Weddingbee

The Department of Tourism invited me and a couple of other wedding magazine/website editors to come visit the Cayman Islands last weekend on a press trip. Not only was it a fantastic opportunity to mingle with some of the top people in the biz, we got to spend 4 days in the beautiful Cayman Islands! What an honor for weddingbee to be invited!

The island is clean, safe, beautiful, and the people are so friendly… I had an absolutely fantastic time, and would definitely love to visit again with Mr. Bee.

Now I’ll start off with the water excursions, because I got to experience a lot of things I’d never done before. On Saturday, our free day, I went snorkeling in Stingray City with Red Sail Sports. I purchased an underwater camera case for my digital camera for about $60 off ebay before the trip. Totally worth it! I got some amazing pictures and videos, and I’m sure to use it over and over again - a must have if you’re going to be participating in water sports on your honeymoon.

It’s no joke how friendly they are! You can have 3-4 all over you at once!

Mama and baby

The tail is poisonous, but not dangerously so - applying heat is the remedy to a sting.

This is a video illustrating how not to hold squid when you’re trying to feed a stingray. You’re supposed to hold it in your fist so your fingers aren’t sticking out. Well one stingray thought my fingers were food and bit me pretty hard and wouldn’t let go! They have no teeth though so don’t worry because it didn’t hurt…. that much. In this video, you can hear me laughing because a fish snatched the squid from my hand. They’re super fast!

Getting up close and personal…

Following a stingray…

Then we moved on to another location to snorkel amongst some coral reef. I’ve been snorkeling/scuba diving in a lot of places, and it was pretty awesome here I must say! Great visibility, and lots of wildlife.

As soon as I got in the water, a friend pointed out a large fish, so I chased it down. Turns out it was a barracuda!!!!

I had no idea and kept taking pictures and filming it. Later I scraped my knees on some coral pretty hard. I was at least a good 100 yards out from the boat and my first thought was, “I have to swim back as fast as I can before the barracudas smell my blood and attack me!” (luckily there was no blood and no barracuda attack )

I’m pretty sure this is a trumpet fish - it’s long and has a trumpet shaped nose.

Kinda random but, there was a cannon!

A school of fish. I swam amongst them for quite some time…

The night before, we visited the turtle farm on Boatswain’s Beach. The manager invited us to come back the next day and swim in the predator tank with 10 sharks! (nurse sharks and brown sharks). This isn’t open to the public, and it was a once in a lifetime opportunity… so how could I pass it up?

This is the nurse shark with two of those fin thingys. He was very friendly and got very, very close.

You can see the tourists watching through the glass window…

Tourists can snorkel and swim right up to the window of the predator tank…

When 5 sharks would gather near me, I’d wonder if they were somehow plotting an attack.

I went with the boyfriend of one of the editors because I think we were the only ones crazy enough to want to swim with sharks. When we got there and learned that the trainer was going to go in the tank with us, we were completely at ease. He’s been training killer whales, sharks, dolphins, sea lions for over 20 years! He worked at Sea World for many many years before coming to the Cayman Islands. (I’m so bad with names I completely forgot his name! He even dove to the bottom of the shark tank and got me two shark’s teeth.)

He did freak us out a bit by telling us 1) not to wave our hands about otherwise the sharks would bite, 2) that he was wearing a wetsuit because he’d rather have the sharks bite his wetsuit than his skin, and 3) that we needed flippers in case we kicked the sharks, it would be with our flippers and not our bare feet… which they might bite. But it really wasn’t scary… it was an awesome experience and I loved it!

Afterwards we walked around the turtle farm. There are 11,000 turtles in this tank! And that’s a beach back there where they lay their eggs.

These turtles are a good…. 4 feet long?

You can touch the smaller turtles in the touch tank - I picked up a heavy one.. he must have been 30+ pounds!

You pet the turtles under their necks and it calms them.

Coming up: Places to stay/have a destination wedding in the Cayman Islands!

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