Radar Reef

North Shore, Cayman Brac, Cayman Islands

This was our first dive in the Caymans, a shore dive off the north shore of Cayman Brac.

This was also my first attempt at underwater photography with the Nikonos 5. The water was very clear with a nice reef in the 40-50ft depth range. There were some beautiful sponges, some orange like those above and some almost a glowing green. We made our acquaintance with the yellowtail snapper who were to be our almost constant companions and saw a 12" Nassau grouper. I was so excited that I burned air twice as fast as Mark and was down to 800 when he was still at 2000.

This was a shore dive. Mark and Victor are swimming out along an undersea communications cable toward the reef. We passed this queen angelfish along the way.

The yellowtail snapper were very friendly, and accustomed to being fed.

There were lots of varieties of soft coral and sponge. They made up an intricate landscape of almost glowing greens.

The blue tang is one of my favorites. We had seen blue tang in the Keys, but this one was sort of gray-blue, and there were gray ones as well.

The tiny blue chromis were like exclamation points among the more relaxed surroundings of the coral.

We saw a lot of these black surgeonfish. Several times we saw them cruising along just above a southern stingray and joked that the stingray was carrying his doctor with him. We saw jacks doing the same thing, but didn't understand why the fish would stick with the ray.

This Nassau grouper hung around with us a bit. This picture was taken without flash at about 40 feet, so the colors are a bit dull from the filtering out of the red, but it shows how exceptionally clear the water was.

This was a nice, relaxed introductory dive. We spent t ime getting to know the others who were also experiencing this seven day diving adventure. Night dive at this location