Cayman Islands diving: the wall starts a few hundred metres from the beach
Picture a mountain with only its peaks above water. Now swim off the beach a few hundred metres. The bottom simply ends, and the side of the mountain drops away beneath you, near enough to vertical.
That is the Cayman Islands, and it is why people who have dived everywhere else still talk about diving here. The Wikivoyage guide to diving in the Cayman Islands puts it plainly: beyond the reefs and the usual Caribbean fish, the wall diving is something most visiting divers have never experienced.
If you have never hung over the edge of a wall, come here to do it.
Three islands, one story
Grand Cayman, Cayman Brac and Little Cayman sit in the western Caribbean, south of Cuba, between Jamaica and Mexico's Yucatán. Together they cover 264 square kilometres and hold just over 90,000 people, most of them around George Town on Grand Cayman.
Columbus sighted them in May 1503 and called them Las Tortugas, for the turtles. The name that stuck came from the Arawak word for crocodile, caiman. Drake dropped by in 1586. Settlement came slowly: the first recorded permanent inhabitant, Isaac Bodden, was born around 1661, and England took formal control in 1670.
One night in February 1794, ten merchant ships struck the reef in rough seas and islanders rowed out to rescue the crews. It is remembered as the Wreck of the Ten Sail. Tourism arrived in the 1950s along with the airport, and the diving followed.
The islands were run from Jamaica for a century and became a separate Crown colony in 1962, when Jamaica went its own way. That is the political shape they still have: a self-governing British Overseas Territory with its own reefs to look after.
Why you can see so far
The clarity is geography, not luck. Very little silt or fertiliser runs off the land, and because the walls are so steep the reefs sit right next to deep ocean water. Diving is from boats, and at some sites straight off the shore.
Grand Cayman
The guide splits the big island into four regions: Seven Mile Beach and the Northwest Point, the North Wall, the South Side and the East End.
The wind decides which you get. It blows from the southeast most of the time, so the South Side is the least dived of the four. Operators go when they can, because, in the guide's words, the sites are really lovely.
Then there is Stingray City: a string of shallow sandbars in the northwest corner of North Sound, just inside a natural channel through the barrier reef, running from Morgan Harbour to Rum Point. Southern stingrays gather there in numbers and visitors can interact with them. It is as much a tourist attraction as a dive.
Cayman Brac and Little Cayman
The two smaller islands are thin strips running east to west, with sites on both coasts. The same southeast wind keeps most diving on the north sides.
Little Cayman is where you find Bloody Bay Wall and Jackson Bay, both on the north coast. The guide notes that weather keeps them from being reachable all year, so if they are the point of your trip, ask before you book.
Planning it
Build the trip around the north and west, where the sheltered water and the famous walls are, and you will lose fewer days to wind. Grand Cayman gives you the most variety and the stingrays. The sister islands give you Bloody Bay and quiet. Background on the islands comes from Wikipedia.
Wall dives are the ones where you want the depth and the time written down while you still remember the edge. Log them in Scubaspot, rate Bloody Bay against the North Wall, and settle the argument with your buddy about which was better.