Grand Cayman: 20th to 26th April 2013

We have just spent one week in Grand Cayman en route from Panama to Key West, Florida.

Grand Cayman has been a very convenient stopping point for us, after a 650nm trip from Colon, Panama.

Customs and Immigration are very polite, friendly and helpful and made the clearing in the process a pleasure. We arrived at first light in George Town and took an orange yacht mooring buoy in front of a very large cruise ship.  At about 9 a.m. the immigration launch came out to greet us and gave us the appropriate forms to fill out in advance.  They then guided us into the jetty next to the immigration office where we completed the process very quickly.

George Town is very tourist orientated which didn’t give us the best initial impression of the Island.  However, after moving round to North Sound and taking a slip at the Barcadere Marina we were able to hire a car and explore the island.

It’s a beautiful island, well worth a visit.  The beaches are superb and everyone we met was very polite and friendly.  It can be very expensive, but we found some good value places to eat and the supermarkets stock everything you could possibly want.

We stayed at the Barcadere Marina which is run by Neville (the owner) and Hailey.  It’s a great marina, with a very good shower block, electricity, and water at the pedestals on the slip and an excellent restaurant/bar which has a happy hour every evening!  The marina looks very new with all the facilities in excellent order. Diesel and gasoline are also available at reasonable prices.

From the marina, it’s a 5-minute walk to the airport.  Perfect for hiring a car or crew change over.  There’s also a large Fosters supermarket close to the airport which makes provisioning easy.

Hailey and Neville made us very welcome and know everything there is to know about the island.  Neville even went out of his way when we had a tricky situation with crew returning from Miami. Thoroughly recommended.

We’re about to depart for Key West, but we’ve really enjoyed our time in the Caymans.  Wish we had more time to explore and see the other islands too.

Peter Sedman

SV Gabriola

United Kingdom

Related content

George Town