Sting Ray City is one of Grand Cayman Island's most popular attractions. Every day the area is crowded with anchored boats, and the water is full of people watching and feeding the rays. These tourists come to both snorkel, and go scuba diving.

You’ll find this congregation of stingrays at the northwest corner of Grand Cayman Island’s North Sound. It’s just inside the barrier reef that separates the sound from the ocean, and keeps the waters in the sound calm.

Sand bars provide areas that are no deeper than three to five feet in places. This shallow water makes for a perfect snorkeling destination. The depth drops off gradually as you approach a natural passage through the reef, providing a diving depth of around twenty feet at the outer edges of the sting ray populated area.

Dive operators recognized that the stingrays would appeal to the visiting tourists.

It started when the fishing boats returned from their trips out to sea. Fishers stopped inside the reef to clean the day’s haul, throwing the fish guts overboard. The rays catching scent of the fishermen’s discards entered the sound for a meal.

Dive operators started running boats out to the area with people who wanted to snorkel among the rays. To keep the ray population large the boat crews carry chopped up squid. They hand the squid out to the snorkelers, who then feed it to the stingrays.

Now when the rays hear the motor of an approaching boat they know it’s mealtime.

During my visits to the Caymans I snorkeled Sting Ray City many times.

You get a mixture of feelings as the rays suddenly surround you. They’re looking for food, and they take it for granted that the only reason you’re there is to feed them.

The first thing I felt the first few moments on my first visit was intimidation, and a slight fear. Those rays bump into you, and graze you as they swarm to get at the squid you hold in your hand.

You have to be careful they don’t knock your mask off.

But my feeling quickly turned to amazement and intrigue as I watched these graceful creatures gliding through the water.

Sting Ray City makes for a nice decompression stop after a deep scuba diving activity.

My first scuba visit awarded me with some great underwater photos to let me revisit the day by tickling my memories. A few of those shots are of a barracuda that happened to get curious about what us strange critters in the water were.

Even better is the video I took during that dive. One part in particular is of a large green moray eel that lives in a clump of coral near the “city’s” border.

As I filmed a small reef shrimp climbed up onto the rock just in front of the moray, stopped, and just sat there. I remember wondering at the time why the moray didn’t snatch that shrimp up, and eat it.

Guess the eel wasn’t hungry.

And I got all this during a dive with a maximum depth of fifteen feet. For a diver with practiced, and mastered, breathing techniques a dive like that can last ninety minutes to a couple of hours, or longer.

The waters around Grand Cayman Island offer many superb experiences for the scuba diving enthusiast. And one of the most rewarding is the dive location called Sting Ray City.