OK so a bit of a miss quote that was about tornadoes and this week life has been about getting ready for hurricanes…
We have been running island wide training exercises and drills, testing emergency systems and training for what to do in a real hurricane situation.
All a bit real… no wonder everyone parties hard during Carnival you just never know! Oh I have been doing shelter manager training as my school is the biggest shelter on island. Good to know.
Well it would not be the Caribbean if there were not a few street parties, lots of sequins and feathers, dancing and loud music!
Last week was Junior Batabano. A fun carnival for children.
This week it is Carnival for the grown ups and in two weeks it is all happening again for our third street party in a month Caymas!
James and I explored a ghost ship. Just one of the 325 wrecks that can be found all around the coasts of the Cayman Islands and particularly Grand Cayman. Testament to the sea fairing history of these islands and the dangers that the maritime life poses.
The originally named the ‘HAWAII’, our ghost ship was built in 1900 by A. McMillan & Sons Ltd. of Dumbartonshire.
She was, in life, a 220 foot long, four masted barquentine. A steel schooner. These ships, in their day, were the cutting edge of technology. Travelling all around the globe. Crucial to world trade. They must have been stunning to see, the last great sailing ships, the pinnacle of their evolutionary family the last of their kind before their extinction and the birth of modern engine driven ships.
A. McMillan & Sons most famous ship was the Hawaii’s sister ship, another four masted barquentine, called the Swanhilda. Launched in 1890. In 1899 the Swanhilda left Spencer’s Gulf near Adelaide, South Australia, with a cargo of grain. She sailed eastwards across the Pacific, rounded Cape Horn and sailed up the Atlantic to Britain in 66 days. A world record that has never beaten!
The Hawaii plied her trade in the Atlantic and Caribbean for nearly 50 years under many different names. In 1933 she was sold to Mexican owners and renamed HIDALGO. In 1946 she was sold again this time to Colombian owners and renamed CALI.
After nearly half a century on the 9th January 1948, whilst carrying a cargo of 30,000 bags of rice, the Cali developed a leak. In a desperate effort to prevent her from sinking at sea the crew made for the safety of the Cayman Islands. Here in a last-ditch effort to save her she was deliberately run ashore at George Town.
But fate did not spare her. There in sight of land and safety the stricken Cali caught fire, burnt down to her waterline and sank.
The wreck of the Cali now lies less than 40 yards off shore near Central George Town.
She lies in 20-30 feet of water adjacent to a small reef that teems with fish.
The wreck and reef are home to huge tarpon.
The Cali is gradually becoming part of the reef as nature claims her.
The Green turtle (Chelonia mydas) and Hawksbill turtle (Eretmochelys imbricata) both belong to the family Cheloniidae and both can be found in Caribbean waters.
The Green Turtle is classed as an endangered species. The Hawksbill Turtle on the other hand is critically endangered. A species on the brink of extinction. So you can only imagine what a thrill it has been to see several of them at different locations while out diving.
On four occasions now James and I have had the distinct privilege to swim with these lovely animals in the wild and this week we found number five!
Smaller than some of their cousins the Hawksbill has a beak that looks, well, like a hawks bill. Hence the name. The back of their shell has a jagged appearance almost like feathers or a saw blade and the sections of their shells are less defined and smoother than other species. A feature of age.
They are a very placid and curious breed who don’t seem to mind the presence of divers and tolerate our intrusion with gentle good humour. Much like their green cousins in this. Making encounters with either species a pure pleasure and thrill.
Just outside the centre of George Town, as you head south down Church Street, on the waterfront, looking west out over the sea, sits the Eden Rock Dive Centre.
On a bright sunny day and let’s face it that is most days, the view is stunning.
The sea sparkles. A patchwork of emerald green and pale blue. Millpond flat it reflects the sun and the startling blue sky.
As you look towards the horizon the sea darkens to a deeper and deeper blue. Near black. It looks utterly serene.
Slipping into the sea and below the surface you enter the blue and green world.
