Cruise Ships, Cruise Ships Everywhere.....

The Caribbean cruise ship industry is huge, one of the largest in the world in fact, delivering over $2 billion in revenue to the Caribbean islands annually. Unfortunately, this means us Caymanian residents have to welcome tolerate their passengers on our shores.

I didn't fully appreciate the size of the Caribbean cruising industry until I arrived on island and had to run down drive around hordes of cruise ship tourists to get to the office (which is on the waterfront just beyond the port, #caribbeanproblems) almost every day. The numbers are staggering. The average number of annual cruise ship visitors to Grand Cayman for the last 10 years is 1.4 million per year. In 2015, there were 1,716,812 cruise ship visitors. To put this into context - there are only 60,000 people living on the whole island!

A quiet cruise ship day
(my office is the cream building with the blue roof)

The Cayman Port Authority website helpfully allows you to see what ships are coming into Port and when (so you can plan to avoid the town if necessary and/or possible). At the moment it's summer on the island which is actually low season (rainy and humid) so we only get 1, 2 or 3 ships a day in port. Painful, but bearable. That's usually no more than 10,000 passengers. But in winter, the high season, there can be as many as 8 ships docked at once, pouring up to 20,000 tourists into town for the day for the duty free shopping, discount diamonds and day trips to the nearby sights. I cannot even imagine what that chaos is going to look like, but you may find me 'working from home' frequently in February and March. 

To make these numbers even more unmanageable, I should note that (1) because of the extensive coral reef surrounding the island, we have no cruise ship dock, so the ships park further out and the passengers are brought in by tender boat and (2) the ships can't stay overnight because gambling is illegal in the Cayman Islands, so they need to head back to international waters every evening so their delightful passengers can gamble the night away in the onboard casino. This means 20,000 tourists flood in and then recede, all within a horrifying 12 hour window. I'm imagining it looks a bit like that scene in Lord of the Rings Return of the King, where Aragorn calls the dead army to protect Gondor and they swarm in their ghostly green-ness all over Minas Tirith. 

Given the importance of the cruise ships to the Caymanian economy and the livelihoods of many locals, the Caymanian government is currently looking at how they can construct a long term solution full cruise ship dock, without decimating the underlying coral reef. Naturally, the discussions are heated. 

This was one proposal for an enormous concrete jetty but would have
dredged all of the underlying reef and caused massive damage.

Any solution is probably some time away yet, so for now, the cruise shippers continue to flood in on tenders every morning, swarming blindly across the footpaths and road as they do, and the rest of us count down to sunset when we get some peace and quiet again.