8 April Land Ho! Barbados and A Submarine Voyage

We arrived in Bridgetown, Barbados at noon, so the first part of the morning was our usual, Zoom church, gym and breakfast. Barbados requires a negative antigen COVID test to enter so we all lined up by deck for a quick nasal swab. We’ve been COVID free since 9 March, so no one had to wait to go exploring, just another hoop to jump through in the COVID era.

There were two other cruise ships in port, a large Royal Caribbean on and a smaller Regal ship. The passenger terminal was well within its capacity but seemed crowded after our journey with 60 passengers.

Mask wearing, hand sanitizing and temperature taking are the all the thing here. The shuttle from the ship to the terminal had a sanitizer spray. The entrance to the terminal had an instant read temperature scan and hand sanitizer. We got another spritz before boarding the excursion bus and another spritz and temperature read out at the submarine port.

Innards from decommissioned sub

Flowers at the Submarine Port

Mind you this was not the Viking submersible, but a 30-passenger vessel with large portholes. Our departure was at 1500 on island time, more like 1540. We boarded a boat for transport to the sub. After a delay waiting for it to surface with the previous tourist group, we boarded and took our seats. Our group was much smaller than the one the disembarked ahead of us so there we had room to move from side-to-side when something of interest came into view. Our co-captain had pretty good spiel to go along with the usual identification of coral, fish and sponges. We after diving to a depth of 138 feet and viewing a shipwreck, plus the usual tropical undersea life we returned to the surface. Pictures through the portholes are not very enlightening.

Murky water made good photos difficult. We saw much more than we could get good pictures of

We were the last dive of the day after boarding the transport boat the sub remained tied to our starboard side long with a smaller tender and we retuned to shore where we were presented with out certificates of participation. We’d recommend doing this once but have already turned down a second chance.

After all the sea days it seemed like we expended a tremendous effort. I think the heat, wearing a mask all the time (Viking made mask wearing optional on 1 April) and being around all the passengers for the other ships was more wearing than we expected.