Sixty years ago, recreational diving had its beginnings in the Cayman Islands. These scuba pioneers created a dive destination that is the stuff of legend.

She’s a real looker, all right. easy to get to know, not the least bit fussy. And dang, she’s getting better with age, wearing just the right amount of colorful adornments that let her considerable appeal steal the show. talk about tugging on a diver’s heartstrings.

“A beauty, isn’t she?” Emil Anderson, my PADI dive chaperone, asks as we climb back aboard the 42-foot Reef Divers boat in Grand Cayman’s Seven Mile Beach Marine Park. “She’s been sunk for only five years, and everybody’s watching the progression of corals, sponges and reef fish flourishing. This has become the wreck as a marine laboratory to study.” Updating my dive log — “Saw huge school of horse-eye jacks, three southern rays, grouper and a hawksbill turtle pulling duty in the wheelhouse…” — I can only grin and nod in agreement.

If there’s a purpose-sunk wreck anywhere that’s become a superstar ambassador, it’s the 251-foot Kittiwake — an aquatic fun house for the masses. The decommissioned U.S. Navy vessel known for recovering the black box from the Challenger space-shuttle disaster in 1986 was precisely sunk and anchored to the seabed in 2011. At just 60 feet deep, the upper reaches of the five-deck Kittiwake are accessible to lookie-loo snorkelers, while divers can poke around exposed hallways and open compartments where daylight is always visible. Novelties like its two decompression chambers and intact bathroom mirrors are adored Kittiwake exclusives. As marine life takes hold, the shallow wreck has become yet another must-dive of the Cayman Islands triplets. And you can bet your nitrox that number is considerable.

Halfway between Cuba and Cozumel, perched on the shoulders of an undersea ridge above a yawning 25,000-foot undersea abyss, Grand Cayman and its smaller siblings Cayman Brac and Little Cayman are a diving trifecta that need little introduction. You know them for waters as clear as a shot of Stoli, their 350-plus fish species, at least 36 types of hard and soft corals, a bounty of shallow and deep wrecks, shore and inshore drop zones, and more than 40 seasoned dive operators and flipper-friendly resorts.

As numbers go, consider this: There are 365 moored, named sites. “A dive for every day of the year,” says Rosa Harris, the islands’ tourism director, who notes that the government’s Dive 365 initiative launched in 2008 relied on the local dive community to research and identify the best prospects. “The islands have been attracting divers from all over the world since the ’50s, and it’s become so integral to the Cayman Islands experience that we wanted to expand opportunities to lesser-known spectacular sites.”

Mission accomplished. And on the heels of that feat comes another pair of digits worth serious bragging rights: 6-0 — as in 60 years of recreational diving in the Cayman Islands. It’s a score card that few if any dive destinations can match. Think about it. What other country has an International Scuba Diving Hall of Fame, which the island nation inaugurated in 2000 and includes pioneering names reading like a who’s who in the diving world?

The well-oiled machine that we take for granted today is the product of nearly 22,000 consecutive days of an industry that began with a finicky learn-as-you-go infrastructure. Ask around, as I did between my dives, and there are stories of pioneers and personalities, risks and rewards, dreams and discoveries.

The sun never seems to set with Sunset Divers, the longest-running PADI dive operation in the Cayman Islands. The house reef — yup, Sunset Reef — played a big role in the early days here by anchoring a resort where an on-site, full-service dive operation was an anomaly — and a natural. Nowadays, you snag a partner, grab a tank, step off the hardpan coral terrace shore, and are welcomed to a litany of spur-and-groove channels extending seaward like branches on a tree. Count us in. We take the plunge, and in a few kicks we’re snapping selfies like so many others at the ever-popular 9-foot-tall bronze mermaid stationed at 50 feet, then fin deeper to the World War II vintage LCM David Nicholson. My newbie dive partner is wide-eyed at the abundance of colorful corals, sea whips, friendly grouper and nippy sergeant majors defending their turf. Crazy marine life, a statue, a wreck — and it’s “just” a shore dive.

