After getting up early and having breakfast we went out to dive at two shipwreck sites. The first site was USS Kittiwake which was commissioned during ww2 from 1945 to 1994. It ended up in the Cayman Islands because they wanted a large shipwreck so they did the paperwork and finally after six years in 2011 it was towed down and sunk. The USS Kittiwake was a submarine rescue ship originally with four large buoys to attach to a submarine to make it float to the surface. Only two of them are still on the wreck. It also had a crane to lower a cabin onto the exit hatch of the submarine to evacuate the submariners 8 at a time. It is 249 feet long and has been moved closer to the reef and tipped over in two different hurricanes. The second boat was much smaller, at around 60 feet and was a cable laying boat. The second boat had a lot more life because it was introduced to be a artificial reef and it wasn’t affected as much by the hurricanes. Surrounding the general area of the shipwrecks there was a sandy bed and there were lots of garden eels. I got to see one stingray on each dive in the distance sucking them out of their holes. I also got to see a hogfish which have a large mouth which they use to root around in the sand with to find food. On the second shipwreck there were large schools of fish with the two main ones being bar jacks, which were higher up, and yellow tailed snapper, which were in and around the boat. The coolest fish I saw was the sand tilefish which make nests in the sand by digging holes and then making a roof out of dead coral. These long white fish float around the entrance and dart inside when you get close. There nests are useful because they provide protection for the tilefish and smaller juvenile fish that also occupy the nest. After diving and lunch we went on a beach cleanup and since Jordi and I, the dream team, found the weirdest item, which was a half melted chucky cheese figurine head, we each got a free tee shirt from the dive shop. After today I am ecstatic for our final dives tomorrow.
