chrism23

Absolutely Curacao especially for less experienced divers. In Curacao at certain points you can literally walk off the beach and there is a Cayman's type wall only 50 or so yards from the shore. I think it goes down a couple of thousand feet. This will accommodate both divers and snorkelers. Best of both worlds.

Bob, Please start a new thread. I started this one all over a year ago. I also posted a followup saying I had found a way to work around any issues I had with SS Air. The key to problem solving was developing a fantastic relationship with my CC cruise consultant. I have tried to take it down so someone else's name is on it but I can't figure out how to do it. I think a newer version should go up, they did after all try to send me to Frankfurt from Dublin,to get home to Boston, but that was corrected immediately with one "are your kidding me" phone call. There are still problems. But please, can someone take this over. Every day my inbox is overflows with followups on the subject. Thanks to anyone who jumps in here.

Whatever you do not stay at the Hotel Costa in Barcelona. Silversea put us there for one night and it was one of the worst hotels I have ever stayed in. It is diagonally shaped with a large indoor courtyard. The rooms share the same geometry. And are down right dangerous with sharp corners and protruding edges. (hope I have the right place it was 4 or 5 years ago, if wrong I apologize to the Costa folks)

These picture are inspiring and gorgeous. It makes me want to go to PR next winter. Missed this one, we were on the Moon, among the many stops was Buenos Aries which was 108 degrees. We had looked at PR, one of my friends has a condo there, but they got clobbered by the hurricanes and were still without power 6 months after the fact. We looked at the Dorado Beach and it was about $1600 a night with all sorts of add ons, that brought it up to over $2000 a night, especially if I played golf which I would do. So now we are looking at a SS cruise next winter, which believe or not will be cheaper than the Dorado Beach. Thanks for the pics/

The Stafford Hotel in London, which I absolutely love, has a modest sized yellow rubber duck in their bathrooms. It seems everyone take them. Then there are matching mini version of the same on the net. I have had 4 of them arrayed in my guest bathroom for years. Always good for a laugh. Then last cruise on the Moon, there was a woman doing crafts every morning on sea days, creating paper flowers, all sorts of colorful stuff, which found the way to a lot of doors. I thought it was very cool.

Sorry Randy. I have to disagree. See my comment below. The cabins directly beneath the pool area are bad cabins. The pool decks vary from ship to ship. They are bad because the crew starts dragging all the deck furniture into place at 6:00 AM (unless the ship is in really rough seas and they are not going to put there furniture out). This makes a helluva lot of noise. It lasts for 10-15 minutes or so. So if you need a 6:00 AM alarm clock every morning, you have one. Otherwise avoid these suites.

For what its worth I never, ever fly in the day of the cruise. These days too much can go wrong. In Reykjavik there are a lot really interesting of day trips to take and a very cool city to walk around in.

I can tell you which cabins to avoid. Anything below the swimming pool. The crew puts out the pool deck furniture at about 6:00 AM. Its loud with the crew dragging everything around. There are ship diagrams on quite a few web sites to see where your cabini is located. And for Jazzbeau and others I alway select my cabin when I book the reservation. For example I am doing a back to back cruise in the Adriatic-Greece etc in August 2024 on the Whisper in August 2024 and I selected my cabin when I booked the cruise a couple of months ago. I have repeated this a couple of times. It is extremely important to have a really good relationship with your SS cruise consultant so you can do things like select your cabin more than a year in advance.

I think, not definitively, that you can order room service anywhere on the ship, and this is the caveat, only when the restaurants aren't serving. Room service is available 24 hours a day. I am not certain about this and would appreciate any feedback. There were a couple of times on our last cruise when we were just too damn tired to wait for dinner. We had pizza one night and room service the other. Then I read more closely the material on dining options. and saw the bit about anywhere on the ship. I wish I had known this on my previous 9 cruises. Something about having an early dinner in the Panorama Lounge does, in hindsight, have a lot of appeal for certain times.

