Twins Beau and Fleur Slowey Dillon learned to dive in August last year when they were both just 11 years old. Seven months later, the girls were certified as junior master divers, and are likely to be the youngest on island to have achieved that level.
According to Professional Association of Dive Instructors (PADI), only 2% of divers ever achieve master diver status. To become a master diver, a person must obtain their Open Water, Advanced Open Water and Rescue certifications, as well as five Specialty Diver certifications, and log at least 50 dives.
Fourteen months after doing their very first dive lesson, the girls now have more than 130 dives under their belts.
On their weekend boat dives, they have also built a reputation for seeing sharks, so much so, that they have earned the nickname ‘Shark Girls’.
“We see sharks quite a lot, mainly nurse sharks, on nearly every dive” Fleur said. “We’ve had a few people, new people on the boat, and they say ‘Yah! We get to dive with the Shark Girls, which is cool.'”
“On our third dive, we saw a hammerhead and it was very, very cool,” Beau said, as Fleur pointed out that the shark had been a juvenile.
“Then, on our 108th dive,” Fleur said, “we saw a bigger hammerhead”. Her sister added, “It was, like, 12 feet.”
Another dive highlight, they said, was a pod of dolphins they encountered as they made their way back to shore on the Cayman Diving boat after one of their weekly dives.
They said they became interested in diving because they both love the water and the ocean, and all the marine life it contains.
They both see diving in their futures, perhaps by pursuing careers in marine biology, they said, when the Compass spoke to them at their family home in Governors Harbour before Christmas.
They’d also love to see more kids their age get in the water and learn to dive, which they say is “easy”.
“We’re on a beautiful island with really pretty reefs, so it’d be really cool to try it out,” Beau said.
Fleur added that the coolest thing about diving, that she tells her friends and others who might want to give it a go, is “being able to breathe underwater”.
“I think more people should [dive],” Beau said. “It’s very easy and it’s fun, and you can do it with friends.”
Attending Cayman Prep, they’re members of their school’s conservation dive club, which organises monthly dives and beach clean-ups.
Whenever they see plastic underwater, they said, they pick it up and bring it back to shore for proper disposal, because they feel they have a responsibility, as divers, to keep the reefs as pristine as possible.
They’ve both dived the Kittiwake wreck off West Bay “many times”, and have also done night dives.
Their mother Vanessa said they both love the sea and want to spend as much time underwater as they can.
Once they are 16, they will automatically become master divers, and will just need to reapply to PADI for new certification cards, said their instructor Lee Baker, of Cayman Diving, who dives with them almost every weekend.
Baker said that, as far as he’s aware, the girls are the youngest master divers on island.
He said the twins were easy to teach, and that, in general, children are usually far less difficult to instruct than adults “because they just have no fear”.
“They were probably the easiest students I ever had,” Baker said. “They were very polite. They just did what they were told and didn’t think about it too much. When you’re teaching adults, they tend to overthink it.”
He said the girls were “very good divers” and use very little air while diving, coming up with far fuller tanks than he does at the end of their dives.
Baker lamented that it was another instructor, and not him, who was with them when they saw their first hammerhead – a sight many much more seasoned divers have yet to spot in Cayman. “I was very disappointed,” he said.
Baker said, because travelling off island was difficult for residents due to COVID restrictions, this meant the girls could log plenty of dives between their various courses, especially during school holidays when, pre-COVID times, they would probably have been on vacation overseas.
Getting to the junior master diver stage is now as “far as they can go, because of their age,” Baker said.
Like the girls, he also encourages young people to get in the water and experience diving.
“Just give it a try. Cayman is one of the best islands to learn to dive in,” he said, adding that underwater visibility is usually excellent, there are rarely strong currents or wave action to worry about, and “there’s nothing out there that is going to hurt you”.
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