Review of bubble sub & Soto's stingray tour

[campboo]

Grand Cayman 11/28/05

 

We did two excursions in Grand Cayman. In the morning we went on the 2-person bubble sub tour. This was the only tour we booked through RCI, because that was the only way it was available. It was expensive ($400 for 2 of us for an excursion that lasted about an hour, start to finish) but it was really fun. The depth ranged from 15 - 40 feet, and the guide was in scuba gear behind the sub, steering it and talking to us the whole time through a microphone, pointing out different fish and coral, and we could ask him about the stuff we saw. We got to steer the sub ourselves for a little while, but the guide got us a lot closer to the reef than we did, so we let him control it most of the time. We were underwater for about 35 minutes. The visibility was excellent, and since we aren't scuba divers, this is probably the only way we'll ever be that far below the surface.

 

When we got back to shore, we had time to eat lunch and wander around the shops for awhile, until we got picked up by Soto's to go on their afternoon stingray excursion.

 

They were about 20 minutes late picking us up at the appointed meeting place, but luckily there was another couple waiting also who had gone with them last year so they were confident they'd show up and eventually they did. The van took us to the boat where we paid (cash or traveler's checks only; there was one couple who thought they could charge it and didn't have enough cash), got our snorkel gear, and got on the boat. There were 13 of us on the boat, though it probably could have held at least 30. The boat just had unpadded bench seats running the length of the boat, so it wasn't the most comfortable ride, but there was a bench up front (only held 4 people) and it was more pleasant to sit there. First we went to Coral Gardens to snorkel for about 30 minutes. The visibility was decent and we saw some fish, but not as many as we'd seen in the bubble sub that morning. Not surprising.

 

Then we went on to the stingray sandbar. There were two other boats there, both of them had more people than we did. There were plenty of stingrays to go around. In fact, they were everywhere! If you didn't get freaked out, then it was really cool to hold them and feed them and just watch them swim around. I stayed in the water as long as I could playing with them. The photographer took lots of pictures, and while we were heading back to the dock he showed each person/couple/group the pictures he took of them, and offered the pictures for sale. He took a total of 13 pictures of me and my DH, and said we could get them all for $45 (cash only). I wasn't totally sure if I wanted to, and at the last minute he dropped the price to $40, and I went ahead and bought them. (One other group on the boat paid $50 for their pictures; maybe he took more of them, I'm not sure.) We got off the boat about 3:15, and we told him our last tender was at 4:30 and he made it to the ship with our CD so we picked it up from the purser's desk after we set sail. I thought that was pretty impressive.

 

The biggest hassle concerning that day was that when we got the tickets for the bubble sub delivered to our stateroom the day we set sail, we didn't open them right away. It turned out that they had changed the time of our sub tour (we had reserved 9:30 am, so we could do the stingrays in the afternoon, and the tickets were for 12:30.) We went to the purser's desk the night before we got to Grand Cayman to get it straightened out, and they gave us a very hard time about not having come to them sooner. And then they didn't want to change it since our afternoon tour wasn't booked through RCI. But in the end they switched us back to the bubble sub at 9:30 and it all worked out fine. RCI does not help you at all if you've booked your tours independently.