1999 DIVER Holiday Supplement

It's well known as an excellent diving destination, but how does Grand Cayman cope with kids?
Andy Blackford checks out family value on this upmarket island

As the sun clears a low bank of sea mist, I kick off my running shoes and plunge headlong into the turquoise lagoon. No breath of a breeze disturbs the palm trees. The Caymanian flag sleeps heavily against its staff on the frontage of the Caribbean Club. A solitary snow-white egret banks lazily overhead.
I glance down: a solitary snow-white goby head-butts my foot. This is obscenely close to paradise.
Back home, things have changed a lot. In the good old days we never dreamt of taking our spouses along on a diving trip.
"Can me an' the kids come with you?" the Better Half would plaintively enquire of a Friday evening.
"Don't be s'bloody stupid, y'daft mare!" we would reply. "We're only gannin' t'Fort Bleak, down on t'marshes. We'll be kippin' in the mud-pits, an' there isn't a lav for 60 mile. Besides, we'll be 'ome Sunday night. Now git on an' clean summat!"
It's all changed now, sadly. Your modern British diver has never donned a weightbelt north of Eilat. Naturally, if he's off to some tropical hot spot he can hardly leave the tribe at home.
So I've been charged with the irksome task of checking out exotic, foreign destinations for the "family-friendly factor".

Rich and famous
The Caymans are extremely family friendly - providing you're the Royal Family. These flat and unexceptional little keys, just south of Cuba in the Northern Caribbean, enjoy the status of a tax haven. It was in the Caymans that the old adage "the rich get richer" was invented.
There are 900 banks on Grand Cayman, most of which are invisible. They exist only as box numbers, but they make a mint for their investors, so the islands' service industry is set up to serve people with six-figure salaries.
And yet, as our skipper points out during a long drive down the coast, if global warming really kicks in, a mere 15cm rise in sea level would relegate Grand Cayman to the realms of folk history.
For the time being, however, you don't get much more affluent than the Hyatt Regency. The hotel is built in the grand colonial style, with gleaming white colonnades, meandering lawns and swimming pools.

Child benefits
From the family perspective, the best thing about the hotel is its creche, Club Hyatt. We checked in Verona, aged three, and left her in the expert but indulgent hands of a trained nursery teacher while we went diving.
Her time was spent creatively. Every day she would proudly leave the Club with some brilliant construction in lolly sticks, paint and glue. On the fourth day, she made a demand valve.
Restaurants, too, cater effortlessly for children. This is some consolation when two main courses, a kid's meal and a bottle of wine can set you back 100.
One morning, we took Verona to Stingray City. Not the famous dive, of course, where you flounder about in 5m of water while a score of 2m rays try to suck you to death. This particular trip was to a nearby sandbank where you can stand up to your waist in thrashing rays, while they mug you for the strips of fish the crew doles out to the punters.
Verona wouldn't actually get into the water, but I held her just above the surface and she was captivated by the sheer size and boldness of the stingrays. They were just like big, friendly Labradors, and, providing you don't impale yourself on the end of their tail, they're absolutely harmless. They made a big impression on our daughter - she wouldn't let us leave without buying a plastic one for the bath.
After lunch, we went to Hell - a village on the edge of a weird, volcanic rock field, merchandised relentlessly with "Greetings from Hell" postcards and "How The Devil Are You?" T-shirts.
By now, we'd more or less exhausted the tourist attractions of the Caymans. There's a commercial turtle farm (which is fun until you contemplate the likely end of the inmates) and a new botanical garden that promises to be breathtaking. But, generally speaking, people come here to count their money or to dive.

Diving delights
The diving is fine, if unadventurous - big reefs, clear water and tons of life. Dive boats are allowed to moor only on nominated buoys, which prevents anchor damage and provides complete protection for the vast majority of the corals that are out of swimming range.
And it works. For the past 20 years, the reefs have played host to tens of thousands of divers a year - and they're still beautifully, vibrantly alive.
The islands are most famous for wall diving - they're perched on the brink of the continental shelf - but my favourite site is the Lone Star Ledges, a beautiful shallow saunter along a spit of coral teeming with life.
I met my first goldentail moray while free swimming between coral heads, and discovered a peacock flounder with its head in the sand. At one point, a huge puffer vied for attention with an even bigger hogfish, while an eagle ray dug into the sand beneath an overhang of soft corals. I turned to point out the ray to my buddy, and almost rubbed noses with a turtle. My buddy missed all of this (he was American, you see).
The dive operators are slick to the point of mechanical. The boats leave bang on time. The instructors' patter has all the warmth and sincerity of an airport security announcement. The divers are mostly fat and useless. (The day before we arrived, our dive leader had to persuade an obese Miami dentist that his 601b weightbelt was just a tad OTT.)
Still, the sun shines, the water sparkles, the flying fish frolic and the turtles snuffle, your best girl's by your side, your nipper's building an oxygen rebreather back at the creche, and you feel privileged to be alive.

Appeared in DIVER - January 1999