Fish of every colour flit around among the fan coral.
Moving away from the shore the sea bed slopes gently down until it meets the reef proper. Here you find the skylights. Holes in the reef dropping down into the grottos below.
You slip down through a skylight. Drifting down into the grottoes. Twilight tunnels illuminated only by the blue tinged sunlight streaming down through the skylights above. The stained glass light falling into a silent cathedral cloister space. The water motionless. Still. The silt undisturbed by even the slightest current.
In this silent still place float ghosts.
Motionless.
Hanging.
Waiting.
As still as statues.
As patient as stone. As old as stone.
The sun streams into their cathedral hallows glinting on their great armour scales.
Mirror bright. Shinning like polished silver.
Sentinals.
Templar Knights.
Some alone others in large groups. Their bodies ranging from two or three feet in length to six-foot giants.
The Caribbean King Fish or Silver King.
Tarpon.
A truly ancient fish. Older than the grottoes they inhabitant. Old when the reefs that these twilight tunnels penetrate were new.
As you pass them they barely move. Completely unafraid of the divers who visit their grottoes. You can reach out and touch their great silver flanks or tails and they hardly flinch.
A mere twitch and they move aside and let you pass.
Resuming once again their motionless vigil.
Waiting.
In late Spring change comes.
The stillness comes alive.
Swarms.
The empty grottoes fill with life. Millions of Atlantic Silversides appear.
Atheriniformes.
Tiny sparkling silver fish forming living curtains.
Pulsating.
Swirling and parting like magic for the great tarpon as they swim back and forth through the clouds. Feasting on the glut.
The wait over for another year.
It all started about six months ago when Dee and Jon asked me to make their wedding cake.
Once we had worked through “eh”, “what?” and “why?” My initial reactions. I carefully explained to them that I had never actually baked a cake before.
They nodded understandingly and said, “yes, but would I do it?”
“We want a traditional Cayman Rum Cake,” they said with the a tone that said ‘it’s our wedding, this is what we want, nothing can go wrong…’ You know part blind faith, part sweet menace. To them this was the reasonable explanation and even some sort of answer to my initial surprised responses.
In life there are time when it is just easier to agree so I said, “Right. OK.”
They seemed happy. They had given me a new challenge all would be well.
So started my cake baking journey.
I began, obviously, by looking for a recipe.
After some searching I found one that I liked:
And credit where credit is due, I can recommend it to anyone as it is a great starting point and a rum cake recipe. If you read Erin’s blog she got the recipe from another site who in turn based it on the world famous Tortuga Rum Cake. It feels a bit like industrial espionage but it’s the recipe was retro-engineered from a real Tortuga Rum Cake and so it has provenance.
Next I went out and bought three bunt tins. One large, one medium and one for cupcake sized cakes (it holds six at a time). Not because I had a plan, but because I had no idea what I needed.
Finally the first lot of ingredients and the cooking began.
A few trials later and I had the basic rum cake turning out pretty well each time. They looked “nice” and tasted really yummy but…
…were they good enough to be a wedding cake?
This of course got me thinking about presentation and how could I make it look special for the bride and groom? After all I couldn’t very well just serve up a very plain-looking cake now could I?
Well Dee’s favourite desert is apple crumble. So, an apple rum cake became the goal.
Jon? Well he likes chocolate and coconut so the idea of the “Bounty Bar” rum cake was born. He also likes beer, but a beer rum cake seemed a bad idea.
It took trial and error. Refining the process each time. Honing the recipes. Testing different rums, more chocolate, less chocolate, different syrup recipes and ways to decorate each cake.
But thanks to the help of a group of dedicated tasters and lots of Sunday afternoon cake tasting sessions I eventually got there and the final recipes were given the thumbs up.
We tried the cakes with tea and coffee and then realised it needed to go with prosecco as this is what it would be served with on the day.
Everyone had to eat a lot of cake but the gang were real sports and put up with it without too much grumbling.
