Grand Cayman:
The cruise books with Don Fosters. My experience was disappointing. I dive in a 5mm somewhat newish wetsuit. I used the same wetsuit in Hawaii and learned that I need 18 lbs of weight to keep me down. The DM suggested I go less so we went with 12 instead. We did a weight check and I couldn't descend even 5 feet so they added a couple more lbs. First, I can't stand that we couldn't just descend after jumping off the boat, instead we had to swim from the back of the boat to the front in choppy waters. Everyone was exhausted before descent. Not fun! The first dive spot was Wallstreet (82ft) then ended at the USS Kittiwake(60ft). At the wreck, I was at 1000psi and slowly started floating to the surface. I emptied my BCD, lungs and did everything I could to swim back down but couldn't as I was weighted incorrectly. I was so upset, frustrated, exhausted and scared out of my mind that I could have gotten decompression sickness. Again the water was a bit choppy and I was too exhausted to swim so the Captain had to jump in to come tow me. First I thought it was just me that had a terrible dive but after speaking to a few other divers, they were also disappointed as well as we didn't really see any marine life... it was more of a topography dive. Why would they even think that any of us cared more to see the topography than fishies? I don't know! Fortunately I was ok and thankful that I didn't get too dramatic and decided to go forward with the 2nd dive. We dove Hammer Head Hole, it was a more calm 45ft dive with few marine life but anything was better than dive #1 at that point. I understand that it's not their fault as they're not supposed to know how much weights I needed but I really regret letting them talking me into going less as it killed the entire experience. At least the Captain was the DM on my 2nd dive and showed us a stingray hidden under the sand, that was the highlight of the day. The water was pretty clear, nothing amazing. I guess I expected clearer water than Hawaii... it was about the same. All in all, the boats were clean, the staff was nice but the dive spots were just blah.
Hi
I used to live and work in Grand Cayman, including with cruise guests so I can maybe shed some light on the reasons behind some of your experiences on your trip.
As far as site selection goes, typically the shallow sites do have more abundant life. However in my experience whenever a choice was given to customers, especially infrequent visitors, they always wanted to see the wall, not least because although sightings aren't frequent, that is the best place to spot the big things.
Also there are obviously no guarantees on what you see anyway. One morning I had such an amazing shallow dive that we returned to the site for the afternoon 1 tank, suffice to say we were unable to find even 1 "cool" creature despite seeing dozens just a couple hours earlier.
The reason for the crew making weight recommendations and the swim to the front of the boat are both tied to the fact you were visiting on the cruise ship.
The variety of divers and broad range of abilities that visit on the ships each day is hugely diverse and the instructors need to try and keep everybody safe.
In the case of using the line, not everybody is comfortable doing a free descent off the side of the wall in 200ft of water and keeping the group together and on profile can be difficult enough as it is even when everybody is descending down the line together.
As for the weighting the most frequent cause of problems I personally saw were caused by divers over weighting. They would spend half the dive dragging along the bottom and constantly adding air to their BCDS, only to try and shallow up the wall or swim over a coral head and forget to let some air out leading to uncontrolled ascents.
That's not to say there aren't a lot of great divers who take trips on the cruise ships. Sadly though when a company runs trips for potentially hundreds of divers a week, even 1 or 2 bad or seriously inexperienced divers in every 100 (and there are a hell of a lot more than that) effect the way a company has to approaches it's trips.
