The Bermuda Triangle

Well, we made it to Bermuda, although when we awoke this morning, it would not have surprised us to see The Flying Dutchman appear out of the very heavy and rainy mist! Actually we couldn’t even SEE Bermuda and thought perhaps the Triangle had finally succeeded in making the whole island disappear! And overnight nobody wanted to take a chance looking outside in case they spotted the eerie red glow of the Dutchman myth - we ran into some of the remnant weather from Hurricane Ida that caused quite a bit of rocking but fortunately not much rolling.


After Dr. Jay Wolff’s lecture yesterday about the myths and unsolved mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle, we were all glad to see the navigation buoys leading us into the Royal Naval Dockyard. The Dockyard is the standard cruise port for Bermuda since it is too difficult for most cruise ships to navigate all the way to the capital of Hamilton. The channels are simply too narrow and modern cruise ships have gotten too big! Fortunately, the weather cleared not long after we tied up at the wharf and we had a lovely day.

After waiting an extra 15 to 20 minutes for the ship to clear (we figured that since Bermuda is still part of the British Commonwealth, they used the Parliamentary System of clearance - two out of three Immigration Officers voting in favour of letting the passengers off) we finally got under way with our tour. One of the couples Larry knows from Cruise Critic live on Bermuda and had suggested that the Island Overview Tour was a good option so we took that - and so did many of the other guests on board.

It took over 5 hours, but we went from the Dockyards to St. George’s (the other end of the island) and through Hamilton. Oddly enough, you could say we covered the entire ‘Triangle of Bermuda’ - the Dockyards to St. George’s to the South Shore outside of Hamilton - during our tour. On the way we stopped a couple of times for photo opportunities, and at the same time we decided where we would like to stay should we come back for a short land-based holiday. The Fairmount Southampton Hotel has a golf course attached, and it looked like one of the nicest on the island (of course some of the other golf clubs also came with an annual membership fee of $70,000 Bermuda Dollars - enough of a deterrent even if you did live here!).

All in all, we managed to avoid most of the weather - we had a few sprinkles during our half-hour stay in St. George’s - but we had to get back to the ship for a 4:00 departure. This is one of the few ports where, by Admiralty Law, not just local law, it is required that ships arrive AND depart in daylight. It apparently has something to do with the coral reefs that ring the island around and have caused over 350 shipwrecks in Bermuda’s long 400 year history.

We seem to be having a certain amount of luck with the weather this segment. Just as we were leaving the harbour, the weather closed in again and we left in the same kind of fog as when we arrived. Even though we will only be skirting the Bermuda Triangle, keep your fingers crossed…..