My apple rum cake was the favourite in practice but the Bounty Bar Cake and the Traditional Rum Cake were real hits as well.
That just left the cakes for the big day!
Typically it had all been going so well but on the day of the final bake my big tin just stopped working! The cakes just kept sticking to it and refusing to come out, fortunately my medium-sized tin and my cup cake tin seemed to be working just fine so with a little bit of redesigning I managed to pull it together… but not before the process permanently traumatized my mum. 😱
The cakes looked really nice and everyone said they tasted great. It felt like a real achievement to go from having never really baked a cake to making cakes that really looked and tasted the part.
I was asked several times where I had bought them and whether or not they were Tortuga Rum Cakes! By chance one guest worked for Tortuga and he was convinced it was one of theirs!
High praise indeed! And evidence that the DNA of the recipes came from a Tortuga cake.
But most importantly the bride and groom were happy. A success. Job done! I could retire from the cake business.
But no.
It turns out that I have been bitten by the baking bug and so I have continued to experiment and innovate with rum cakes.
This week two more creations have joined my recipe book.
The ‘Jaffa Cake’. A chocolate orange rum cake glazed with marmalade.
Secondly a Pina Colada Rum Cake.
The Pina Colada Rum Cake calls for some extra preparation.
But it is well worth the effort!
Each rather good! Both very pretty!
Oh and my big tin is working again!
A few weeks ago Victoria and I were swimming in the sea not far from our home. We were only in about six feet of water but we swam slap bang into a nurse shark.
I called to Victoria ‘shark’ and she set off in the other direction.
She has always been the sensible one. But she quickly overcame her initial reaction and we followed the shark for about a minute before it swam off.
The shark was about five and a half feet long. So a fair sized animal.
It was a lovely encounter but surprising given the depth of water, proximity to the shore and how close we were to a really packed beach.
Weeks passed and despite swimming near the same spot regularly we did not encounter the shark again. We chalked it up to luck and forgot about it. Until today.
The kids and I were swimming close to our usual spot. We had swum half a mile down the coast and were making our way back exploring as we went.
James called for me to look at something he had found. There in a hollow in the coral was what looked like a big bug. When I say big it was like a woodlouse but just under a foot long. I recognised it as a kind of lobster. As we looked at the odd creature we realised there were two of them.
They are called slipper lobsters they are very odd looking but a great find none the less.
Inspired by the find we were determined to see if we could find anymore lobsters or crabs. So we carried on searching as we were heading back towards the cove where we had entered the water.
We were only in a few feet of water, nearly back to the entrance of the cove looking in cracks and under corals for interesting things when Poppy suddenly called ‘shark‘.
Ducking below the surface I span in a circle expecting to see the creature. But nothing. I knew they could swim quickly, but not that quickly!
I surfaced and turned to Poppy a little confused. A little relieved. It is one thing me swimming with sharks but my 12 year old child. I do have some common sense.
I looked at Poppy. “Shark.”
“Eh, where?” Thinking she had imagined it and if she hadn’t quietly pleased it had gone.
She pointed to a completely unassuming lump of coral about eight foot long, six wide and six high the top only just below the surface right next to us.
I ducked under and looked again. Nothing. At the surface once more I looked at her quizzically again.
“It’s under that in a cave,” she clearly thought I was blind.
We ducked below the surface once again. This time together and she pointed. There at the base of the rock was a well hidden roundish hole maybe one and a half foot across. I stress the hole was really well hidden you could swim by it day in day out and never spot it.
I jumped. Sitting just back from the entrance was the head of a shark the same grey as the surrounding rock. Neatly camouflaged. I had not been expecting it to be so close! Right there! My heart pounded, not two feet away from my daughter was a shark!
They were literally face to face only a couple of hand spans apart!
The two of them were frozen in a tableau. I tried to make sense of what I was seeing. There was Poppy grinning and just in front of her nose a nurse shark. Sleeping. Or resting.
