Manta Rays at the Beach

Posted by Christopher and Alexander

As you may know we have been staying at a little moorage for a while.  A quick swim from our boat is a beach called Volleyball Beach.  But this is no normal beach! This beach is frequented by manta rays hoping for some leftovers from the conch salad shack.

A Stingray gliding through the water.

The people working there will often feed the rays, or allow tourists to feed them. (No sign that says “DO NOT FEED RAYS”). They are so comfortable with humans that they will slide right over your feet and creep you out! Yes we speak from experience.

This one's crawling all over Christopher's feet!

They range from the size of a drying cloth to the size of a small circular rug. A big, small circular rug. We often wade into the water just to have the insanely creepy thrill of having one of these suckers slide over our feet. Also occasionally we can grab some leftover conch guts from the pile of conch shells and hold them in the water.

The handsome face of a Stingray

Then the manta rays will slither up and nibble/suck/whatever they do to eat, and take the conch out of our hands. We do avoid the tails as some people say they can sting but other than that the manta rays are buckets of flat, slimy, entertainment.


Manta ray fun facts:
 1. Guess what? We just researched it for the fun facts, and what we believed to be mantas actually turns out to be stingrays ! Sorry about the error!

2. Stingrays are related to sharks

3. Stingrays do have a poisonous barb on the end of their tails but it’s only used in self defense. Even so we’ll be careful