Features
Zone A mostly consists of the Hol Chan Cut, a natural break in the reef. The cut is approximately 23 m (75 ft) wide and 9 m (30 ft) deep (Hol Chan is Mayan for "little channel"), and is rich in marine life. Around the cut the sea can be as shallow 1.5 m (5 ft). On the outside of the reef the channel slopes into the Caribbean, and on the inside of the reef tails off into the shallows. Zone B has Boca Ciega Blue Hole, a sinkhole, which opens into a larger underwater cavern. It is dangerous for inexperienced divers, so is not regularly visited. Zone D, Shark Ray Alley, is a shallow sandy-bottomed area inside the reef, unremarkable except that it is a gathering place for sharks and stingrays. It was an area traditionally used by fisherman to clean their nets before returning to port, and the abundance of food that entered the water as a result attracted the sharks and rays to feed. The presence of these fish was actively encouraged as a tourist attraction — being fed by local tour guides; the shallow clear waters make it an ideal spot for snorkellers to observe the creatures.
Read more about this topic: Hol Chan Marine Reserve
Famous quotes containing the word features:
“The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“However much we may differ in the choice of the measures which should guide the administration of the government, there can be but little doubt in the minds of those who are really friendly to the republican features of our system that one of its most important securities consists in the separation of the legislative and executive powers at the same time that each is acknowledged to be supreme, in the will of the people constitutionally expressed.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)
“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)