Day 3 started just like the other days, with sleeping in followed by a big ol' breakfast. It then continued just like the other days, with some reading and lounging around followed by an even bigger lunch. Really, you've gotta love the food on the cruise line. I think there's only about half an hour each day that there isn't food available somewhere.
After lunch Jen and I went on our first official "shore excursion". A shore excursion is where you pay some extra money to go do something on the island. In this case, we took a 20 minute boat ride out to another little island. This was just a small island with a nice little beach. We went there to swim with the stringrays.
We started out by getting our snorkel gear and getting in the water. The stingrays were in a large enclosed area along with some man-made reefs and lots of fish. We were a bit worried that the fences along the edge of the area would be distracting but we barely noticed them. It turned out to be a nice little area.
They let us tool around for a while checking out fish and attempting to touch the stingrays on our own. They said that the females were pregnant so we had to be careful. The females were also about three times the size of the males, so that made us a little nervous. It was fine though, they had their stingers removed and they don't have any teeth to begin with. I don't think they could hurt anyone even if they tried.
The coolest part of the swim came a little later though. They lined us all up in the water and had us get down on our knees. The water came up to about our bellybutton. As soon as we did this the stingrays started swarming around. They knew it was feeding time.
The trainer gave us each a few pieces of squid and let us feed the stingrays. You just held it out and then swam along and, "shhhuuuucck", sucked it right out of your hand. It was really neat. They were really soft and kept brushing up against us with their bodies. Jen and I were only a foot apart and the big females even managed to swim between us. It was a great experience.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment