Todays dives were crazy. I never thought I would get a chance to dive a shipwreck. On our first dive we swam through a ship called the Kittiwake. Once a ship in the US Navy, it was designed to rescue submarines and was in commission from 1946 to 1994. It actually picked up Buzz Aldrin after one of his missions. Our dive master told us that it never actually did rescue a submarine, but it did manage to sink one. While leaving port after receiving some maintenance, the crew started the engine and tried to go forward, Instead, the Kittiwake started moving backward. The captain thought that there was a current, so he increased the throttle. It turned out that the maintenance team had put the transmission on backwards, so the ship ended up backing into and sinking a submarine. A few years after it was retired, Grand Cayman asked for it to be sunk in its waters to make for a good shipwreck dive. It was originally sank in 2011, but despite being a 250 ft ship held down by 4 anchors, a hurricane moved the ship to deeper waters and turned it on its side in 2017. Because of this, the coral is only now beginning to regrow on its sides.
There were a few plaques on the boat, but the most prominent was emblazoned across the entire bow. It said “Thanks to the tenacity and dedication of Nancy Easterbrook.” I decided to look her up. She was in charge of the operation to obtain the vessel on behalf of the Grand Cayman Island Tourism Association. The Caymans applied to the US government to receive a ship to use as an artificial reef. To her choosing the ship was a bit sentimental. She’s quoted saying that the Kittiwake “served divers all of her life … so it just seemed the appropriate ship.” Nancy Easterbrook is now a member of the International Scuba Diving Hall of Fame. She started diving in 1974 and currently lived in Grand Cayman. According to Hall of Fame website, she was inducted for “pioneer[ing] technical diving, rebreathers, and the sport of breath-hold freediving in Grand Cayman,” co-authoring training manuals for free diving students, founding an organization that brings divers around the world together to share knowledge and teach children to dive called Inner Space, and, of course, her eight-year operation of obtaining, transporting, preparing, and sinking the USS Kittiwake. She certainly sounds like she has a lot of “tenacity and dedication.”
We didn’t see to many crazy fish in the Kittiwake. At the end of the dive on the sandy bottom, we saw a huge hogfish sifting through the sand. It had a large mouth, yellow fins, spikes on its dorsal, and a black head.
One our second dive we saw the Doc Poulson. It was a much smaller ship, and we didn’t swim through it. However, unlike the Kittiwake, it had been where it is now on the seafloor for 30 years, and it was covered in vibrant, healthy coral and fish. During that dive we mostly swam along the reef. At the end, I saw a Southern Atlantic Stingray, scavenging along the bottom.
After lunch, we went out to a beach cleanup. The beach wasn’t very wide, but we still collected a surprising amount of trash. I heard that someone even picked up a dead cat. The car ride home smelt TERRIBLE! I can’t wait for our last dive tomorrow. I’ll be sad to leave this awesome place, but my feet are starting to get pretty scraped up from wearing the booties and fins everyday.
