Underwater Camera Action and Snorkeling in the Bahamas and Grand Cayman

Great Stirrup Cay – Bahamas

This is the private island of Norwegian Cruise Lines and is a great place to spend the day.  I’ve already covered it in another article as a destination.  This is about the snorkeling and specifically my first adventure with an underwater camera with the point of introducing anyone who hasn’t tried it – into trying it – because I thought it was fun as hell.

While there, we took our disposable Fuji Film cameras that are designed for underwater.  They are roughly USD10 at discount stores and can be “developed” at  Walgreens or any drug store that offers photographic services.  It had been close to eight years since I had actually had film developed so I was curious if they still did that sort of thing.  Amazingly, yes.  And they still can do it in an hour.

The Great Stirrup Cay snorkeling was great fun and we snorkeled around the large rock in the little bay.  The water was really very clear.  A really big spotted grouper (that somehow escaped photographing) and a barracuda (now that was so damn cool) were highlights there.  It was amazing how hidden the barracuda was and how it blends in with the environment.  It was about three feet long.  There was plenty of fish to see and while not the best snorkeling, it was well worth it and lots of fun.

Cemetery Beach, near George Town, Grand Cayman

Our snorkeling destination for Grand Cayman was Cemetery Beach and was a great day out and included a whole lot of smaller fish and quite colorful.  The coral formations were quite good and the water crystal clear.  There were plenty of places to look for fish and in some cases they were all around and came directly up to us.

I am no fish expert by any means but enjoy snorkeling.  There were plenty of colorful fish in large schools and it was interesting taking pictures of them underwater.  The larger ones were the easiest though it was nice to see the photographs after getting back from the cruise to really see what we captured.

There were no secret ghost fish that we didn’t see but some of the pictures came out far better than I would have thought and the water is incredible in some of them.   This was the first time I had tried my hand at underwater photography and these two destinations were great places to try it.  Both locations were off shore snorkeling and quite easy for anyone to handle and the rewards were very nice.

So, the point of all this is that I am a total amateur and these were done snorkeling off beach in fairly common locations and we had a blast photographing the fish.  We will definitely do this on future snorkeling trips and really wish we had a camera with us when we saw eels, turtles, squid and other sea creatures not to mention some really great examples of coral in some other destinations.