It was aware of us but not bothered, quite quiescent.
I calmed.
So there we were less than two feet from it and we were transfixed, by its gills opening and closing rhythmically. By its tiny blue eye that followed us, watched us and by it’s blunt squarish face and by how close we were to it.
I swam around to the back of the lump on a hunch and pushed down to the base of the rock. There under an outcropping lip was another hole and through it you could see clear under the rock. A narrow entranced tunnel running the length of the lump opening out to about four foot wide and in it lay Poppy’s shark. The tip of its tail inches away from my face.
What a beauty nearly six feet long and gently swishing her tail from time to time to hold herself in place as she slept.
Poppy and her shark were of a size and they could have easily fitted next to each other in that little cave!
We spent about half an hour there diving down, holding our breath just watching the shark. Mesmerised by her. She was just serene. We were so close that we could have reached out and touched her on the nose or on her tail. We didn’t, we are not that far gone yet…yet.
While there we were joined by a large shoal of fish and a big very tough looking barracuda! In some ways a far more mean looking animal than the slumbering shark.
The amazing thing was her little cave is only about eighty feet from the seaward exit of our swimming cove.
Finally we decided to leave our new friend alone and followed the barracuda back towards our swimming cove… spotting a stingray as we went.
I also think I am becoming a bit obsessed with sharks and shark encounters. But you know what? So what.
I was rather reminded of an old episode of Father Ted this week. The one where the eponymously named Priest attempts to explain ‘perspective’ to his intellectually challenged sidekick and friend, Father Dougal.
The conversation involved cows. Dougal thought a pair of cows that the pair could see from their caravan window were very small. Ted was trying to explain that they were normal sized cows but far away. This distinction was lost on Dougal who just became progressively more confused.
Small and near or big but far away? No clue. ‘Perspective’ it seemed, much to Ted’s frustration, was beyond Dougal’s comprehension.
In my case however it wasn’t cows.
Under normal circumstance I am pretty good at judging size and scale but I have discovered that there are times when the normal rules, gained through years of experience, don’t apply.
It had been a busy, long and quite stressful couple of weeks with lots going on at work. Too much to do, so much to cope with. It all seemed too big.
But today it was Sunday and Mothers’ Day. To celebrate and to try to have a break I took Victoria and our friend and dive buddy, Cissy, up to the East End for a boat dive and lunch.
We jumped onto the boat and we set off over the opal coloured water. Out through a gap in the reef and into the true blue of the deep-sea. Flying fish zipped alongside the boat their silver wet wings glistening as they flew parallel to us. The sun sparkled on the Caribbean Sea and the breeze whipped our hair. Stunning and just right for Mother’s Day and a break from it all.
After about twenty minutes we reached our dive site. Kitted up we stepped off the back of the boat one at a time and into sixty feet of water.
As I waited at the surface for the rest of the group a four foot barracuda circled me inquisitively. A big fish sleek and torpedo like. No more than five feet away. His proximity to me and the fact he was between myself and a couple of other divers in my group made it very easy to estimate his size.
A big fish. Near by.
We took each other’s measure. We agreed we were each quite interesting but probably not dinner and with that the big fish slipped down into the deep water.
With everyone now in the water we followed the barracuda down and descended to the sea floor.
A green sea turtle followed us down, curious to see where we were going. She kept her distance staying about 30ft out from the group. Just a baby only about a foot and a half in length.
A little animal. Far away.
As a group (12 of us) we headed due east towards the wall passing through the coral reef that sat between us and the Cayman Trench. We swam through a gently sloping coral garden. A strange alien place of odd shaped ‘plants’ and ‘trees’ painted weird colours. Hues of purple, blue and yellow. The water was really clear and we could see for a long way. The colours around us were vivid.
We moved through the reef following its gentle slope down to the lip of the ‘Drop Off‘.
As we reached the cliff edge the sea bed dropped away steeply until the wall disappeared into the inky black blue endless night below. True dark. True deep.
