Cayman Diving Memories

Much of Cayman Diving Memories mimics what you'd find in a dozen other underwater music relaxation videos: repetitive footage of fish scurrying across the ocean floor to repetitive, somewhat vapid background music. Roughly divided into segments running 6-8 minutes in length, the video quality here is very competent--not top of the line, but not a camcorder in a plastic bag either--but several shots include those telltale fins at the bottom right and left corners which suggest that the lens was not completely open. Still, as pedestrian as the majority of the sequences are, one segment is a real eye-opener. A diver sits placidly in the center of a multicultural school of fish of various stripes while stingrays swoop over his head and return for another go. Shortly thereafter, another diver hand feeds both a moray eel and what looks like a mud shark, and while you might think these creatures would ring the dinner bell and bite the hand that fed them (probably to the shoulder), they do not. It's an incredible sequence in--as I said--an otherwise so-so underwater music relaxation video. Optional. (R. Pitman)