FamBam Cruise 4: St. Maarten

On June 25, 2025, we arrived at the island of St. Maarten.

"Sint Maarten" (as the Dutch spell it) is a "constituent country" of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and occupies the southern half of the island of Saint Martin, while the northern half is the French "overseas collectivity" of Saint Martin. The Spanish "dibsed" the island originally, but the Dutch built a fort on it in 1631, then got kicked out by the Spanish. Then in 1648 when the 80 Years' War ended (in which the Dutch regained their independence from Spain), the French and Dutch both jumped at the chance to take over the island. After some conflict, they realized that they would be better off with a compromise, so they split the island and mostly got along.

In spite of all that, the main language spoken on the island is English (67%), with some Spanish (13%), Creole, French and Dutch sprinkled in. And the occasional redundant 'a'.

A bunch of us signed up for the "Sea Trek Adventure" through Royal Caribbean, and were herded to our meeting area.

Then we boarded a water taxi to take us to our adventure.

Jared and I both had the same idea of taking a picture of the group.

Mikayla put on some sunscreen.

Once we arrived at the place and got our safety briefing, we took turns climbing down a ladder with a 70-pound helmet on our heads. Fresh air was pumped into the top, and our exhales went out the back of our helmets. The water was up to our chins, and only air pressure kept it out. They didn't really say what would happen if we tipped over or something, but we tried not to do that.

We had to swallow and work our jaws to pop our ears every couple of rungs of the ladder on the way down. Soon we were all on the ocean floor, about 20 feet underwater. There were two railings made of slimy PVC pipe that marked our path.

There was a helicopter down there, which was kind of cool.

I gave Katelyn the GoPro while I attempted to take video footage with my iPhone in a waterproof holder. The GoPro did much better, but I got a few shots with the iPhone, like this picture of Katelyn.

Here are pictures that the company took of us all. 

I like how this fish has its eye right where Adam's eye goes.

There was also a cool cannon down there.

And here are the couples/siblings pictures.

And we got put in the underwater dungeon!

The noise from the air and gurgling of the bubbles made the experience kind of intense. And we had to walk in slow motion under water.

There's a blue-headed wrasse swimming by this statue down there.

Finally, we made our way back up the ladder, popping our ears as we went up.

We were down there for at least 20 minutes, plus the time it took to get down and back up.

Here's a 5-minute video of the experience. You can see that they shot fish food out of a bottle to get the fish to swarm around us for the pictures, which was fun.

While the other half of the tour group did the Sea Trek, we spent some time snorkeling. The one fish we saw that I thought was interesting was the Halfbeak Ballyhoo, which looked like a little foot-long narwhal. There were hundreds of them swimming along.

The Sea Trek was more impressive than I expected, and we were glad we did it.

While we were doing that, Erika & Kyle and Kelsi & Chase explored the town.  

We all met back at the ship for lunch, and to swim in the pool for a bit. Jared got this butterfly to land on his finger.

At 1:30pm, most of us headed out on one more outing. 

We hired a taxi fan to take us all to the Parrotville Aviary. Kyle loves birds, so he was in heaven.

We each got a cup of seeds fastened to a wooden handle, and the birds came right over to us.

Eva didn't seem to know quite what to make of these things.

Sometimes birds would land on our heads while waiting for a turn at the food.

I'm not sure Erika was quite as excited as Kyle about the birds.

These two were squawking at each other pretty loudly.

There were a lot of us, and a lot birds, so we took a lot of pictures. I'll throw a bunch more in here, because they're pretty cute.

Kyle was seeing how many birds he could get at one time. Here he is up to four.

One of the birds kept trying to eat the lemons on my shirt.

Or my ear.

Katelyn and Jared got some good shots with their nice camera (combined with their know-how).

For some reason, it got even more fun as time went on.

When Linette and I were in Australia in 2019, there were hundreds of lorikeets flying around the area. Some landed on our balcony, where one did a little dance for the other. So it was fun to see them up close. They're noisy, but they're so pretty!

One landed on Adam's head, and I thought it was cute that he would accommodate it.

Here's my Statue of Liberty imitation.

The yellow bird liked eating Linette's shoe.

And this one liked eating my phone case. (It still has marks on it, but it's like a souvenir).

One landed on Katelyn's camera when she was trying to take pictures.

After trying for a while, Kyle finally got six birds at once!

"This is the greatest day of my life!"

We were having so much fun!

Here's a slo-mo video that Mikayla captured of a bird coming in for a feast. But all is not as it seems!

And here's a 5-minute video with fun at Parrotville:

Our taxi was scheduled to pick us up soon, so we took a quick peek at the one-room museum they had there.

When we got back to the dock, we had a few minutes to shop, so we wandered around.

Linette and I went into a jewelry store and really liked this Tanzanite ring. The three stones symbolize the 33 years we have been married. (Which is also the approximate time that it has been since I bought her real jewelry, so it seemed high time).

An iguana was standing guard as we returned to the ship.

Jared got the drink package, which allowed him to get virgin specialty drinks for free, whenever he wanted. You have to have at least 4 per day to break even, so getting less would be "fiscally irresponsible." Well, they got around 46 drinks during the 7-night cruise, so they were very "responsible."

The theme for dinner attire that night was "Caribbean", so we suggested, "...as in, 'Pirates of the...?'" So Shaylee and Sienna dressed up as pirates.

Linette discovered an even nicer conference room on the ship than the sterile one we used the night before. This one was decorated in wood like a fancy office, and had two big round windows so we could see the ocean.

People enjoyed pensively looking out the big windows.

We played "Code Names" and other games.

Earlier that day, we got mysterious notes on our doors.

This turned out to be an allusion to that night's Survivor challenge, which was to find 12 bits of paper that formed a puzzle of yourself and assemble it. The papers for all the people were all mixed together.

Soon we were hard at work.

The pictures that Erika and Kyle chose were hilarious.

Jared got a little hosed in that one of his pieces was stuck in the envelope the pieces came in.

Later we played Rummikub. Eva provided a certain random element to the game.

The kids had a Switch 2 with them (or three of them, perhaps), and they figured out how to plug it into the big TV in that room, which let them play Mario Kart and such. It was funny to walk into this conference room and have this big party going on with games, video games and laughing.

Later that evening several people came to chill in our room again (or maybe the opposite, since it got warm in there with all those bodies).

In the next episode, we "hop a-board a catamaran" at St. Lucia.