On stingrays

I love stingrays. When my sister and I finished our Openwater I dive course, we drove down to Santa Barbara California to take a dive boat tour to the Channel Islands. We traveled to the dive spot that night while we slept on the boat. When we woke up we ate breakfast and jumped in the water. The first thing my sister and I saw were 2 beautiful large Bat Rays swimming past us as if they were flying. Awesomely beautiful rays, with big eyes. We were in heaven. We both looked at each other in pure joy. After our dive we said that we felt like we had been missing this all our lives. We went ahead and got OpenWater II certification.

Often when I am down by the beach near where I live, I see stingrays that have been caught by fishermen who are afraid of them and do not release them back into the water. They would only have to cut the line, but they prefer to let them die. many times they chop off their tails. My dog will roll in a dead stingray carcass if given a chance, he once draged me over a cliff to do so. I am always sad to see the stingrays wasted, because they are actually very delicious when cooked. Their wings make fine chowder. When the wing meat is sliced off, the cartilage is visible. The cartilage is beautiful and very high tech looking, like computer circuitry.

Every year around Father's Day, stingrays mate in the lagoon near my house, swimming close to the surface for a change and thier wings flip above the surface and many people watching think the rays are dangerous sharks. One time an older lady asked me what was going on and when I said the rays were mating, she said, "Well at least someone is getting some on Father's Day!"

Once when I caught a stingray in the ocean, it lay flipped upside down in the boat making choking sounds which reminded me of a human baby. I ate it, tis true, but I felt sorry for it.

I am sorry that Steve Irwin has been killed by a ray, because it has created bad press for an animal already maligned. I have never been one for handling sea creatures. I do not pet the moray eels. I don't let the dive guides put octopi on me or stroke sharks. I wouldn't like it if aliens landed and started grabbing me, so I afford sea creatures the same courtesy. Having lived in San Diego, where there were many rays in the shallows at the beach, I always do the stingray shuffle, dragging my feet along the bottom.