Stingray City

Still in Grand Cayman, but before the turtles, we went to a place called Stingray City. It is basically a sandbar in the middle of the ocean where somehow stingrays and humans figured out to meet up. We feed them, they don't hurt us, and we all leave happy. 

Facts about Stingrays: Females are much larger than males, the part that hurts you is this barb on their tail which you should watch out for, they have a really strong suck when eating and can give you the hickey of your life if you are not careful, if you kiss their nose you get 7 years good luck,  once the squid comes out everything is fair game- or so one stingray thought as he was foraging for food on my backside.

The experience was pretty amazing and scary though. One of the guides was this guy who reminded me of a Crocodile Dundee type of character.  He was amazingly tan, wore a handkerchief on his head, talked with a really thick accent that was hard to understand, and when we were in the water if no one was looking he would swim off and wrestle with stingrays.  He would just dive down and come up holding a huge stingray.

It was fun to look in the water and see these huge stingrays right next to you.  They would also come up behind you and brush up against you when you were not expecting it. They told us we could scream as loud as we wanted if we got scared, but we shouldn't jump or run away because we might step on them and then they would hurt us.  I took their directions very seriously....


Part of the experience was we got to hold and kiss a stingray. We gave our camera to this lady to take pictures, not quite sure what she did because it was all automatic.....

 

And here are the stingrays:

Here is a pic of the barb:

Here is a live Conch shell this guy found:

A random one I got of Brigham, swallowed a lot of saltwater in the process, oops!

And more stingrays:

And last, and certainly least, no idea how this picture got taken?