Caribbean cruise: Saint Kitts

January 10, 2009 at 09:40PM     Travel Caribbean Saint Kitts

Practicing for scuba diving in a pool in Saint Kitts
How could anything top zip lining through the rainforest in Saint Lucia? The other excursion I was really looking forward to came the next day in Saint Kitts: scuba diving. I've been snorkelling before, but never descended below into the thousands of leagues under the sea. In fact, I'd previously only been about 0.00055 leagues under the sea, and now I've been all the way down to 0.0022 leagues under the sea, quite an adventure! (According to Wikipedia, the title Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea refers to the distance travelled under the sea and not the depth to which they travelled. But I digress.)

Me in a wetsuit after scuba diving in Saint Kitts
Our adventure began in the pool of a seaside hotel not too far from the ship. We practiced breathing with the tanks and repressuring every half foot of descent, and then swimming around the bottom of the pool with the tank on. Once our instructor deemed us ready to go (and one of our group was not, so she had to sit out for the scuba diving portion of the scuba diving excursion), we boarded our boat and set off.

MV River Taw wreck; photo by Clark Anderson/Aquaimages, used under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license
We made our way a few kilometres off shore to the site of the wreck of the MV River Taw. It sunk in 1985 in one piece, and then Hurricane Hugo split it into two parts in 1989. We swam around and over the two parts of the ship. Our guide brought fish food so at times we were surrounded by fish. It was a great first scuba dive. While I'm here in Australia I will probably try to take some scuba diving lessons so I can go out on the Great Barrier Reef for some diving.

Here's a great blog entry from a blog called Life on St. Kitts with lots of photos from a dive at the same wreck.

We headed back to the ship. Leaving Saint Lucia I had another evening of sunset yoga on the top deck of the Queen Mary 2.