Over several days I pay visits to a notable hit list that includes Trinity Caves, Eagle Ray Rock, Devil’s Grotto and Palm Ledge Grotto, each with their own dive demeanor. But it’s the boat dive at nearby Big Tunnel that gets my pulse pumping the most. This is among the crème de la crème of Grand, an elevator shaft drop-off festooned with an enormous coral archway that bottoms out at 120 feet. Thread the arch and you hover above a sheer wall that can inspire vertigo. With my posse of knowledgeable dive pros, we’re a tight squadron of neoprene-clad aliens finning through winding channels and canyons pockmarked by alcoves brimming with a never-ending tapestry of sea life. Green morays, French angels, toothy barracuda, itinerant green and hawksbill turtles — after 30 minutes, I feel like I’m turning the pages of a spellbinding novel, with a never-ending roll call of characters that each would qualify as a high point of any dive fantasy. But that’s the Cayman Islands, I’m finding.

Here on 76-square-mile Grand Cayman, you’re never far from dive culture that’s seeped into everyday life, from the ubiquitous Seven Fathoms Rum aged in wooden casks submerged at 42 feet (courtesy of cooperative Divetech divers) to fillets of invasive lionfish speared by local divemasters and served at restaurants like the Brasserie in Georgetown.

Thing is, if you ask around and buy a round (or two), the loose dive talk eventually turns to Bob Soto, the undisputed granddaddy of Cayman diving, who passed away in 2015 at 88. Born in Cuba, he established the Caribbean’s first legitimate dive shop in 1957 after becoming a U.S. Navy frogman. Equipment was in its infancy, so Soto improvised by crafting 10 dive tanks from converted fire extinguishers, making backpacks out of plywood, and melting down batteries to harvest lead for weights. There were no certifying agencies or standards then, and Soto adopted dive tables he’d learned in the Navy, and deemed his students “Soto Certified.” With a wooden pontoon boat used to pick up dive groups along Seven Mile Beach, Soto’s business grew throughout the ’70s, and he took as many as 150 divers a day to unnamed sites along the North Wall and locations near the capital of Georgetown. The price? A mere $7 per person. His legacy includes many famous dive sites, which he and his divemasters, including Lach MacTavish and Peter Milburn, explored and named.

Recalls Milburn: “It was unbelievably beautiful and breathtaking. It was like being in a forest with so many soft corals and sea fans — there was so much black coral in the crevasses. We were pioneers, and Soto was the first.” Fittingly, Soto was inducted as the “Father of Diving” in the International Scuba Diving Hall of Fame in its inaugural year.

Scoot forward another decade, and recreational diving was entering a new phase. In 1980, a ragtag group of dive operators founded the Cayman Islands Watersports Association, providing a deliberate thrust to promote the islands’ dive potential. Among the new arrivals on Grand Cayman was Wayne Hasson, who became the dive operations director for the former Casa Bertmar (now South Cove Resort) just south of Georgetown. Looking for a hook to help entice more involvement, Hasson enlisted some marine members of the reef community right out the hotel’s backdoor. “I started the Green Petting Zoo,” Hasson recalls. “It started with a very tame giant green moray eel we’d named Waldo, who lived right at the reef.” Dive guests were enamored, so Hasson named other resident reef life, including Blackie the grouper, Snaggletooth the barracuda, and so on. “We named everything — they became used to humans, and it was a hit.”

But look through the gauzy annals of those early years and that same critter concept had earlier beginnings, largely traced to Capt. Marvin’s Watersports as far back as 1951. Using a borrowed sailboat from a dock in West Bay, Marvin Ebanks began running tours for visitors to see the mass gatherings of stingrays that would feed on debris tossed by incoming fishing boats along the shallow sandbars of North Sound. The activity played out over the years but wasn’t much more than a sleepy novelty until Hasson and others leapt at the opportunity to promote it as a signature activity.

As the ranks of divers and snorkelers grew, Hasson went on to repurpose an oil-platform transport ship and christened it the Cayman Aggressor liveaboard in 1984 — a move that spawned the global Aggressor Fleet of liveaboards today. His early forays to the stingray spectacle tipped the scales.

