We found a new favorite spot to dive on Grand Cayman! Well, two…sort of. Right behind the Eden Rock Diving Center is the name sake dive site Eden Rock as well as another right next to it called Devil’s Grotto. Both have amazing swim throughs and tall coral structures that reach very close to the surface, making them an excellent spot for snorkeling as well.

Beyond the interior reef is an expansive sandy plateau which is home to thousands of garden eels and a very healthy population of conchs. We even met a group of local photographers that like to shoot very small nudibranchs and tiny frogfish hiding in the algae. After the sand, a second reef starts up again just before the drop into the Cayman trench.

There were also tons of fish, some in schools and others just swimming around individually. In fact there were eleven first time captures for us including an eyespot costasiella, brown variable sponge, pink bush algae, sunray lettuce coral, topsail chub, houndfish, hybrid hamlet, dog snapper, lane snapper, whitestar cardinalfish and an antiguan cave shrimp.


FIRST TIME CAPTURE IDENTIFICATION

We primarily use two sources to validate our first time captures. The first is Florent's Guide To The Tropical Reefs which can be found at [ Ссылка ]. Its free and has lots of pictures, but is not comprehensive. The second is “The Reef Set: Reef Fish, Reef Creature and Reef Coral (3 Volumes)”. The box set can be found on Amazon; however with all our travels, we also purchased the eBooks ([ Ссылка ]) so we don’t have to carry an extra five pounds of paper in our luggage. :-) We may also reference other sources from time to time as well.

Here are some links to this video’s first time captures.

* Eyespot Costasiella - [ Ссылка ]
* Brown Variable Sponge - [ Ссылка ]
* Pink Bush Algae - [ Ссылка ]
* Sunray Lettuce Coral - [ Ссылка ]
* Topsail Chub - [ Ссылка ]
* Houndfish - [ Ссылка ]
* Hybrid Hamlet - [ Ссылка ]
* Dog Snapper - [ Ссылка ]
* Lane Snapper - [ Ссылка ]
* Whitestar Cardinalfish - [ Ссылка ]
* Antiguan Cave Shrimp - [ Ссылка ]


We want to encourage more shore diving, so this video provides some guidance where the site is, how to dive it and what you may see there. If you want to skip to or review specific topics, the section timings are as follows.

CHAPTERS

0:00 Intro
0:31 Site Background/Description
4:05 Site Logistics
6:52 Dive Profile
11:54 Sea Life
14:12 Night Diving

Please add a comment and let us know what you saw there.

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