Swimming with manatee

Stories abound around here about manatees in and around the reef near Blue Hole. Manatee sightings show up on maps and in most of the tourist information about this corner of the island. Still, many people who have lived here for 20 years or more have never seen a manatee. Some even think it's kind of a hoax, a public relations gimmick based on a single sighting years ago.

Well let me tell ya - manatees really do stop here once in a while. I know. I saw and swam with a mother and her calf yesterday in Blue Hole. They are huge, amazing, curious and gentle creatures.

We saw them during one of my SCUBA certification training dives. It was also a "discover SCUBA" dive for two women from Germany, vacationing here at Shacks. Not only had they never been SCUBA diving before, they've never even snorkeled! Their very first dive and they get to swim with two manatee. As our dive master said, he's made close to 300 dives on this reef and he had never seen a manatee before Saturday.

Elaine and our friend Marisol and I went out snorkeling this morning looking for them, but they were gone, moved on (literally) to greener pastures. Ah well. Even without the manatee it was a beautiful swim on the outside of the reef.

The mother, in the picture swimming above me, has a number of remoras, fish that attach themselves to other creatures. In the other picture, the calf is “walking” across the bottom on his flippers. There are more pictures of the manatee on our Flickr site. Check 'em out.