“We began going to North Sound with the Cayman Aggressor in 1985, as did other operators, and it really took off. All of a sudden, Stingray City was formally born,” Hasson recounts.

Thirty-five minutes and 82 air miles east ushers me to Little Cayman Island, a watery world away from the big resorts and throngs of cruise-ship day-trippers on Grand Cayman. Here too numbers are thrown about. Last in line in island size at 11 square miles, this little sister island claims 60 moored sites compared with Grand’s 240. But here’s the kicker: Little packs a big wallop with around 20 undeveloped, undisturbed and uninterrupted miles of flourishing bathtub reefs, including the dive utopia of Bloody Bay Marine Park and its namesake wall. Here you’ll find the “Oh my gosh” stuff, like mushroom scorpionfish, reliable showings of Caribbean reef sharks, flocks of eagle rays in midflight, larger stands of black coral, gorgonians, turtles approaching the size of VW Beetles, 4-foot pufferfish and, yes, a wall plunging thousands of feet. Dive traffic factors little more than a shrug.

“When Cayman Aggressor started going to Little Cayman in 1984, it was like a new frontier,” recalls Hasson of his earliest days scouting the island. Southern Cross Club Divers had staked a claim as the first dive operator there in 1958, though conditions were rudimentary and dive sites were largely unexplored. Even three decades later, Hasson remembers Little Cayman’s infancy. “It was total darkness, just the lighthouse to guide us in,” he says of gingerly motoring in to the outer reefs. “We relied on radar, and it was a very solemn experience coming into Bloody Bay — we’d wait for full moonlight nights and depth finders to help find where would could drop anchor off the reef onto the sand.”

It soon became apparent that permanent moorings needed to be established, so Hasson and his crew began the task of ID’ing and naming Little Cayman’s dive sites — a project he performed on Grand Cayman and Cayman Brac as well. “Adrian Briggs (owner of Sunset House and then-president of the Watersports Association) and I headed the Mooring Committee, and we came in, removed the old 55-gallon drums used as mooring anchors, drilled 112 permanent moorings, and gave these sites names,” Hasson says. “It was a major feat.”

At the Little Cayman Beach Resort, I’m the beneficiary of those early efforts as I spend several days exploring Bloody Bay and Preston Bay marine parks with the resort’s own Reef Divers crew. The dramatic, world-famous Bloody Bay Wall lacing the island’s north shore is nothing short of a mind-blower, dropping from a sandy 50- to 60-foot shelf sprouting bommies to a chasm of 6,000 feet. The dynamic of nutrient upwelling from the depths supercharges the entire marine ecosystem and helps steer in the bigger pelagics that feast on the resulting buffet.

“You won’t be disappointed: turtles, sharks, rays, schools of jacks — you name it, it’s all here,” says Michael Weinbaum, one of Reef Divers’ divemasters. We drop into Great Wall East and West, and enter a fantasy world that truly sets Bloody Bay apart. Soft corals and sponges of all types grow from every square foot of reef structure, while a mesmerizing display of small reef fish sway in the gentle currents. Something about having marine-park status is obvious here: Fish are friendly, to the point that portly grouper, parrotfish and triggerfish have no qualms about making eye-to-mask contact. As we cruise along the wall in a right shoulder dive, we peer left and enjoy the 100-plus-foot viz that enables us to see obscure shadows in the depths. We hold our positions, and gradually one of the denizens moves up the water column: a reef shark posting a good 6-foot length that hypnotically undulates past us like a remnant from the Pleistocene epoch.

Over the course of a dozen more dives, I enjoy a pleasant blur of extraordinary diving at sites like Ringer’s Wall, Grundy’s Gardens, Sarah’s Sets, Donna’s Delight, Gay’s Reef and more. Choosing a favorite is like choosing a favorite son or daughter; each has its own character worthy of a thousand words. Not to mention Little Cayman’s sister island, Cayman Brac, where you can descend upon a 330-foot Russian warship (Capt. Keith Tibbetts) or a site with a dramatic drop-off and big animals cruising by (Wilderness Wall) — just for starters.

