Standing Among Wild Stingrays

Wild stingrays come to you in water so shallow you can stand in it. No mask, no snorkel, no diving. You wade in from a beach or a sandbar, and southern stingrays glide around your legs and sometimes bump into you. The encounter runs year round. The classic spot is Stingray City Sandbar in the Cayman Islands, in the Caribbean, a waist deep sandbar where about a hundred rays gather. The shallowest is Gibbs Cay in the Turks and Caicos Islands, also in the Caribbean, an uninhabited white sand island where the water is about two feet deep. In Belize, in Central America, the Shark Ray Alley off Caye Caulker adds nurse sharks and stingrays to the same shallow water.