A RAY! A RAY!

We have seen some really cool things here in the Bahamas.  We’ve seen the Junior Junkanoo, Santa arriving in a horse drawn buggy, angelfish right off our dock, and I saw an octopus while snorkeling.  And let’s not forget seeing Sean Connery at the Christmas party.  This one topped all of those cool things.  Saturday morning Allen and Jackson had gone to the store because Jackson was going to have some, and this is his description, “fishing lessons”.  Miller and I were on the dock feeding the fish.  We put in mostly fruits, veggies, bread and the like.  We regularly see angelfish, some gray fish and a pretty black and yellow striped fish.  Every once in a while we will see some large fish that are about the size of my calf. Until Saturday.
While we were out there I saw a couple of rays swimming towards our dock.  I picked up Miller so he would have a better vantage point and about that time I realized it was three and then four spotted eagle rays.  They came up and sniffed at our strawberry stems and Pepperidge Farm white bread heel and deemed them unworthy of consumption and then kept right on going by.
Of course I didn’t have my camera.  So here is what an eagle ray looked like with my underwater disposable  camera last spring while we were snorkeling.

Not a great picture, but this one off of Google is much better

A few minutes later, as Miller and I were sitting on the dock with our feet dangling off the side, one of them came back and swam right under our feet.  Not long after that the other three came up our dock, but decided it was unsafe to swim in front of our dock because a jumping, screaming 34 pound two year old doesn’t convey safety to them, apparently.
Shortly after that Allen and Jackson came back from procuring bait and were able to see the single Eagle Ray come back by our dock to meet up with his friends.  As they got down to the end of the canal one of them jumped out of the water.  It looked something like this…

But different because we weren’t out in the ocean.
Now that was cool!  Miller won’t remember it for long, but I will.