This post was originally published on this site.
Leave your tank at the dock. Someone else is carrying it. Your fins and mask are ready for the next boat, lunch is waiting back at the hotel, and one of the Caribbean’s great underwater walls is only a short ride away.
This is Little Cayman Beach Resort, a 40-room hideaway on one of the smallest islands in the Caribbean, where the entire vacation seems designed to answer one question: how quickly can you get back in the water?
The answer is very quickly.
The resort has its own Reef Divers operation, personalized valet diving, daily boat trips, a pool, the Nature Spa, bicycles, hammocks by the beach and the wonderfully named Beach Nuts Bar. And just offshore is Bloody Bay Wall, the underwater cliff that has made Little Cayman a pilgrimage destination for divers from around the world.
You don’t have to be the diver who owns 17 masks and knows every grouper by name, either. Little Cayman Beach Resort is equally compelling if you’re newly certified, traveling with someone who dives, or simply looking for a Caribbean island where traffic jams involve iguanas and bicycles.
This may be one of the most fun little resort vacations in the Cayman Islands.
Yes, Little Cayman Really Is Little
Little Cayman is roughly 10 miles long and one mile wide.
There are no traffic lights. Cars are scarce enough that bicycles and scooters make perfect sense. Much of the island remains green and undeveloped, and the list of things you might encounter away from the hotel includes red-footed boobies, rock iguanas, empty stretches of sand and the occasional bicycle coming the other direction.
The island belongs to the Sister Islands of the Cayman Islands, along with Cayman Brac, and it has a very different personality from Grand Cayman.
You aren’t coming here for shopping centers or packed itineraries.
You’re coming to dive, read, snorkel, bike, look for birds, kayak toward Owen Island, spend an hour in a hammock and eventually realize you haven’t checked your phone in quite a while.
Little Cayman Beach Resort fits right into that kind of trip.
Bloody Bay Wall Is the Main Event
If you dive, you probably already know the name.
Bloody Bay Wall is the reason serious scuba travelers have been coming to Little Cayman for decades. The wall drops dramatically into the Caribbean, with coral formations, barrel sponges and marine life filling the upper reaches.
Dive sites along the wall include names such as Three Fathom Wall, Marilyn’s Cut, Donna’s Delight, Randy’s Gazebo, Lea Lea’s Lookout and Barracuda Bite.
You might see groupers tucked near the reef, barracuda hovering farther out, octopus, arrow crabs and eagle rays. The wall itself supplies the drama: you’re swimming beside a vertical coral face with deep blue beyond it.
Little Cayman Beach Resort makes getting there unusually easy.
The resort says all of its boat dives, including trips to Bloody Bay Wall, are just a short ride away. Reef Divers operates directly at the hotel, with boat diving available each day.
You finish the dive, head back to the resort, eat, recharge and go again.
Valet Diving Means Someone Else Does the Heavy Lifting
Here’s one of the best parts.
Reef Divers offers valet diving, which means the crew handles much of the gear schlepping that can make a dive trip feel surprisingly physical before you even reach the water.
Your equipment is handled between dives. Tanks are managed. The dive operation is right there.
If you’ve ever hauled dive gear through a hotel, onto a vehicle, down to a dock and then onto a boat, you already understand why this sounds appealing.
The resort has also expanded its dive services with increased coaching, enhanced scuba instruction and lower in-water guide-to-diver ratios.
The result is particularly useful if you’re relatively new to scuba.
Little Cayman is known for many dives with little current, allowing newer divers to take their time. Experienced divers and underwater photographers get the same benefit for a different reason: when something interesting appears on the reef, you can spend more time with it.
And photographers have a lot to look for here.
There’s a Free Learn-to-Dive Offer This Summer
If Little Cayman has been on your list and you still haven’t earned your certification, the resort is giving you a particularly interesting excuse this year.
Little Cayman Beach Resort is offering free PADI Open Water certification with qualifying Classic Cayman or Cayman Escape packages for stays between Aug. 15 and Sept. 19.
The offer covers the Open Water certification portion, although classroom theory and confined-water pool work aren’t included.
It creates a pretty memorable place to finish learning.
Instead of completing your first certification dives somewhere you’ll forget a month later, you’re doing them in the Cayman Islands, with Little Cayman’s reefs waiting just offshore.
A first serious Caribbean dive trip can begin almost immediately afterward.
And Then There’s Underwater Photo Week
Already certified and constantly carrying a camera underwater?
There’s a trip for you, too.
The resort’s Underwater Photo Week runs Sept. 19-26, with packages starting at $2,695.
The program is aimed at helping divers improve their underwater photography, and Little Cayman gives photographers a deep inventory of subjects. Macro life along the reef can keep you hovering over the same patch of coral, while the wall, sponges, rays, groupers and open blue provide bigger scenes.
The calmer dive conditions around much of Little Cayman can be particularly useful when you’re trying to compose a photograph rather than simply keep up with a current.
There’s also a Clearly Cayman Adventure Week from Aug. 8-15, starting at $2,395, pairing diving around Little Cayman with Cayman Brac during a single week.
