We spent a week in St Thomas Jan. 2005, taking our 1st cruise in Jan. 2006. When we were there Jan. 2005, We did a 1/2 day snorkel sail to Buck Island on the Dancing Dolphin (dancingdolphin.com). They provided the snorkel gear, a lunch buffet, and an open bar for the entire time. Buck Island is a great snorkel spot and numerous sea turtles. It was a very fun time! We also did a day trip on the New Horizon II to the British Virgin Islands. We boarded the NHII at 7:00 am, set off for St. John to clear customs (this was brief), then headed for Virgin Gorda to The Baths. It is about a 45 minute to 1 hour by powerboat with decent conditions. We docked at a a marina and were taken to the top of The Baths and hiked down to the beach. Anyone who has never been to this place or has just seen photos, words and pictures can not even begin to describe or do justice to this place. Beautiful beaches peppered with bouders that are larger than houses stacked upon each other that you can walk/hike/crawl through. It is amazing and I wish we could have stayed longer. We headed to Marina Cay (also known as Cuervo Island) for lunch at Pusser's. Very good food right on the beach. NhII provide the lunch, they had the menus and called our orders in when we were on the way to Virgin Gorda so we did not have to wait long for our food which was nice. I think the average cost was about $13 for the meal. After lunch we snorkweled off Guana Island for a couple hours. Very good snorkeling, lots of fish, even barracuda. After snorkeling, we were off to the highlight of the trip. Jost Van Dyke, White Bay Beach. This beach is awesome, has the world famous Soggy Dollar Bar and Grill, home of the Painkiller and swing the ring. There is no dock, so like my T-shirt I bought says: "#1Swim In, #2 Drink rum, #3 Swim Out (repeat)". All in all, this day trip was the best day in our stay in St. Thomas. NHII provided the snorkel gear, snaks, and open bar the entire trip. The only thing I wished is that we spent more time at the Baths and Jost Van Dyke. I could have totally foregone the snorkel as I had done the Buck Island snorkel and The SNUBA at Coki beach(I though out of all the places Coki was the one I liked best for snorkel. There are a ton of day trips you can choose from that offer something like this excursion and each consists of 2,3 stops with at least one of them a snorkel stop and a lunch stop. Some are sail and some are power boats, if you do a sail boat you're not going to see as much as it takes longer to get where you're going. The cost of our trip was $125 per person and well worth it. As I met several locals last year, this time we are renting a boat and my freind will captain it. Renting a boat for 8 hours with 6 people is going to run anywhere from $300-$500. You have to provide your own food/drink, rent your snorkel gear if you don't have your own, and hire a captain if you are not qualified to captain the boat yourself, I think it's between $125-$150 for the captain. If you can captain your own boat you can take up to 8 people. Going this route, you get to do and see what you want in your own time. I can't wait! Check out VINOW.COM for more info, I got tons of info on day trips through this site. If you care to see some trip pictues ( like over 400, lol) go to
http://shutterfly.com/view/pictures.jsp then type in password: tteurp . one last thing sorry this is long!
Tammy
