Stingray City was fun enough to warrant a second trip out there in the dinghy. We go as much for the people watching as we do for the stingrays. It’s also just fun for the kids to be standing on a sandbar a mile or so from land.

The guy in the blue t-shirt was trying desperately to “catch” a stingray to hold for his boatload of tourists. The ridiculousness of the entire tour industry here on Grand Cayman is not lost on us. Everywhere we go we find these tour leaders going off to snatch up wildlife that they then carry back to their group, who stand huddled in a circle around the boat. I’m trying hard not to sound like a travel snob, and realize that I’m likely failing miserably. Whatever, everyone is having fun, and if the stingrays have traded their dignity for some free food, who am I to complain?

I guess this makes me the tour leader of this boat.

Tour leader ran aground.

A different sandbar. Grand Cayman feels a lot like Miami to us.

All right, so it’s probably clear that Grand Cayman really isn’t our kind of place. When a small weather window opened up for us to run the 75 miles to Little Cayman, we scrambled to get ready to take it. We pulled in to Camana Bay marina for one night in order to stock up on groceries, get laundry done, and check out with customs. Even though we’re only moving from one island to the next in the same country, we needed to clear out with customs since we are crossing international waters along the way. Bit of a hassle just so the paper pushers could fill their file cabinets, but whatever.

Ali must have scared them when she brought the laundry in.

Since they made us clear out with customs in order to move to another island, we got to fill up with duty free fuel. That took the price down from $6.25/gal US to $3.75. Quite a difference when you take on a couple hundred gallons.

Apparently full service here means they’ll flip the pump switch on for you.

After finishing up all of our errands we went back out to anchor for the night in order to leave early the next morning. Cruising around at dawn in Grand Cayman is not recommended. There are simply too many shallow spots. I ran us onto the dirt here and had us pretty good and stuck. I jumped in the water and walked around a bit trying to find an easy escape route, but there wasn’t any. In the end horsepower was the only thing getting us out, and we had to back straight up the way we’d come in. It was a close call. It took us an hour to cover the next two miles searching for a clear way out to the pass. We had to stop and turn around a couple of times, but eventually we made our way out to deep water and got underway for Little Cayman.

It was seventy-five miles across to Little, so in the afternoon we came to the very small pass leading into the bay. There was a decent sized swell running, which meant riding the waves a bit as we squeezed between the reefs and breaking waves close by on each side of us. The boat got a little squirrely, but we slid in without issue and were immediately protected from the swell and sitting in a bay with a max depth of six feet. We inched our way in as far as we could away from the pass and dropped anchor in water I could just about stand up in.

Some of the weather we were racing to get here ahead of.

Lowe is the family card shark when it comes to Cover Your Assets. He just outplays us every time.

A couple stingrays and a huge barracuda quickly took up residence under the boat.

Huge conch here. And thousands of them.

Always a welcome view of the anchor. Honestly, if I had to pick the biggest improvement to cruising since we first started out sailing, I’d say it’s the anchor. Ours is a Mantus, and it truly is amazing. Of course, in this anchorage any anchor would do, but with our anchor it doesn’t matter what is on the bottom, it always sticks the first time. Getting it back out when we try to bring it up is now the hardest part of anchoring. I can’t believe we sailed around the world with a little Bruce anchor and used a CQR in Mexico on the second boat. Garbage.