Grand Cayman 2023
Day 8: Sparkles are a girls best friend
No sleeping in this morning says my body and I was up before the crack of dawn at 5am.
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I headed out to the beach before sunrise to find the water really calm and crystal clear. The sunrise wasn't the best today but none-the-less I snapped a picture because that's what I do.
I decided to walk along the beach and do a little beachcombing before heading back up to the house.
Today was going to be a lazy breakfast day where the family had to fend for themselves and we ate cereal.
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Sakari had really wanted to do some fishing while we were here and I made a promise that she could. She had been begging all week but we either didn't have time to fit it in or when we went to the bait store and it would be closed. Today was going to have to be the day I suppose since we weren't able to do any diving today and I really didn't have anything planned.
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Sakari had packed her tackle box but we would find that, even with her rod broken down, it would not fit in what I believed was a ginormous luggage to begin with that could possibly stow away my entire bedroom set if I tried. So, we would also have to rent her a rod and reel and I had hoped they did that here.
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Sakari and I headed out to the car, but first a stop at our favorite grocery store.
We arrived to find it was a few minutes before the bait shop said it was opening and right on the dot she was there to open and motioned us in. She was very nice an informative on what bait we should use and gave us our options of rods to rent.
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Rental was $25 for 24 hours but we would find that they only accepted cash. I guess I didn't think about that. She informed us that they only required a $50 deposit down on the rod until we brought it back the following day.
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We headed back home to grab some cash. We were only about 10 minutes away.
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When we returned, she said "Ok, that will be $95 USD. Wait, that didn't add up. She had told me $50 and that's what I had brought. Even if she meant $50 deposit PLUS $25 for the rental, that's only $75. So, not sure how those calculations added up.
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She decided to take the $50 and then said when we returned the rod, she would just take the price of the rental out of the deposit. Yep, that worked for me. The pack of frozen squid would be an extra $1.50 so we grabbed one of those too.
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We zoomed back to the house and I didn't even get a chance to ask her when she planned on going out to fish and she was nowhere in sight already. She was already down at the dock baiting her rod. Geesh, excited much kid?
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I packed the cooler with drinks and snacks and headed down. We stayed out there for hours and she loved every bit of fishing off our dock. I knew she would. It was one of reasons I picked this particular place. After seeing the dock in the pictures and asking the rental company if you could fish off of it and they told me yes...it was the place for us. Sakari's last fishing adventure did not turn out the way she wanted. She thought deep sea fishing would mean going out in the water, casting a rod, and sitting there until she caught a fish. Not constant moving on the boat as the bait pulled through the water teasing the fish to chomp on it. She likes being still so "still" she was today and it made her very happy.
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She started reeling in the fish and was super excited.
She caught a variety of fish and was so much more happier catching these little fish, compared to the larger barracuda on the fishing trip in Mexico, and you could tell by each little squeal she let out. She caught a lot of the needlenose fish as well but every time she pulled them up in the air, they managed to get away.
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As she continued to fish, I decided to try to snorkel. There really was a lot to see out there at the reef right in front of our dock. A wide variety of fish and coral and it was beautiful.
