MANATEES! (The final frontier.)

Finally, the last of the Wedding Saga series (except for occasional anecdotal and pictorial visits, okay). Upcoming entries will probably be not-so-longwinded. What follows is a poor account of the second tour we did while on honeymoon:

Friday, June 30.

Okay, if you’re gonna go to San Pedro, you have to see some ruins (which we did!), and you have to go snorkeling! Uh, unless you have some scuba training, which we didn’t. So: snorkeling! But before that, manatees!

Okay, this is one of those touristy things that we set up at Mata Rocks. This goes through “Seaduced” (company and boat) again. Leon is with us again. Ricky (that guy I called Ray, from the Lamanai tour? His name’s actually Ricky) wasn’t. Our tour guide was uh, uh . . . Okay, we’ll call him TG, ‘cuz I can’t think of his name. And by the way, snorkeling equipment is not included, so ya better rent that first. But that ain’t hard, ’cuz there’s plenty of dive shops in San Pedro.

So, we’re off on “Seaduced”! We speed along in our fast boat to where are likely to find manatees. I don’t sit quite as close to the front this time; it’s only been two days since that spanking I had. It’s a beautiful day! Sunny! Now, there will be a sunburn after this; every silver lining has its cloud. We end up going to a little park marked by posts in the water. There is a $5 BZ (that’s $5 Belizean, which is equal to $2.50 US) charge per person for going into the park, which you give to the park ranger. The park ranger is in a little shack on posts in the water:

This park is where you are almost guaranteed to see manatees, and, no surprise, you can’t run your boat motor there (potentially extremely harmful / deadly to manatees, doncha know). You have to use a pole to move along. Okay, here’s why manatees like this place: manatees eat the roots of turtle grass. The silt in this spot is fairly soft, so the turtle grass is easier to pull up. Hey, it’s a buffet, like a Golden Corral for manatees.

We sit quietly in the boat. We wait. Every once in a while, someone sees a manatee nose 40 or 50 feet away and says, “There!” And then everybody looks, just in time to see the ripple that remains when the manatee dives down again. We theorize that the manatees are screwing with us. And then one of us (me, actually) says, “There!” and even though this manatee dives down again, it’s close enough for us to pole closer, and then we can see the body shape, and this manatee is nice enough to come up for air often enough for some of us to get pictures.

Leon said a manatee looks like a smiling potato. Judge for yourself:
I think it looks like a smiling gray potato. Regardless, I HAVE SEEN A MANATEE!

But wait, there’s more. We head off to Goff Caye, which is a tiny island next to the reef. We wade into the water, put on our snorkle equipment, and start swimming. AMAZING! The water is so clear! Amazing coral, very colorful fish. We swim to where it suddenly gets much deeper. This is where the reef is. And here, we hit a jackpot: by pure luck, there’s another manatee! It’s a gorgeous animal (okay, a gorgeous gray smiling potato with a broad, flat tail). It’s maybe 20, 25 feet away from me, below and in front, roughly at a 45 degree angle. At first it’s looking in our direction, and then it turns and slowly, gracefully, swims away.

On the return swim, we see more fish, coral, neat stuff! I try to follow a small crab, but it buries itself in the sand -- very near a shiny faux-gold earring. So, no fan of litter, I pick up the earring. And as I'm getting ready to climb out of the water, I take one last look -- and find myself within 10 ft. of a stingray! Gorgeous creature!

We do a second quick snorkel after lunch -- more plantains and rice & beans and rum punch, all yummy. This time we see a couple of nurse sharks and a bunch of rays of some sort. You can sometimes touch the rays, which I do. They feel . . . soft and slick. Once again, amazing, beautiful creatures. This is a sort of "cheap and easy" snorkel -- they throw some bait over the side and the sharks and the rays come to us. The shy nurse sharks don't stick around long but the rays ain't so shy.

A marvelous time. Snorkelling is awesome! On the tour we also meet another newlywed couple from Seattle -- Mike and Gianne. If you look at the picture of the ranger station, you can see the top of Mike's seriously sunburned head. Gianne, I believe, is hoping to teach scuba diving in the future, once she's certified. So if you wanna learn and you're in her area . . . .