It's Stingray City, Sweetheart

Our second cruise excursion was to Grand Cayman Island where we were going to see stingrays.

Unlike Jamaica, here our giant cruise ship was too big for the dock so we had to take a tender, a small shuttle boat from our ship to the shore. Under instructions from our tour guide, we hopped on the first tender and got to shore quickly, which gave us plenty of time for early morning photos of our group with our ship in the background looking oddly surreal in the early light.

Dexter from Fantaseatours was our tour guide. After digging around for a while on the web, I decided on him because I found this article about Dexter's campaign against stingray injury from incautious boat captains. Plus he runs a 38 foot trimaran that he said he'd put under full sail if the wind was right. It sounded great, so I chartered the boat just for our group (23 of us were going on this trip, the maximum Dexter could carry). 

We met Dexter at the dock, a large outdoor square surrounded by shops and pavilions. In the square's shadeless center was a line of tour guides holding up signs for their various trips, most having to do with stingrays, and as the guides saw the cruise ship people start trickling in, they began pitching their services: "Stingray tours here!", "Sail the pirate ship!", "Snorkling!"

Dexter had to drive us to his dock, but since we had too many people for his van, we split into two vehicles. The drive to the dock was quick, less than fifteen minutes, although Dexter asked us a few times if we wanted him to swing by the grocery store for snacks (Dexter only had water and soft drinks on board), but we wanted to beat the other tour guides to the stingrays. Any distractions would have slowed us down.

The trip out to Stingray City, a shallow sandbar where stingrays have been congregating for years now (for the free food) took about 45 minutes. We all lounged on the front of Dexter's boat, the kids particularly liked hanging out on the nets near the front of the boat, dangling their feet into the water below. A rainstorm opened up on top of us and kept us nice and drenched for a third of the trip. When I asked Dexter how long the rain would last, he pointed at the clouds, the horizon, the water and then made a twisty motion with his hand. "Not long," he said. "It goes away soon. No worries."

He had a preternatural knowledge of the weather because, a few minutes later, the rain stopped as if on his delayed command.

Except for a few rubber motor boats that raced us and then beat us to the stingrays, we were the first boat out there, but it took Dexter a little while to anchor so some other boats showed up while we were parallel parking. Now I have to say I quite appreciated how careful and sensitive Dexter was to the stingray environment, especially watching how the other, much larger boats (they're called cattle boats - large boats filled with cruise ship passengers that appear like an invading Spanish Armada) simply plow into the middle of everything, drop anchor, and disgorge person after person after person into the water, as if shooing off paratroopers over Normandy.

We did get some good chances at petting and holding stingrays (these, by the by, are friendly, non-aggressive stingrays; they've been fed by local fishermen and now tourists for the past 35 years so there wasn't anything to worry about although we were given a lecture about being calm and not kicking up the sand on the ocean bottom - stingrays, apparently, do not appreciate these kinds of things). A large stingray, easily six feet wide, wrapped itself around me like a bath towel.

Some of the kids, of course, had to panic and kick sand and do the things we were instructed not to do, but I think the stingrays understood that the small humans always did this, and the stingrays, for the most part, paid them no attention, targeting instead Dexter, who had a baggie of tiny squid and was generously distributing them among the stingrays.

Once the other boats began invading, we sailed off to a spot for some snorkling, and once there we could easily see the new floating marina that had developed around the once lonely Stingray City. Snorkling was great although I had to compensate several times for a few ocean swells that filled my snorkling tube with salt water. Megan and I were partners, and I tried to keep close to her, one time panicking when I thought I lost her and whacking my leg against a stump of coral. I hated to do that, but I hated even more the stinging three inch cut on my leg, spilling blood that I knew would instantly attract all kinds of snaggletoothed sharks. That's when I grabbed Megan (who had been right next to me the entire time) and gurgled, "Groog goob karakb." Although sounding like Klingon this was salt water talk for, "Let's go back to the boat."

We made out way back under full sail, a nice and leisurely ride and then we opted for lunch back on the giant cruise ship. While we ate on one of the top decks, we saw the tourist pirate boat sail far below us, it's Jolly Roger flying threateningly. That ship was so very tiny compared to us, and I wondered what would happen if we could take our cruise ship back in time 250 years or so.

We would be the new pirates of the Caribbean, only dressed in tuxes and t-shirts. We'd put all the other pirates to shame.

And based on my observations around the Lido deck, we'd have more tattoos as well, although most would be of the butterfly-on-the-lower-back variety.

Comments

[megan nair]

you rock daddy!!!!!

[megan nair]

i love your blog!