Cayman Character

By Kirk Brown

The British rid the islands of the pirates after a fierce battle in 1687, for which Little Cayman's famed Bloody Bay Wall is named. The crocodiles were wiped out by the end of the 19th century because they posed a threat to settlers and their livestock.

Today iguanas, red-footed boobies and Caribbean whistling ducks still outnumber the residents. About 2,000 people live on Cayman Brac, compared to only 100 or so who call Little Cayman home.

Like Grand Cayman, Little Cayman and Cayman Brac are essentially peaks of ancient underwater mountains that rise thousands of feet above a sea ridge that stretches from Cuba to Honduras. The Cayman Trench plunges to a depth of 24,000 feet near Cayman Brac, so don't even think about retrieving any lost weight belts.

Offshore, you'll find shallow reefs with healthy stony corals that gradually give way to some of the Caribbean's most impressive walls. Bright sponges and soft corals flourish on these walls, which also feature numerous tunnels and archways. Eels, groupers, lobsters, rays, turtles and schools of tropical fish vie for attention on almost every dive.

Thanks to a lack of rivers and manmade runoff, divers enjoy visibility that often exceeds 100 feet. Water temperatures fluctuate from 78 degrees in the winter to 85 degrees during the summer.

The landscape on both Cayman Brac, which is 12 miles long and a little more than a mile wide, and the slightly smaller Little Cayman is dominated by silver thatch palms, mangroves, gumbo limbo trees, wild orchids and other flowering plants. Beaches and lagoons play host to the iguanas and a wide variety of birds, including herons, frigates and rare species of boobies, ducks and parrots.

Despite obvious similarities between two small islands separated only by a choppy seven-mile expanse of azure water, notable differences can be found in the diving and land experiences on Little Cayman and Cayman Brac.

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