Grand Cayman 3D Models

USS Kittiwake was a 251-foot (76.5-meter) United States Navy submarine rescue and support vessel. She was commissioned in 1946 and began her career as a submarine hunter at a time when German U-boats were still ravaging Allied convoys in the Atlantic. She was later refitted for submarine rescue and support. The ship was transferred to the government of the Cayman Islands in November 2008 and sunk as an artificial reef. The current 3D model is only partially complete. It was created using data from just two dives conducted with Scuba Diving Magazine in October 2023. Additional data is required to complete the underside (shaded) areas of the wreck, which will be collected in the fall 2024.

Doc Poulson (also spelled Polson in some references) was a Japanese-made cable-laying tug sunk as an artificial reef in 1981. She was the first artificial reef sunk in Grand Cayman and was named after Dr. James “Jimmie” Poulson, the island’s first diving doctor. He was also responsible for setting up the island’s first hyperbaric chamber for the treatment of decompression sickness.

The Mermaid Statue, located on the reef at Sunset House is officially known as Amphitrite. She was created by Canadian sculptor, Simon Morris, in November 2000 as both a new attraction for divers and a way to ease the strain of underwater traffic on the dive resort’s magnificent house reef. The statue is made of bronze and is dedicated to military divers.

The LCM David Nicholson was a U.S. Navy landing craft that was believed to have been used in the Korean War. She was purchased as an artificial reef and named after David Nicholson – a French Canadian divemaster who worked at Sunset House and passed away in 1989. LCM stands for Landing Craft Mechanized, or Landing Craft Mechanical, and describes the type of vessel that came to prominence during the Second World War for landing troops and military equipment during amphibious assaults, such as the D-Day landings. Similar designs are still in use today.