All’s clear: Grand Cayman

Though most of the people I knew 20 years ago on Cayman also moved away, those who stayed have fashioned successful careers. For a homecoming dinner, I hook up with Collin Pearson, a former scuba instructor who married a Cayman citizen and now owns a marine services company. He and his wife, Olive, meet me at Champion House II, a locals’ favorite just outside George Town. After two decades, I’m happy to see that Collin has retained the shock of red hair, glasses and permanently astonished look that led the dive crowd to nickname him Beaker, after the Muppets character.

We order a down-home Cayman feast that fills the table with conch, lobster, turtle and snapper. The conversation naturally turns to their hurricane story. They’d moved into their new house about a mile from the water just a week before the storm hit, thrilled with the extra space and features like a spiral staircase, tile floors and sunken living room. On September 11, when the change in Ivan’s course that everyone had been praying for didn’t happen, Collin and Olive invited all their friends and acquaintances who lived in more exposed areas to come hunker down at the house. As the weather reports grew gloomier, showing the Category 5 storm — the strongest hurricane to hit the Caribbean in 10 years and the sixth-strongest ever, one that had already delivered a deadly pummeling to Grenada and Jamaica — headed right for them, they boarded up as best they could. “Then I went to sleep,” says Collin.

“How could you possibly sleep?” I ask.

“I had a feeling I was going to need it,” he says.

At 10 p.m., when the eye of the storm was still 113 miles southeast of Grand Cayman, the winds screaming across the island had already reached 100 mph. “That’s when the water really started pouring in under the front door,” says Olive. The water ran across the floor and into the sunken living room.

“By this time,” notes Collin, “I was wide awake.

Bob Friel / Caribbean Travel & Life

The water level rose quickly, and they formed a bucket brigade to bail out the living room. As fast as they could, they dumped the water down the sink. But it kept rising. Then the lights went out. Flashlights reflecting off what was now an indoor pool created eerie ripples of light on the walls, matching the mood produced by the screeching winds and creaking house. “Around midnight, I shined my light down into the sunken bloody living room,” says Collin, “and there was a school of minnows swimming around!”

They couldn’t see what was going on outside, but knew that having live saltwater fish inside their house was not a good sign. By one in the morning, the water overflowed the four-foot-deep living room and started filling up the first floor. “We picked up all the furniture and carried it as far up the winding staircase as it would go,” says Olive. “Of course, the big things got wedged halfway up and we had to climb over them going up and down.”

At 2 a.m., with water coming in under all four of the house’s doors, they gave up bailing. A wrenching sound at the front was part of the roof ripping off. “And that’s when the back door blew open,” says Collin.

By 10 a.m. the eye was 21 miles southwest of Grand Cayman, as close as it would get. Unfortunately, that put the island in the worst quadrant of the storm, which lashed out with winds of 150 mph and gusts up to 220. At the Pearsons’, the ceilings in three rooms caved in, the drywall soaked with water that had rained in through rifts in the roof. By the time the wind finally dropped, Ivan had pounded the island for 16 hours.

Today, six months after the storm, there are great swaths of ceiling yet to be repaired, and there’s tarpaper on the roof waiting to be covered. But it’s still a home. Actually, a group home: $1.4 billion out of Grand Cayman’s $3.4 billion in total damages was to residences, and the Pearsons opened their house to displaced friends and friends of friends. Eight people are still living under one patched roof. 

On the Divetech boat the next morning, I’m nervous. There’s a bit of a breeze out of the north, so the captain says we’re going to dive a West Bay wall, where the water is almost always calm. When I worked here, the boat I ran was a small flat-bottom trimaran more suitable for taking a family of four on a lake picnic than for what I actually did with it: take a dozen divers out to a 2,000-foot drop-off in the open ocean. So I didn’t dare leave the protected waters of West Bay unless it was mirror-calm. Consequently, I dove all the famous spots — Orange Canyon, Trinity Caves, the wreck of the Oro Verde and my favorite, Big Tunnels — over 100 times each. It’s not a complaint: These are some of the best dives in the world. Or they were.

As we motor out toward the wall, Dolphin Point comes into view. The towering waves that devastated the condo had raced up West Bay, right overtop the wall, and slammed into the coast where it elbows out. As I ready my gear, I wonder how rough it got underwater.

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