During that dive if any one of those frisky hammerheads gets an itchy trigger finger, the entire group of them will attack. There will be no warning. You absolutely right about the hammerheads. It is truly a mind blowing site. The dive master made sure that those diving understood the risk. As I understand it, the mating orgy of the hammerheads takes place at about 80 feet, and the SS dive was limited to 40 feet. Then there are the white tipped reef sharks, they are much smaller tha a hammerhead but they will take a bite off you too, in a beach snorkel one passed within 2 or 3 feet of my wife. and I totally freaked out. They were all over the place.

Thank you all so much for your in-depth responses. I am sorry if in any way my use of the term "bozo" is in any way condescending. I just shudder when is see hotel guests with 4 hours experience diving to 40+ feet. I guess I am being short sighted and selfish. It's just that spending hours at the bottom of my local YMCA pool, and freezing my ass off in murky water off of Port Judith Rhode Island are experiences I don't want to repeat-but it looks like I will have to because my card is really outdated. As for the deep dive, it was just off of Curacao, our dive master caught holy living hell. Only afterward did i realize what a stupid dangerous move this was. I was much too much of a beginner to be hanging off of lines with tanks, for what seemed forever, ascending, so I didn't get bent. I am too old, 71, to start over again. So I guess I snorkel. Not to belittle snorkeling. The best experience I ever had in the water was in the Galapagos. We went snorkeling off a beach on our second day, we found ourselves in a middle of a sea lion colony. There were over 100 of the critters. They loved us. After the initial shock of having a sea lion barreling toward you at, (how fast to the do they go, about 30 mph?) thinking that a bad collision is about to happen, only to have the sea lion jump over you is a one off. It was spectacular. These critters just wanted to play with you, going over you, under you, every which way. I was laughing so hard I inhaled too much water andI had to surface and take off my gear and catch my breath. . Oh well, anyone want to buy an old BC? I really do appreciate the time spent on the comments. Thank you for preventing my further searching for a short cut when there isn't any and in hind sight it was just stupid on my part which might not ended well at all.

I just noticed this topic when scanning through the boards, I am usually on the Silversea site. And boy, do I have something to say on the subject. The recent cruises I have been on there were 3 diving opportunities. I live in New England. I do not dive here, it is too damn cold and so murky you can't see anything. I have a PADI advanced card. I have been on wrecks near 200 feet. I have done night dives, long drift dives, in short just about everything. Yet the dive masters on the last three cruises I had wouldn't let me in the water. Among other things I missed a long swim with a whale shark, and worst of all, in the Galapagos I missed the annual convention of hammer head sharks, there were 100's of them at about 80 feet deep. Harmless. The main problem is the last time I dove was 10 years ago. The PADI authorized dive school here said I would have to get a new card and go through the 6 week introduction course. I contacted PADI directly without success. Obviously I don't want to take the damn course again. Yet I see these bozos taking resort dive courses for a couple of days then they are allowed to go into open water. Any advice on how to work around this. TIA

A couple of things. On a recent cruise on the Moon there was an arts and crafts glass. One class had the folks make really colorful paper flowers. About 25% of the people on our corridor had placed them on their doors. Magnets, especially on longer cruisers were also on a lot of doors signifying where the folks have been. All made the corridors more interesting. I liked them. (we brought back our flowers and they are in our kitchen now) Binoculars not so lucky. The SS binoculars are mediocre to poor. Absolutely bring your own. Also keep them uncapped by your veranda door. Sea critters pop up fast and they are gone, especially whales.. Fiddling with lens caps means your probably missed the attraction. Another little tidbit. When dining in the MDR ask for a table next to a window. A number of times we have been accompanied by many dolphins. We call the view out the window "Silversea TV."

It seems like I started this thread years ago. Since then I have sailed 3 times with SS and used their air department 3 times. I have discovered that having a good cruise consultant at SS makes all the difference in the world. I am lucky to have a great one. For example, 2 trips ago SS Air had us routed through Frankfurt to get to Boston from Dublin. On very annoyed call to my CC, it started off with me going "You have got to be kidding me" led to the problem being solved. Now, if I don't like the flights, or the seats or whatever, a call to my CC gets it fixed. I it really helps to do a little research before changing things up, to find the flight you want to take, the time, and the seats ready before you call your CC. In general I have found that in all things Silversea it is essential to have a good relationship with you CC. I am even taking mine out to dinner next time I go through Miami.

