Month: October 2017

Well it has notall been cake this week. Despite the weather we have been getting out and about.

On Monday we dived at Lantern point with Dive Tech where we saw turtles and a five foot grouper, it was a huge fish! Easily as big as James.

I introduced James and Victoria to the Guardian of the Reef.

Tuesday started with breakfast at Coconut Joes. Always a favourite. Good grub in an unpretentious setting. Just as breakfast was served a chicken jumped up and stole my bacon! It made everyone laugh.

After breakfast headed north for a tour around West Bay. We found two more really nice spots for diving and we journeyed to Hell. Now I have driven through this part of the island a few times but did not realise that tucked away behind the shops and the eponomously named post office is an amazing landscape of jagged rocks and pools. It’s an amazing looking place and it looks like the surface of a mad alien planet. A truely hellish landscape.

This is the real ‘Hell‘, so named because one of the early Governors of the islands upon seeing it for the first time looked at it in the sweltering heat and said, ‘Gods’ this must be what Hell looks like…‘, true story.

We headed back down the island to spend the afternoon on the beach at Governors.

Thursday we headed back up to West Bay again to check out one of the dive sites we scouted out on Tuesday.

Turtle Reef and Sun Divers. Amazing! The water at Trurtle Reef was crystal clear. Refreshing after the heat and humidity at the surface.

20 feet from the shore there is a steep drop of about 50 feet, the ‘Mini Wall’. The Mini Wall is covered with coral and drops down to the sand sea bed. It is essentially a 1/4 mile wide plateau or step that surrounds most of the island gradually sloping down to between 100ft and 130ft were you reach a second reef wall only this one drops down to a depth of between 2 miles and 5 miles… the Cayman Trench.

The reef at the northern end of the island, below about 20ft, is in really good condition and teeming with life.

Almost as soon as we dropped off the mini-wall we were greeted by a stingray. In among the coral we found a stunning black and white conga eel. The reef teemed with fish of all types and hanging out in a cave were 20 to 30 huge tarpon.

The only way to describe the experience is that it is like flying. It so easy to forget you are actually underwater.

At one point I looked up at the pouring rain and thought ‘thank goodness I am not out there, I would get soaked!‘ the fact I was sixty foot underwater and looking at the sea’s surface did not occur to me…

All in all one of the best dives we have had.

Thursday was a quiet day just sat listening to the rain and doing a few little bits and piece (including my Tax Return…). Then in the evening we went out for  lovely meal with John and Dee at The Brassarie.

On Friday Poppy and Holly went with the ladies to have high tea at the Ritz!

The boys in the meantime had Roti. At the Roti Shop. With the Roti Club. Not the most imaginatively named group but like Ronseal it does exactly what it says on the tin. Roti.

Lovely grub and loads of laughs.

I am back at home now writing this and once again listening to the rain, it is absolutely torrential and relentless. It was just like this for half term last year! The whole garden is flooded under about 5 inches of water.

 

It has been such a long half term! Returning formally to work on the 14^th August and running up to 20^th October has been a long slog.

I know my friends with real jobs will roll their eyes and sigh something like, “teachers” but teaching isn’t like the real world or a real job it is so much more demanding than many jobs and ask so much more of you emotionally, physical and personally than other professions. It has many of the demands of social work; as a head teacher you are also running a medium to large business with 50 to 100 staff and a multi million pound budget; it has very long hours (despite the popular myths its not a nine to four job at all); you are dealing with young children and absolutely everyone thinks they could do a better job and knows more about education than you do just because they once went to school…

Anyway it has been a very long and hard half term three solid weeks of rain and wet play have not helped as it has meant everyone is on duty without a break everyday for days on end and the kids never get a chance to run around and burn of all their excess energy!

But it is HALF TERM! Oh and its pouring with rain… But it is HALF TERM!

So what has this term brought so far?

Well as you know from my earlier posts it has been a really active hurricane season here in the Caribbean. We have watched the weather really closely and breathed a sigh of relief each time we have been missed.

That’s not to say we have been unaffected, as I have already said we have experience 3 to 4 weeks of near solid rain. The rain here has been torrential among the heaviest rain I have ever seen and I lived in monsoon countries…

It has meant rough seas but we have had some beautiful skies and rainbows as well.

The wet weather has allowed me time to learn to bake cakes. I have never been very good at cakes but friends have asked me to make a couple of cakes for them and an upcoming event so I have had to learn. The brief is to bake a traditional Caymanian Rum Cake. After several weeks of practice I feel that I have got it pretty well cracked so I am working on chocolate rum cake (think Bounty Bar) and my own invention an apple rum cake topped with toffee apples…

Of course all of the cake making has meant lots of tasting sessions and so tea parties at our house have become a feature of social life here.