Imagine going for a dive this summer and finding an animal in the water that is the size of a car! What would you do?
Well on Sunday, a group of divers decided a selfie and a video on the GoPro camera would be the way to go when they found a giant stingray in the Gulf of Mexico.
“That was the biggest ray I’ve ever seen,” diver Howard Cohn explained. “It was the size of a car. It was a monster!”
Cohn, who was certified to dive back in 1978, said the giant stingray was not the only massive creature he and his dive team have seen in the waters off Tarpon Springs, Florida.
“We go diving almost every weekend," he said. "I have tons of videos of creatures -- bull sharks, nurse sharks, blacktips, whitetips.”
Cohn said he and his dive team left out of Tarpon Springs around 7 a.m. Sunday morning for a dive site called the Airplane Barge. It's a saltwater dive with a maximum depth of about 41-50 feet.
He said while they were floating outside of the site, something on their right side caught their eyes.
“Shawn grabbed my attention and pulled me over to there,” Cohn recalled. “I motioned for him to swim by it to show how big it was. It was literally right there on the ship right next to the barge.”
In the video taken by Cohn, you can see the diver, Shawn, swim next to the animal, and he looks to be about the same size as the stingray. The stingray lays there for a while, allowing the onlooking divers to take in its sheer magnitude and beauty before it finally decides to swim away.
Cohn says they also saw a Goliath Grouper during the dive, as well as some huge hermit crabs and starfish.
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