We moved out over the void and hung in space for a while before following the cliff edge along the coral face. To our right the cliff and its denizens were near by and it was easy to judge their different sizes. But to our left the sheer immensity of the drop, clarity of the water and the distance we could see out into the featureless deep made scale more difficult to judge.
We swam 100ft below the surface transfixed by the beauty.
As we swam a flicker in my peripheral vision. Up out of the deep came a sleek predatory shape. Sliding up from darkness a silhouette of effortless power moving unerringly upwards. Growing.
The shadow resolved itself into a pelagic shark. Its shape instantly recognisable. A deep sea shark, an open water predator. A design millions of years old the perfect hunter here in its own element.
And this is where perspective comes into play.
With no way to judge distance there was no way to judge size. I found myself trying to work out if it was a big shark a long distance away or a medium-sized shark close by.
If it was between 20ft and 50ft away then it was a ‘modest‘ 5ft long shark. However if it was between 50ft and 75ft away then it was easily 10 foot long. A BIG shark!
Small and near by or big but far away?
Perspective. I tried to puzzle it out, trying to understand the threat. Just how much danger did this animal pose?
Then instinct took hold.
The familiar automatic response that is the natural reaction to finding oneself in the presence of an apex predator in its natural environment.
A reflex as old as time itself. An ancient instinct. One that we can no more control than we can the turning of the tide.
There 100ft down rational thought and reason ceased and nature took hold. A primal urge kicked in.
We all swam towards the shark.
As a group we turned and moved further out over the deep towards the ancient hunter.
Programmed by millions of years of survival and savagery. A creature of unthinking instinct. It in turn reacted. Its tail twitched and under its slick grey skin its muscular body rippled. It turned, its path now matching ours.
It totally ignored us. Unfazed by our presence it began to casually swim along the cliff face parallel to us now. It now flanked us. Between us and the deep.
Matching our course along the reef face it swam effortlessly. Where we were ungainly and slow it was all grace and power.
It glided along while we tried to keep up completely in awe. The gap between us never closed. 30ft or 60ft? No real way to judge. No way to know.
I really do not have the skill with words to describe just how stunning that shark was.
Power personified. No doubting from its design what it was made for.
Utterly beautiful and what a memory. Hanging over the void 100ft down with a deep-sea predator.
It stayed with us for a few minutes before causally flicking its tail. Accelerating effortlessly away it slid once again back into the inky blue deep and gone.
A big shark far away, or a modest sized shark near by? I don’t know.
I do know it was a privilege, for an instance, to swim with this magnificent creature.
Oh and I think I now understand how poor Dougal felt.
A Caribbean Black Tipped Reef Shark this one may be bigger or smaller than the one we saw…
We surfaced elated. Chattering about all we had seen, the drop off, the coral and of course our shark. The weeks worries forgotten somewhere down there in the deep, the stress of the week washed away. Forgotten or at least put in its rightful place.
See perspective.
As for Victoria and Cissy? They had a lovely Mothers’ Day.
Really proud of Jim he took an additional diving qualification at the weekend. He took the PADI Eco Diver accreditation and has signed up with Eco Divers to help restore coral and do conservation work.
Did you know that we have lost about 90% of the coral around the islands due to hurricane, human impact, pollution and the dreaded coal bleaching in the last 20 years. One of the worst offenders is sunscreen washing off bathers, this oily film suffocates coral. Always buy ‘reef safe‘ sun screen.
This year Valentine’s Day, Ash Wednesday and Half Term all coincided with a visit from the Mother in Law. This meant that we had a babysitter so Victoria and I had a night away at the Marriott. A day on the beach, dinner and watching sunset over Seven Mile Beach. Just lovely.
London Gins and Big Grins.
With half term we have had time for a few dives and James has undertaken a specialist Coral Conservation Course one of many PADI Specialist Diver courses.
We both now have our Christmas presents attached to our BCDs…
Is this a dagger I see before me?
Under an Endless Sky 