Liz and I went to visit the stingrays (our first trip together was back in 2008 when Liz came to visit us the first time) and this trip turned out to be a a lot more eventful than our trip 3 years earlier... but not in a good way.
It started off well with our first stop being some some snorkeling inside the reef. We got to see a Moray Eel being fed by one of the
Moby Dick Tours Staff... not recommended to try on your own as Moray Eels tend to have really bad eyesight and will just lunge in the direction of food with those sharp teeth. I managed to catch the feeding on video...
After our snorkel we hopped back on the boat for a 1 minute trip to the sandbar just inside the reef where the friendly stingrays were waiting. Liz and I were trying to get some good underwater shots of the stingrays so we were standing on the outskirts of the rest of the people feeding in the hopes that the rays would glide beautifully our way once they were done eating the squid provided.
Now before we had even climbed out the boat, I noticed and commented on how large the needle fish were around the sandbar, I had never seen them that size anywhere else on the island. They are generally always about when you're snorkeling anywhere on island, just hanging around close to the surface of the water on their own, but the ones I see are usually anything between 20 and 40 centimeters (8 to 16 inches), there was one at the sandbar which was about 80 centimeters long (31 inches)!!! I know that they are petrified of humans and stay away, so I thought nothing of it... I was wrong.
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| Not my Needle Fish, but just to show you what they look like |
Much to my shock (and to Mark's - the owner of Moby Dick Tours who was on the boat with us - who in 17 years of taking people out almost every day of the week, had NEVER seen this), I was waiting around for the rays with a piece of squid in my hand to lure them towards me for a photo opp, I had my hands out of the water, when all of a sudden out of the corner of my eye, I see the large needle fish lunge out of the water towards me hitting my body and snatching the squid from my fingers, managing to bite me in the process! I got the fright of my life!!
No serious harm done at all, just a majorly big fright and a bit of blood! I did moan a bit about the stinging and how deep the cuts were...
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| A few days after the event |
and then I remembered that I was with Liz... She once fell off her bicycle on The Argus road race (someone else's fault, he caused a bit of a pile up), she assessed her bleeding arm and hopped back on her bike to finish the other half of the race. I took her to the hospital afterwards for the doctor to brush the tar from the open wound all down her arm with a metal bristled brush. That's only one of her injury related stories. I also recently watched Soul Surfer.
Bigger scheme of things? It was like a few paper cuts (Serious paper cuts, I might add.) =)
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