Travel Blog: Hey, Captain, Can You Find a Smoother Ocean???

As we mentioned earlier, this trip was always going to be light on excursions, a sort of “been there, seen that” trip as we have been to almost all of these ports at least once, or twice, or more, on previous cruises. So why, you ask, did we book it? Vista is a new ship, having only gone into service in August, and since we had not been on an Oceania cruise since 2017, Larry wanted to see what had changed with Oceania since then. Add in sunshine, warmer temperatures than at home in November, plus Monica’s birthday, and here we are!

The only “new” port stop on this trip was the first one at Great Stirrup’s Cay in the Bahamas, NCL/Oceania’s “private island”, which is only about 1 KM west of Royal Caribbean’s Coco Cay.

This is a day at the beach with excursions heavily weighted toward things like zip lining - RCI claims its is the longest in the Caribbean - jet skis and the like. For our day there were ten zip lining excursions and six jet ski excursions scheduled at different times through the day. Now, given that even with about a dozen children onboard, the average age of the guests is probably somewhere over 80 years, we were not entirely sure where all the participants were going to come from, but there they were on the schedule.

The zip-lining tower behind the lagoon and
hundreds of beach chairs!

In the end we never found out as, after bobbing around for an hour, the Cruise Director announced that it was too rough to run the tenders, so we were leaving for San Juan. Apparently the company that runs the tenders to the island told the Captain that the afternoon forecast was for heavier waves, so while they could get everyone ashore in the morning, getting them back onboard might be a problem.

After bobbing around for another hour while they retrieved the staff who had gone ashore on the first tender, we set sail for San Juan. The Captain had announced we would sail west and then make a left turn at ???????? (he has a bit of an accent, and we were out on the balcony) and sail south to the Bahama Channel. Turned out that ???????? was Nassau as we discovered 90 minutes later when the ship quickly slowed down, and much to our surprise we were looking at the Paradise Island hotel complex! After a couple of hours of bobbing around, while slowly steaming in circles, we once again sailed off into the setting sun. We found out later they had to do a medical evacuation.

An unscheduled view of Nassau's harbour. It was
quite windy and stayed that way.

After about 48 hours of very bumpy sailing in very choppy seas, which even had us feeling a bit queasy, we sailed into San Juan harbour under sunny skies. This is one of the more impressive ports in the Caribbean as the harbour entrance is guarded by the massive, and very impressive looking, Fortress El Moro, with its batteries of old cannons pointing out over the ramparts. Of course, we were not the only ship in town, with Carnival Celebration and the newish Sky Princess and their combined 8,000+ passengers already docked. All you really need to know about the Celebration is that it has two enormous waterslides and a functioning rollercoaster on its top deck!!

Given that this was our third visit to San Juan in the last twelve months, last March on Silver Moon, and last November on Regent Splendor, we did not having anything planned, but after two days of bumping up and down, we did want to get off and stretch our legs. That, and a visit to the Walgreens pharmacy across the street from our pier for a couple of small purchases. In March we had done a “foodie” walking tour through the Old Town and the plan was to retrace part of that to El Convento Hotel for lunch, but a very late breakfast, and a reservation in Ember at 7:00 PM for dinner, changed that plan. Instead we visited the cathedral, one of the oldest and most impressive in the Caribbean, and then just followed our noses through the Old Town and back to the ship, breaking the 10,000 step mark along the way!

Old San Juan. The red gate on the lower left used to
be the only entrance to the town. The yellow building
is the Hotel El Convento and the Catholic
Cathedral is also on top of the hill.

Christmas decorations are starting to go up...

...even inside the El Convento

The main altar of the Cathedral

We retraced some of our previous tour and found the Plaza de Palomas, or Plaza of the Pigeons, which is a small park with a childrens' play area. You are allowed to feed the pigeons in part of the park, so there are literally hundreds all around. These 'pigeonholes' may have been put there on purpose...

Someone had also put some handcrafted decor
on the trees for colour

The city wall seems to be everywhere. This
is in a small park near the waterfront

The next few islands became “in-port” sea days. St Bart’s was a tender stop (again), and while they could operate the tenders, we found out later that they had to keep moving the tender pier from one side to the other as the winds were variable. By the time they got all the tours off it was after Noon, and given it was a very long tender ride for not very much to do on shore, we decided to take a pass. Never mind that by 2:00 when they finally opened up the tenders to anyone not on a tour, we started getting rain showers about every 20 minutes, it really wasn't even worth trying to get ashore.

What is there to look at but one private yacht
after another?

The view from the ship toward Gustavia

Next up, Dominica, which has maybe three things worth seeing that we had already seen before (see a pattern developing here?), So after a short walk up and down Front Street, we spent most of the afternoon on our terrace, away from the very crowded pool area.

The local tour transport - each one painted differently

One of the more colourful buildings in town

The furthest point south on this trip was our stop at Bridgetown, Barbados. There a number of places to visit on the island, and we have seen them all, some twice! The harbour is enormous, we were one of five ships in port, and were docked the furthest out from the terminal building. We think the bow of the ship might have actually been outside the harbour wall! We discovered the other four ships were on turn arounds, disembarking one load of guests and embarking, and re-provisioning, for the next cruise.

From the sublime (tiny Emerald Azuura, capacity about 150) to the
ridiculous (huge P&O Cruises Avira, capacity about 5,200)

Knowing how chaotic the terminal area would be, and that getting a taxi into town would probably not be easy……………

As the sun was going down

We left our berth behind sister ship
Oceania Insignia right around sunset

Next stop Grenada, where we thought we might walk up to Fort George, which overlooks the town, and take some pictures. After a hard climb up a VERY steep and uneven staircase, we discovered it was closed for renovations until 2024!!!