Legend of the Sea Cow

On a day I was going from Negril to Ocho Rios we got stuck in some super heavy traffic on the highway.  We moved at a crawl for a good long while near Runaway Bay and I thought for sure it was an accident.  There are some pretty crazy accidents on Jamaican roads and I wondered what we’d see as we approached.  Eventually we were crawling right beside the sea wall and there were literally hundreds of people stopped and gathered on the wall looking out onto the water.  My first thought was “Oh God don’t tell me a car went over the wall!”

My driver decided to ask someone out the window what was going on and the guy just replied “sea cow”.  What?  So I asked my driver if that’s what he actually said and he confirmed “sea cow”.  I pretty much laughed and asked him to explain to me what is a sea cow LOL.  He simply said its a cow that lives in the sea.  I didn’t even contain my laughter, I thought that sounded ridiculous and the first thing that came to my mind was the Loch Ness monster haha!

He asked if I would like to stop and get out to look.  Of course I wanted to!  And….this is pretty much all I could see. A bunch of people and a big ocean with nothing in it.  Like look at the size of this crowd looking at basically nothing!

So I stood there for about 20 minutes looking out to see the big attraction and ONCE….only once I saw something about a billion miles away pop its head out the surface of the water.  It was so far away no one could ever know what it was but all these Jamaicans seemed all riled up about it!  It was so entertaining!  There was one point where a whole bunch of Jamaicans stopped watching the sea cow and just watched me, so I pointed out to the water and said “Look…a sea cow!”

We left the scene eventually and reached Ocho Rios.  It wasn’t til I returned home and wrote my trip report that someone told me a sea cow is actually a Manatee.  What a let-down!  I was hoping for something MUCH more mystical !!