Cayman Brac Climbing Trip

Teresa insisted that we do a "beach vacation" over Christmas break this year, so we headed to Cayman Brac, a tiny Caribbean island, just south of Cuba. Although there was tropical weather with clear blue ocean water, there also happened to be some awesome sport climbing (and no actual real beach)!

Cayman Brac - tropical island... with sport climbing?

The island is a bit of an obscurity, its one of the three Cayman islands, and has only 2000 inhabitants. Its mostly known as a dive vacation location, but in the past few years has seen significant development as a sport climbing destination.

We flew into Grand Cayman island through Fort Lauderdale. From there we took a tiny little plane over to Cayman Brac, rented a car and made our way to our rental house on the ocean.

Rental house

 

The house was lovely and very affordable!

Our first full day on the island it was cloudy and threatened to rain, but that gave us a chance to climb at the Orange Cave. The cave is on the south side of the island, and sits right next to the ocean.

Heading out climbing

The orange cave

The climbing was super fun, steep, featured and interesting. The cliff was so sheltered and steep, that even when it started to pour rain we were able to continue climbing!

Teresa samples routes in the Orange cave

Steep and fun!

Each day after climbing we did some serious relaxing. The weather was perfect, not too hot, not cool, always a nice breeze blowing. The island was so chill and relaxed.

Its easy to relax with ocean views like this.

Chillin on the patio

 In addition to climbing we checked out the local sights. The island is full of caves and and the east end of the island has a tall bluff where sea birds, the brown footed boobie, nests. We hiked out to the bluff and encountered a bunch of the birds nesting and courting. 

Nesting sea bird

 

Photographing birds

Brown footed boobie

The sun stayed out for the rest of our trip, the crags on the south side of the island were a bit too hot to climb in the sun, so we mostly climbed the routes on the North side of the island. The limestone was very high quality, and we had the place to ourselves. We only saw a handful of other climbers in passing.

Tuffa climbing at the Heritage wall

Evenings at the house

A nice treat was that one of the neighbors had a super friendly dog who would come by and visit. He would hop over to the ocean, take a cool-down dip and then head over to us for pets and belly rubs!

Friendly pooch!

 On our rest day we did a bit of snorkeling. Neither of us had done it before, and it turned out to be more fun than I expected. The water was crystal clear, and as the island is just a giant coral reef there is tons of sea life right off the shore. At first, we tried going right out of our house. There was lots of fish, but they were pretty small.

Heading into the warm Caribbean sea

 After some interwebs searching, we went to an excellent snorkeling location a few minutes down the road. It was amazing! We saw squid, and tons of super colorful fish. 

Snorkeling!

 And more climbing. The best wall we climbed at was Dixon's wall, the wall carried on of the most fun 5.10s I have ever done. Tuffas, steep, a traverse - super fun.

5.10 doesn't get more fun than this!

And of course, many more lazy afternoons....

Post swim drinks

 

Sunrays

 The island has a bunch of caves. They were pretty neat, some of them had large bat colonies living in them. Unfortunately since the caves are roadside, they have been heavily vandalized. What is wrong with people? 

Cave

Cave entrance

Mostly on the trip I was on-sighting climbs within my comfort zone. It took a while to get used to the steep climbing, not something we have a lot of in my regular caves. On one of our last climbing days, I took the time to redpoint something a bit harder (for me anyways), an interesting and enjoyable 5.11. I managed to get the redpoint, right before a thunder storm blew in, what luck!

Teresa working my little project.

 Soon enough our little trip was over. I feel very recharged, it was probably the most relaxing vacation I have taken in a long time. A really special place!

Bye Cayman Brac!