kayaking in Saint Thomas
Guided Kayak from Margaritaville
On our port stop to Saint Thomas USVI on Symphony of the Seas we booked a kayak tour from Margaritaville through Vacations to Go, who uses Shore Excursions Group for the tours they offer. These tours use local providers. They are less crowded and often less expensive than things booked through the ship, but sometimes you have to provide your own transportation to the site, as was the case with this tour. The taxi ride added an extra $17 per person in each direction. Even including the taxi fare both ways the per person cost was less than most of what the ship offered for any port and still under $100 per person. Definitely less crowded since we were the only ones on this tour.
getting ready to launch kayaks from the beach at Margaritaville
The excursion description mentions mangroves, seahorses, fish, dolphins, and coral as things you will see through crystal clear water. It may usually be clear, but we came on a windy day. Not so windy as to not be able to go, but windy enough to have some waves that kept the water from being clear and also brought sargassum seaweed to the shore, which the guide said the resort cleans up daily, but this was an early port stop and they hadn’t got to it yet.
kayak on the beach
Before the tour started we asked the guide if there was somewhere nearby we could snorkel after the kayak tour. Instead he brought us to a beach for snorkeling where he said there would be things to see. I don’t think that is part of the usual tour. He did mention not getting many requests for snorkeling.
Hannah snorkeling
We did not go to any mangroves, but that could be because we went to that beach to snorkel instead, or if they are located beyond the little cove where the resort is it may have been that we didn’t go there that day because of the rougher water. It’s also possible that people see seahorses and things in that cove when the water is clear, though the mangroves must either be elsewhere or closer to shore than where we went.
big spiny black sea urchin
The beach was not too far from Margaritaville. The guide did mention there was another one you could walk to from the resort where the snorkeling would be better, but we didn’t go there since we had already snorkeled during the kayak tour. At one end of the beach it was sand all the way up and that was where we went in with the kayaks. Beyond that little spot there was a lot of rocky structure just below the surface. That’s where all the fish hung out. There were also a lot of spiny black sea urchins and some small corals. In some places the water was fairly shallow over the structure so in those areas people have to be careful to stay far enough away not to touch the rocks because you don’t want to touch a spiny sea urchin and get stung.
little red fish
Fish like structure and there were quite a lot of them swimming around in that area. Most were fairly small, but there were some bigger ones. I also saw one really big sea urchin, or at least half of one sticking out from under a rocky prominence. That one was bigger than any urchin I have seen before. Most of the other urchins were quite small.
kayaks
After we finished snorkeling we paddled across the bay to a structure housing a dolphin sanctuary. The dolphins there were born in captivity and brought to this facility from places that have either closed or didn’t have as much room for them to swim. The facility offers dolphin swims and dolphin encounters.
dolphin sanctuary
Looking in from our kayaks we saw someone feeding the dolphins. The dolphins would pop their heads out of the water to get the fish. About the time we all put our cameras away and our kayaks that nobody was paddling at the time started drifted away from that area one of them started leaping out of the water, but nobody got a photo of it.
pool at Margaritaville
Following that we paddled back to Margaritaville. The two teenaged girls with us (granddaughter and a friend) took a dip in the pool there. There was hardly anyone around and nobody would have cared if we stayed to enjoy the resort awhile, but our ship wasn’t in port long that day so we only stayed for a short time.
view of Margaritaville from the kayaks
We weren’t sure how long it might take to get a taxi ride back, but there was one waiting right outside the front door of the resort so we didn’t even have to ask them to call us one or try to find a phone number where we could call one for ourselves.
lizard at Margaritaville
The ride back to the port was quicker than the ride there because there wasn’t as much traffic. We passed by the other port on the way so it would be a quicker journey for people coming on ships other than Royal Caribbean because they all go to the main dock in town, but Royal has their own port outside of town at Crown Bay. Celebrity ships sometimes dock there as well because Royal Caribbean owns them too. Every time we have been there we see lots of iguanas in the rocks at the edge of the water.
iguana at Crown Bay
Overall it was a good excursion. It was just the 4 of us and a guide, not a large group like you get with a cruise ship tour. These sorts of tours always have less people than one booked through the cruise ship. The guide was very nice and quite informative.
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