Patty's Place

The Cayman Islands' dive sites carry names that tell stories — the operators who pioneered them, the features that define them, the animals encountered on the first memorable dives. Patty's Place on Little Cayman carries the warmth of a named dive site in the oldest tradition of diving culture, where the person who found and loved a site first gets to lend it something personal and lasting. Whatever Patty found here, the dive bears witness to why it was worth naming. An intermediate site within Bloody Bay Marine Park, Patty's Place offers the combination of reef terrace and wall diving that characterizes many of Little Cayman's best sites. The shallow entry zone sits at approximately fifteen to twenty-five feet, a mature coral reef community where decades of protection have allowed the hard corals to build to impressive sizes and the fish populations to reach the natural densities that a truly healthy reef system supports. Moving through this zone before reaching the wall edge is time well spent — the reef is rich enough to reward attention at every depth. The coral community here includes the full range of Caribbean hard coral species — brain corals, star corals, and pillar corals providing the structural foundation, with mustard hill corals and encrusting corals filling the spaces between. Gorgonian fans spread their intricate networks in the prevailing current direction, and sea plumes sway with each passing surge. The fish community is equally diverse: surgeonfish schools, paired angelfish, solitary hogfish hunting through the rubble, and the ever-present damselfish defending their algae patches with a ferocity comically disproportionate to their size. The wall at Patty's Place has the character of the wider Bloody Bay Marine Park system — densely colonized, vertically dramatic, dropping from the shallow reef edge into blue water that quickly surpasses recreational diving limits. The wall face is alive with sponge communities that paint the rock in Caribbean color: orange encrusting sponges, yellow tube sponges, purple rope sponges hanging in festoons, and the brown-orange interiors of barrel sponges large enough to require their own personal geography. Deep-water gorgonians spread their fans in the cooler water below recreational depths, just visible from above as dark lacy shapes in the diminishing light. Patty's Place, like all of Little Cayman's better-known sites, supports the general marine life of a healthy Caribbean reef. Hawksbill turtles are frequently sighted, foraging on the sponge communities of the wall face with the patient focus of animals that have been doing this since before the first diver arrived. Caribbean reef sharks make occasional appearances in the open water off the wall. Eagle rays sometimes sweep past in the mid-water column, their movement unhurried and graceful. Nassau grouper hold their territories in the reef crevices and coral overhangs with the quiet authority of a species that has reason to feel confident here. The intermediate level of the dive reflects both the wall component and the open-water buoyancy demands of hovering at the reef edge without touching or disturbing the coral structure. Divers who have their buoyancy well managed will find the conditions at Patty's Place typically benign — the water is warm, the visibility excellent, and the currents moderate unless conditions are unusual. The main challenge is the temptation to go deeper along the wall than planned, a consistent feature of beautiful wall diving where the interesting things below create a gravitational pull on the curious diver. Patty's Place is diving as it should be — warm, clear, rich with life, visited at a pace that allows real observation rather than just transit. Named for someone who clearly appreciated exactly these qualities, the site continues to reward everyone who follows in their fins.