Stingray City is a sandbar in the middle of the North Sound of Grand Cayman where the water is waist deep and warm and dozens of southern stingrays swim up to the boats because fishermen have been cleaning fish there for decades. You climb off the boat, stand on the sand, and rays the size of a coffee table glide around your legs and over your feet. It is the thing every family in Cayman does and it is worth doing right.
Go early. The cruise ships send hundreds of people by midday and the sandbar gets crowded. An eight o’clock departure on a small boat, twenty people or fewer, and the family has the rays to themselves for an hour.
The guide holds a ray and shows the kids how to touch the wing, soft as velvet, and how to feed a piece of squid flat on the palm so the ray hoovers it up. They have no interest in stinging anyone who is standing still. Kids over three stand in the water with a parent. The nervous ones watch from the boat ladder and change their minds in ten minutes.
The rest of the boat day
Most trips add a snorkel stop at the coral gardens or the barrier reef, and a stop at Starfish Point, a beach with orange starfish in the shallows. Look, do not lift them out of the water. Three or four hours total.
Rash guards, reef safe sunscreen, water shoes, and a waterproof camera, because the photo of a six year old with a ray on the surface in front of her is the one that goes on the wall.
Then Seven Mile Beach for the afternoon. Cayman is a small island and nothing is far, and the boat drops you close to where you started.
Planning Cayman Islands with kids? Start with the full Cayman Islands family travel guide, or send me the ages and the dates and I will come back with what is really available.
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