I recently took a trip down to Florida to visit my girlfriends family. While there, we took a day trip to Fort Myers beach. We’d noticed some guy fishing in the water all day long but didn’t really pay attention to him. But as we walked across the pier, we heard this ruckus coming from the beach. I looked over and saw that the guy had caught a sting ray (not sure but I believe it’s a manta ray). We’d been swimming earlier and saw several schools of rays swimming in the water so I wanted to get a closer look at the ray.

It attracted quite a crowd and after unhooking the ray, the guy had a little trouble getting it back into the water. So some other guy, I’m guessing a local, came by, picked up the ray and tossed it back into the water. Now I’m not here to judge if catching a ray was cruel or not, it looked a little crazy but no beach officials came by to do anything so I guess this is something that happens often. It was kinda sad seeing the ray struggle to get back into the water and I don’t know how it works but I’m sure the school of rays it was swimming with didn’t stick around to see what was happening. But I thought the video was interesting so here you go.