Diving Stingray City – World’s Best 12 Foot Dive
I had mentioned about scuba diving with stingrays in my article about scuba diving in Cayman Islands. I’ll get into more detail about this dive here as well as show you the fuller video at Stingray City, which is known in the dive community as the world’s best 12 foot dive.
Stingrays average weight is 600 to 700 pounds with a wingspan reaching up to 6 to 7 feet wide. Although they normally do not attack humans, they can be extremely dangerous if stepped on or provoked as they will slash their venomous sharp tails which was how Steve Irwin lost his life. This is why usually on most scuba diving trips, divers are advised not to get too close and just watch any stingrays they see on dives from a safe distance.
About 200 years ago, pirates roaming around the Cayman Islands noticed a lot of stingrays particularly around the north end of Grand Cayman Island and they began to feed them. This activity continued with other people and over time, generations of local stingrays became use to interacting with humans since they learned that people often bring them food.
So a specific site now known as Stingray City off the north end of Grand Cayman Island is now home to huge numbers of stingrays. Both scuba divers and snorkelers come to Stingray City to see and interact safely with stingrays. To my knowledge, this is the only place in the world where humans can interact safely with stingrays.
How To Dive Stingray City
Many of the dive operators on Grand Cayman Island will run special dive trips to Stingray City. It is known as the world’s best 12 foot dive because Stingray City is very shallow at an average depth of only 12 to 15 feet so it is a very easy dive suitable for newly certified divers too. Usually divers will be given a few more pounds of weight to keep them at the bottom since this is such as shallow site.
The divemasters brief the divers on the boat about how to interact with the stingrays and one very important point which should be obvious, is not to grab them by their sharp tails! A pail of squid bits is lowered into the water and we can access it anytime we want while we are in the water. We interact with the stingrays by feeding them these squid bits.
The way we would feed them is hold out a bit of squid flat on our hand. When a stingray comes by, they will hover over our hand and take the squid. Their mouths are actually underneath their bodies which is why they need to hover directly over our hands. To add some more activity to our interactions with them, we were advised that instead of giving them the food right away, we could keep the squid in our closed hands and move it around for the stingrays to follow a bit before actually giving them their treat.
In the video below, I think I did a bit too much of this teasing with the food and one big stingray smashed my in the face accidentally and another pushed me over. During another interaction again when I was a bit careless with my food teasing, another stingray was hoping to grab the squid but ended up chomping down on my elbow instead which left a nice bruise I proudly showed my non-diving friends and co-workers when I got back home. They thought that I was crazy to interact with stingrays but overall, this is a pretty safe dive.
The part in the above video where a stingray pushed me over had been used by dishonest YouTubers who used it without my permission in videos they created and claimed that it was actual footage of Steve Irwin getting killed. When I found out about these cases, I applied for copyright claims at YouTube and these outrageous videos were removed.
Overall, Stingray City is a great dive and I would recommend it for all scuba divers to do at least once in their dive careers. This might be the only location to safely interact with lots of stingrays in the world.
If you were to dive the Cayman Islands via liveaboard, I’m pretty sure that they will include Stingray City as one of the dives when they are at Grand Cayman Island.