Back on Little Cayman, at Cumber’s Cave, we drop 20 feet to the sandy seabed and fin around rotund bommies before spilling over the shelf to about 80 feet. Jawfish, a couple of turtles, and stingrays with attendant bar jacks hovering above keep our group in the happy zone.

Then we’re cued to the site’s raison d’être, a glorious swim-through unique in my dive experience. We enter the cavernous structure at 60 feet, carefully minding our buoyancy, then begin a single-file procession down to an azure portal that I swear looks like an IMAX screen in front of me. Our exit at 100 feet finds us on the perpendicular shoulders of Bloody Bay’s wall. It’s a sight to remember, a dive experience etched in all our minds. And in the scheme of Cayman diving, it’s just one of 365 sites that have made this diving destination one of the world’s best for 60 years and counting.

Special thanks to Cayman Islands Tourism, Cobalt Coast Grand Cayman Resort, Sunset House, Little Cayman Beach Resort, Cayman Brac Beach Resort

Cayman Islands, Through the Years

• 1951 Using a borrowed sailboat, Capt. Marvin Ebanks begins taking snorkelers to Stingray City.

• 1957 Bob Soto opens Grand Cayman’s first rec-diving operation.

• 1958 The first dive resort in Little Cayman, Southern Cross Club, opens.

• 1966 Tourist Board is formed.

• 1970 Population of the Cayman Islands is 10,249, with only 403 visitors.

• 1971 Don Foster’s dive shop is established at the Royal Palms Hotel.

• 1972 Sunset Divers opens; Cathy Church begins photo instruction.

• 1984 The first Cayman Aggressor starts running trips

• 1985 Marine parks are established in the waters off Grand Cayman in March, and in Cayman Brac and Little Cayman in May.

• 1994 Divetech opens.

• 1996 The Tibbetts is purpose-sunk

• 2011 The Kittiwake is purpose-sunk.

Cayman Islands History, Through Their Eyes

“Jim Church and I were among the first to write about the Cayman Islands regularly for Skin Diver magazine in the early ’70s. We had no depth gauges or computers or BCs. Our ‘life vests’ were made from airline-pilot life jackets that were inflated with CO2 cartridges. Adrian Briggs added diving to the Sunset House, which was his mom’s hotel, and there was diving right there at the shore. Early pioneer Bob Soto had a flat-top pontoon boat with a canopy, and we’d dive all along the wall. It’s come so far since then. Now we have entire diving families, grandparents and 10-year-olds. It’s so professional in the Caymans now with the best equipment, training and information about all aspects of diving.”

“I came to Grand Cayman in ’72, and my 33 years there were magic. I was 22 working for Bob Soto, and there were no divemaster ratings then, no BCs or octos. One time, the Skin Diver magazine crew was coming down to photograph the North Wall. We rounded Northwest Point, the boat ran out of fuel, the engine died, and we were drifting toward Cozumel. Since we had time to kill waiting for someone to bring fuel, we dropped anchor and went for a dive. The anchor dropped through a hole on top of the coral-reef drop-off. We dived through the hole and popped out on the drop-off, and the Big Tunnel dive site was discovered.”

“There weren’t many options in the early ’80s. I remember wearing pink wetsuits because that’s all they had for women. Dive boats were pontoons with tiny outboards. Nowadays the boats are luxurious. Diving’s gotten sophisticated at every level. We have technical divers supported with rebreathers and trimix, and we’re exploring the deeper walls. And families and kids have easy learning environments; they can dive over beautiful reefs at 10 feet and be one on one with an instructor.”

“We had to convince the government that diving was sustainable and a big thing, and in 1994, Jean-Michel Cousteau said I should certify the country’s premier, Thomas Jefferson. I told the premier I wanted to teach him to dive and that diving could be popular for island tourism. He said Caymanians don’t dive, period. But I convinced him to go out, got him certified, and he loved it. He ended up becoming a huge proponent, dived all over the Caribbean and was proud that diving set the Caymans apart.”