Two Sister Islands, a week of diving and very little reason to wear anything more formal than a collared shirt.
What Happens When You’re Done Diving?
Eventually, you have to come up.
Little Cayman Beach Resort is designed for the hours between dives almost as much as the dives themselves.
There’s a swimming pool where you can stretch out after the boat returns. Hammocks are positioned for a book and an extended period of inactivity. Beach Nuts Bar is ready when a cold drink sounds better than another tank.
Weekly resort activities include movie night, trivia and Friday karaoke, which is exactly the sort of nightlife Little Cayman needs.
You aren’t choosing between nightclubs.
You’re deciding whether you’re brave enough to sing karaoke in front of the dive crew you have to see again tomorrow.
That sounds much more fun.
Nature Spa Overlooks Booby Pond
Your body may eventually request something besides another backward roll off a dive boat.
The resort’s Nature Spa overlooks Booby Pond, one of Little Cayman’s signature natural areas.
Treatments include massages, facials, manicures and pedicures, giving you an easy afternoon alternative when you decide to skip a dive or take a break from the sun.
Booby Pond itself is an important wildlife site, best known for its colony of red-footed boobies.
Bird-watching is one of the island’s easiest non-diving activities, and you don’t need an elaborate excursion to do it. Little Cayman’s ponds, vegetation and lightly developed interior bring plenty of opportunities to spot local and migratory birds as you explore.
A bicycle is often all you need.
Take a Bike and See Where You End Up
The resort has bicycles for exploring Little Cayman.
On an island this small, a bike feels less like transportation and more like permission to wander.
You can ride toward Point of Sand, explore the quieter stretches of the island, stop near Booby Pond or head out simply because you have nowhere else you need to be.
There are very few cars and no stoplights.
The island’s famous rock iguanas are another reason to pay attention as you ride. They’re part of Little Cayman’s wildlife story, and encounters with them are common enough to become one of those details you end up talking about after the trip.
Then there’s Owen Island, the tiny uninhabited cay just off Little Cayman.
You reach it by kayak or boat, and it’s exactly the kind of outing that makes sense here: paddle over, swim, explore for a while, paddle back.
No complicated excursion required.
The Resort Knows You’re Here to Dive
Plenty of Caribbean hotels happen to have a dive shop.
Little Cayman Beach Resort has the opposite relationship with scuba.
The hotel experience revolves heavily around divers. Boats head out regularly. Gear is handled on property. Meals fit around dive days. The pool, bar and spa are ready once you return.
Airport transfers are included with dive packages, which removes another chore from the trip.
Weather permitting, Reef Divers can also organize a Cayman Brac dive day to visit the wreck of the Captain M.V. Keith Tibbetts, giving experienced divers another major Cayman dive during the stay.
It’s an unusually convenient arrangement if your definition of a successful vacation is measured partly by how many tanks you emptied.
You Don’t Have to Dive Every Day
Here’s the surprise: Little Cayman Beach Resort can still be a great trip when one person in the room is less obsessed with scuba.
Maybe your partner dives twice a day and you’d rather alternate between snorkeling, the spa, a bicycle and a hammock.
That’s completely plausible here.
Little Cayman is quiet enough to reward doing very little. You can read beside the pool, take a bike out, watch birds around Booby Pond or explore the island.
You can also snorkel, kayak and spend long stretches near the beach.
When the dive boat returns, everyone meets up again at the resort.
Couples with one serious diver and one enthusiastic non-diver often have trouble finding a hotel capable of keeping both people happy. Little Cayman gives the non-diver an entire island to enjoy at a deliberately easy pace.
How Do You Get to Little Cayman?
Reaching Little Cayman adds a short extra leg to the trip, and it’s part of what keeps the island so quiet.
You’ll generally fly first to Grand Cayman, arriving at Owen Roberts International Airport. From there, Cayman Airways Express operates smaller aircraft to Edward Bodden Airfield on Little Cayman.
The little airport matches the destination.
Once you land, you’re on an island only 10 miles long.
Guests on dive packages receive airport pickup from Little Cayman Beach Resort, so the final part of the journey is handled for you.
A few hours later, your dive gear can already be at Reef Divers.
Why Little Cayman Beach Resort Is Such a Good Caribbean Escape
There are dive resorts where scuba is one activity among many.
At the Little Cayman Beach Resort, the entire vacation becomes wonderfully uncomplicated for anyone who loves being underwater.
Bloody Bay Wall is minutes away. Reef Divers is on property. Someone else is handling the tanks. Lunch is waiting when the boat returns. The pool is nearby. Beach Nuts has the cold drink. Nature Spa has the massage.
And beyond the hotel, Little Cayman gives you 10 miles of one of the Caribbean’s smallest and quietest islands.
Take a bicycle. Look for a rock iguana. Paddle toward Owen Island. Sing karaoke badly on Friday. Spend the next day swimming beside a coral wall dropping into deep blue.
Then leave your tank at the dock.
Someone else has it.
The post This Tiny Cayman Islands Resort Makes a Dive Vacation Ridiculously Easy appeared first on Caribbean Journal.
