a yacht called Tatoosh which is currently moored off GC. Quite a yacht, indeed. Check her out on Wikepedia - we did!

After lunch back at Sunshine Suites we decided to go for a walk to find a cache, so headed out to the beach and turned right. What a trek it was! We went about 2.5miles on soggy sand. Beautiful, warm sand but soggy nevertheless. We had a fruit punch stop on the way, and eventually had the cache in hand., Were we going to trek back to the hotel on the beach? No, we weren't. There is a fantastic system of mini buses on GC. Basically you either wait by the side of the road or start walking, and special little buses with blue number plates will toot at you. If you want them to stop you wave at them and they do. They will then take you pretty much anywhere you want to go as long as it's somewhere near their route, and at an extremely reasonable cost. The one we jumped on to was at first heading in the opposite direction to the hotel, and we had a tour around the North end of the Island before being deposited back at 'home'. We learnt some 'stuff' about the Caymainians - the real ones, not the ex-pats. As it was a Sunday afternoon Bishop Clark from CG was giving a sermon on Cayman Radio which went on for a good half an hour. I would consider his views to be dated and discriminatory, but hey ho. He was kind enough to let us have his church address, phone number and email address at the end of it. CG is held up as a rich island - we we saw some bits of it today that were far from rich., and we certainly want to go back and explore the North end some more. Incidentally we went within 400m of Hell. A bit ironic with Bishop Clark's voice resonating around the bus.

Both of us were quite weary by the early evening. We managed to avoid sleeping until after supper, but as I finish the blog Carmen is snoozing away. We are being picked up for divinga little later tomorrow, but as 5am seems to be wake up time we probably won't benefit from it. Still at least we can have a cup of tea when we wake up now. We'll tell you about the kettle sage tomorrow......