Puerto Rico and Southern Caribbean Cruise Jan 2020 - Day 3 - St. Maarten

St. Maarten

As per usual, I woke up earlier than Roger and Emmaline. I donned my running costume and headed up to deck 4 for a run on deck. Given that I saw people running in both directions, I knew that the forward part of the deck was already closed down for mooring operations and it would be a u-shaped sort of run. I had hoped that an hour and half prior to “all ashore” would be early enough to be able to run full laps, but alas, no.

After my run, I went up to deck 9 to have a little snack and enjoy the quiet of the morning as we made our way into St. Maarten. Eventually Roger and Emmaline got up and we enjoyed a leisurely and slow morning doing a bunch of not much until it was time for our excursion: SeaTrek. We had booked a DCL sponsored excursion this time around, a rarity for us, but it looked like fun so we decided to give the helmet dive a try. 

After meeting in Azure at 11:15, we were led off the ship where we signed a bunch of waivers and were given a run down of the activity. From there, we made our way over to the water taxi (the cruise ship port is a little ways out of town) and it began to sprinkle. Then it began to rain in earnest. Then it began to pour. We waited it out for a bit under the overhang at the water taxi pier.



Eventually there was a break in the rain and we were underway. It was about a ten minute ride to a floating platform. We arrived there and had to wait for 10-15 minutes for the previous group to finish up, then we disembarked and were divided into two groups of about 10 people each. Our group would go second so we were free to use some snorkeling equipment and noodles to go in the water, or just lounge on the platform.

After about 30 minutes, it was our turn and Emmaline was ready to go and raced over to the ladder to be first down. I went down after, descending the 25 foot ladder to the bottom of the ocean with a 70 lb. helmet on my head attached to an air hose. They were feeding the fish so there were a lot of fish down there. We trekked along in the chilly water (really my only negative of the whole experience, which really they don’t have a lot of control over) seeing fish and other underwater stuff (other sea life as well as a sunken helicopter and a couple of different sea vessels of some sort).


This photobombing fish cracked us up when we imported the photos.


Ah, there she is!


They gave us this urchin (?) to hold. It's tentacles ticked and then suctioned itself to your hand after a moment.

After everyone was out of the water, we got back into the water taxi for the return trip to the cruise ship port, arriving back a little later than anticipated (due to the rain, but also, things just seemed to move overall sort of slowly). We were hungry since it was 2:30 and we hadn’t had lunch so we went right up to deck 9. Cabana’s was closed, but there were plenty of other lunch items to be had from the quick service on deck (on that Royal ship we were on in June we would have been screwed). 

After lunch, we were definitely feeling ready to be clean so we all took turns showering. Emmaline went first and then went off to Edge while Roger and I got cleaned up. After that, we looked through some of our photos from the day and I worked a little on my trip report.

At 5:15 it was time to sail away so Roger and I went up to deck 10 to watch Saint Maarten fade into the distance. We stayed up there for awhile and then had a snack before we returned to the room where I worked a little more on my trip report, went to the laundry room to iron my dress and then got things organized for the next day’s activities.

At 7:30 it was time for Villains Trivia in the D Lounge. I was pretty excited because I’m a big villains fan, but the questions were really hard with some really rare villains. Also they wanted the answers to be really specific (like, they wanted specifically Toy Story 3 vs. Toy Story or Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest vs. Pirates of the Caribbean) and we ended up with a score of 28 out of 40. Ah well. 

We booked it back to the room after our sorry performance to change for formal night. Once changed and ready we took a couple of photos in our dressy clothes and then went off to our dinner in Tiana’s Place. After dinner, Emmaline went to Edge, but just for a short while, coming back to the room around 10 PM, at which point we all went to bed.

Click here for Day 4.