Tankah Bay and Cenote Manatee

Tankah Bay, What a cool place, Casa Cenote is a laid back restaurant at the beach (try the fish tacos). Across the dirt road is Cenote Manatee (scroll down on the page behind the link, fee was 20 pesos, a river vanishing underground with quite a current. On the other side of Casa Cenote it emerges a few steps from the beach from a gaping hole. When we were there, a massive school of fish (sardines? I'll have to wait and see if my photos are good enough for identification) kept right in front of the river outlet. Diving into the school gives you an eery sense of loss of orientation. Mac, Colin and James got a little scared at one point. Also, the current from the river is quite strong. But if you drift and paddle north along the beach you will soon come to the edge of the dropoff. I dove to the sandy bottom and followed the swarm when I suddenly saw several good sized tuna dash off. I tried and tried but was unable to see them again. James and I also observed a houndfish (Tylosurus crocodilus) skip on the surface with its catch, almost like a flying fish. I was able to get a picture later while swimming in Cenote Manatee. And I just have to get this fish in somehow, in the shallows we saw quite a few of the omnipresent slippery dicks (Halichoeres bivittatus).


View Tan Kah Bay and Casa Cenote in a larger map

On the way out we saw a turkey vulture, the first one, it seems that black vultures are more common.