search for Stingray_City,_Grand_Cayman
Stingray City is a series of shallow sand bars found in the North Sound of Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands. It is a popular tourist attraction where southern stingrays are found in abundance and visitors can feed, pet, and interact with the animals.
Stingray City is located in the shallow waters of the northwest corner of Grand Cayman's North Sound. It is just inside a natural channel that passes through the barrier reef and consists of a string of sand bars that crosses the North Sound from Morgan Harbor to Rum Point.
Stingray City and a second site near Rum Point Channel called Sandbar are known throughout the world and have been featured on prestigious television documentaries and seen as underwater advertising backdrops for everything from automobiles to batteries.
Kissing the stingrays is believed to bring "seven years of good luck".[citation needed]
Local legend has it that the stingrays began gathering in the area decades ago when fisherman would return from an excursion and navigate behind a reef into the sound and clean the fish in the calm water of the shallows and sand bar area. The fish guts were simply thrown overboard and the stingrays eventually congregated to feast on the discarded guts. Soon the stingrays began to associate the sound of a boat engine with a free meal. As this practice turned into a tradition, local divers realized that the stingrays could be fed by hand. In 1987, Skin Diver Magazine sent a reporter to do an article on this anomaly which fascinated the world.
There are three ways to experience the rays, and each involves a short boat ride to the sandbar area at the North Sound.
Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia © 2001-2006 Wikipedia
contributors (Disclaimer)
This article is licensed under the GNU
Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Monday September 24, 2007 at 05:23:47 PDT (GMT -0700)
View
this article at Wikipedia.org - Edit
this article at Wikipedia.org - Donate
to the Wikimedia Foundation