Story & photos by Laurie Carter

The onshore breeze blew my hair back from my face and banished the island heat as we skimmed across the lagoon toward Grand Cayman’s North Sound reef. Shading my eyes from the early afternoon glare, I focused on the ragged line, drawn as if by a pre-schooler with an oversized crayon, where deep marine blue met luminous turquoise in a riffle of tiny white cat’s paws breaking over unseen coral. My heart kept time with the dive-boat’s engines. It was more than a decade since I’d first heard about Stingray City and I was finally going to experience the thrill for myself.

Lots of people would argue (members of my own family included) that voluntarily swimming with dangerous denizens of the deep is not a vacation choice for the mentally balanced. So call me crazy – but I couldn’t wait. I was eager to see for myself those National Geographic images of elegant creatures winging through the sea like eagles gliding on thermals.

Sure, stingrays are called stingrays for a reason. The barbs on their tails are venomous and can deliver a painful (even fatal) sting. Yet thousands of people enjoy these close encounters every year without incident. The key is knowing how to behave around them.

While Captain Marvin (a wiry, grey-headed, sun-weathered veteran of wartime convoy duty out of Halifax) piloted the boat, Karl, our Caymanian snorkel master joined us on the fly bridge for a briefing. The stingrays in this area are thoroughly accustomed to human contact, he said. Originally, they gathered to take advantage of the free lunch provided by fishermen who stopped inside the reef to clean their catch before heading to port.

Local divers took advantage of the situation to interact with the stingrays and eventually a mutually beneficial arrangement developed. Caymanians are so protective of the rays that when hurricane Ivan devastated the island last fall, shutting down tourism for several weeks, the dive boats continued to run out to the reef every day so that the rays wouldn’t go hungry.

Stingray City is the catchall name known by tourists but there are actually two popular locations that deliver quite different adventures. Stingray City itself is a 12-foot deep area favoured by divers with scuba gear. Our destination, the sandbar, is better for snorkellers. Karl said we’d be able to stand on the bottom in about five feet of water and warned that we’d only have to be careful about our feet.

Rays feed naturally by creating depressions in the bottom to expose small fish and invertebrates and are often completely covered in sand. They’re quite testy about being stepped on. Karl assured us that while swimming, we would find them perfectly harmless.

Our three-hour itinerary included two stops before the sandbar. In an area called the coral garden Karl stood on the bow and slowly lowered the anchor, taking care to avoid snagging any of the delicate growth. Safe patches of white sand were easy to identify through the clear water.

I slipped on my flippers, spit in my mask and jumped in. How I love the Caribbean! A girl raised on the shores of frigid Lake Ontario, I never get past the surprise and the deep pleasure of water so warm it feels like a snug blanket. I got an even bigger surprise when, lowering my face into the water, the window of my mask framed a Southern Stingray gliding directly below.

I literally squealed with delight – no easy feat with a mouth full of rubber. I wanted to shout for everyone else to see. We came on this trip thinking how cool it would be to get close to a ray even in the artificial environment of a hand-feeding station. But here I was swimming with one in the open sea. Talk about getting your money’s worth.

And that was just the beginning. At our second anchorage, I followed close behind Karl as he waved a handful of squid into a small opening in the reef face. Swirling bubbles and retreating flippers nearly blocked my view as a green moray ribboned out of the dark crevice and I cravenly ducked behind a slower swimmer when the eel suddenly turned in my direction. A moment later I felt like an idiot when the poor creature took refuge under a coral ledge.

My pulse was slowing to normal although I knew there was more to come. Karl had promised to really spike our thrill quotient. A moray wasn’t enough; he had to produce the ultimate heart-stopper. Karl had to lure out – a shark!

Okay – so it was only a three-foot baby nurse shark, but I’m here to tell you that that unmistakable silhouette instantly triggers a primal response – the certain knowledge of our slot on the food chain. I couldn’t get enough. I’d gladly have floated there all day watching the lithe brown body gracefully curving through the water, if only the shark hadn’t been so eager to get back to the safety of the reef and I so eager for the ultimate thrill of the day.

At the sandbar, when Karl got into the water to handset the anchor (rather than possibly dropping it on a ray), he was instantly surrounded. The rays simply materialized, a dozen or more, gliding up as if to greet a good friend. The rest of us joined the party, carefully shuffling our feet in the sand to avoid stepping on one of our hosts.

Three teen-aged girls from Cleveland screamed – clutching on to each other as the rays glided around their legs. However, they soon realized there was nothing to fear and even agreed to take their turn when Karl offered to show us how to hold a ray in our arms.

I was transfixed – alternately standing still and savouring the satin touch of the huge wings on my legs and putting my mask in the water to watch the impromptu ballet below. When I spread my arms under the metre-wide span of those wings and looked directly into the face of a single ray, I found myself babbling to her as I would to our pet cat. I was the last one out of the water.

Swimming with the stingrays is no gimmick. It’s the kind of experience that opens your mind and stays with you for a lifetime. When you visit the Cayman Islands on a cruise or longer stay, don’t miss this incredible opportunity. You’ll find details at www.captainmarvins.com or www.caymanislands.ky.