Today, we anchored (well, ok, technically we didn’t “anchor” — we just held our position with azipods) off the coast of Half Moon Cay in the Bahamas, which is HAL’s private island destination. We’d stopped here before. It’s a pretty nice facility with white sand beaches and plenty of amenities ashore. Given that it was the first day of the cruise, we were only scheduled to be here into the early afternoon, and our fellow guests are fairly advanced in age, only a modicum of guests seemed to visit the island and even fewer made their way to frolic in the surf on the beach itself.
View of Zuiderdam from Half Moon Cay
For our part, we had a delightful time. I even rented a floating map ($10 for the day), which was from Frontgate and something I might invest in for when the pool is finished at home. We did have some rain showers pass through intermittently, but it wasn’t really an issue for us as they weren’t accompanied by lightning or thunder. Plus, it was both novel and fun to swim in the rain.
The ladies ate the included lunch at the Island BBQ (decent enough). I opted for the path less frequently taken to visit the “Lobster Shack” for Caribbean lobster roll ($13).
Lobster Shack vs. Island Barbeque
We’d planned on having dinner at the Pinnacle Grill, but the swells started to kick up as we sailed south. This caught us off guard, making Emerson motion sick before we could get Dramamine into her. So, we rebooked our fancy dinner for the following night and opted for the main dining room again in case we needed to leave early (which we did).