Tim & Denise Tiner Travels: 2015 Western Caribbean Cruise

After a great nights sleep, we were up in time to go to the forward part of the ship to see us coming into Georgetown, Grand Cayman. Our arrival time was 10 AM, scheduled and actual. This is a port where you get tendered back and forth from the piers. But before all this, I got up and went to the place where you get tender tickets to get off the boat. They do this for the first few boats of the day. We were #4. After getting the tickets, I came back and blogged a little, adding photos to the blog until it was time for breakfast. We then headed up to the buffet for some more of the same...although I made a wild omelet. It tasted pretty darn good...I thought. I also had fresh fruit, turkey sausage and english muffins. Boy people stuff their plates though. I was pretty reserved!

After being tendered to shore, we found the site where our tour operator was to be. Nobody was there yet. It was about 10:45 and we were not supposed to meet them until 12:15 PM. So I had some backup plans.....to walk to a point where you can put into the water and swim out to a reef. So off we went walking. The reef is calleed Cheeseburger Reef. The reason for this name is because it is right across from a Burger King. Anyway, it took probabl 7 or 8 minutes to get there. So Kim, Ilene and I got into our snorkeling gear and headed out. Denise tended the gear, even dipping herself into the water a bit. The sun gets pretty hot when it is bearing down on you...and it was. The air temperature is really nice...high 70's. But the sun makes you get hot quick. Anyway, the reef was quite aways from the beach. I just kept swimming until I got to some boats and asked a guy on the boat where it was. He said I needed to go a bit further out. So I kept swimming and swimming. I finally found the reef and I swear I was halfway back to the cruise ship! But the reef was nice with quite a bit of sealife moving around. I tried to get some GoPro videos. I wish I could post them here...but I cannot. Pictures only. After a few minutes of messing around over the reef we headed back into shore. It was quite the swim. Ilene took off like a fish swimming pretty fast. It was her exercise she said later. We pulled out of the water around 11;30. We got out of our gear and headed to Burger King because they had free WIFI! The first place I've seen have it. So we quickly downloaded emails and I published the first 4 days of posts to the blog. Once it uploaded...which took quite awhile...we were off to the pier where we came in to hook up with our StingRay Bar and Snorkeling excursion. When we arrived, our guy was there. Turns out that there was only 8 people on his boat! Really small group which made it nice. We got into a van and headed north to a Yacht Club where their boat was. From there we headed east into the bay to the Stingray Sand Bar. We pulled up as the morning folks were pulling out. So when we got in the stingrays immediately came over to us. These puppies are pretty darn big in some cases. They would come right up to you wanting food which we had been given by the tour operator. It was fun to touch and mess with things you would never see in most areas in the world. The water was shallow so all of us could just stand there while they swam all around us. After the food ran out, we jumped on the boat and headed north to the barrier reef for this inlet. There we snorkeled for 45 minutes or so. Lots of great sealife there. Great picture opportunities which I enjoyed much. I did get hung up on some coral and cut my leg a bit. I thought for sure sharks would smell my rich, vibrant blood and want it. But no sharks appeared!!! :-) After snorkeling, we got onto the boat and headed east to a point called 'Starfish Point'. There you could walk on a white sandy beach and look for starfish in the water. I think we found a few 'planted starfish'. They looked dead to me but the skipper said they were alive. I don't know if I believed him. They were pretty hard.

After our tour was over and we drove back to the pier, we found a liquor store with free WIFI. Both Denise and I went in and loitered around downloading emails and trying to upload email with photos and videos. I guess my email was too large and I was too impartient with the slow WIFI so I finally gave up on sending my note. I did get a text out to the family who have apple devices letting them know that we were alive. After doing this, we boarded a tender and off we went back to the ship.

We had the usual very nice dinner (Tiramusu for dessert). We are dining with a couple from Florida and a couple from Toronto. They are very nice people and we have enjoyed our visits with them. Our entertainment tonight was the ships dancers and singers performing what they called 'Momentum' which was a series of pop songs with some very nice dancing. These people are so flexible....it hurts to watch them!

It was really a nice day. Grand Cayman has 50k people living here. So not many. The water is beautiful and the life seems pretty slow. Everyone was really friendly.