I want to echo the a couple of opinions expressed above. Nearly everything they serve at Le Dame finds its way to the main dining room menu in a day or two. Some items get a little dressed up, for example order the rack of lamb and you will get 4 ribs rather than 3. I always will eat at Le Dame once at the start of a cruise, almost always the first formal night, to see if anything is different. Then that is usually it for the rest of the cruise. I did find Le Dame on the Moon to be less inviting and intimate than its iterations on other ships. I think they have done a great job with the decor, atmosphere and menu on Atlantide on the Moon and I really didn't see any reason to do Le Dame more than once.

I too am sorry at your discomfort. With so many MD's in this group I am puzzled why none of them has said the dreaded word-Norovirus. I am hesitant even to mention it, but the symptoms as described seem to fit. When I was aboard the Moon a month or so ago, there was mention of the Norovirus aboard the ship-and their absolute compulsion about hand washing with the sanitizing devices installed everywhere seemed closer to Norovirus prevention than Covid. I do not know wether there is any test for the virus or whether I am just off the mark here.

The whales are so plentiful that Icy Strait Point offers a 100% refund if a whale is not spotted on every trip. @mysty Hi Mysty. A couple of suggestions. First SS should hire you, to write, if you want to do any work, the Gray Travel Journals they used to provide. I miss them. Your work, and the time you must spend on it is astounding. Your descriptions are spot on. Second, whales. I need to get this right but I don't quite remember where. I think it was Juneau. We went out in a small boat, about 20 people, to do what they called whale watching. They were not kidding, this was a one off experience that probably never can be repeated. We are on the water, first we see a couple of fins, then flukes of diving whales, then more, and more. I think they were humpbacks. The whales are sort of crashing into each other (find mating habits of humpback whales). So we are in the midst, and I don't want to exaggerate here, at least 20 whales having fun. Some came right up to the side of the boat and some passengers were able to reach out and touch them. Ever petted a whale before? This was truly mind blowing. Then there was a 3 hour long kayak trip in Ketchikan, with a guide that seemed to know where every bald eagle nest was on the shore. There were only 4 of us. In addition to the eagle chicks (eaglets?). A couple of orcas decided to breach a few hundred yards away. I have to admit being scared in case one of these things landed on us. This was on the Silver Shadow in August of 2016. I was so awestruck by all that I experienced I have returned to SS at least twice a year ever since. But your prose and the depth of your insight is a real asset to the group. If they would only bring back the gray journals. Cheers. then a couple of rear diving, then more fins more tail

Sorry but I just have to do this, I rarely lose. On the Silver Cloud in July I teamed with a polymath and we won 10 out of 11. On this last trip I had 2 very smart Brits on my team, especially David and we won 5 of 7 until they got off. Then it was all down hill, And BTW, Ms. Jolly Jones is the best trivia player among Silversea regulars,

This isn't a troll even though I will once again get trashed. I am an avid trivia player. On my last voyage on the Moon any rules governing trivia went out the window. This wasn't the Cruise Directors, Raphael's fault, he is the best. But rather the fault of the pax. On everyone of my now 9 cruises there were limits to the size of the trivia teams, usually 6, sometimes as many as 8. This time, teams were allowed to have as many as 16 members. Most were 10-14. This was grossly unfair. Rather than subject myself to more abuse I didn't say anything. Also, there was a lot of team switching based on teams being good or bad. I remarked to someone this was rude and I got an earful, I hate to say this, but guidelines need to be established and adhered to. Sorry, but I just had to ***** about this,

Just got back from 31 days on the Moon. (The carnival in Rio was one of SS's best excursions ever-us 70 year olds dancing to dawn). As I mentioned before I have a place holder in for the World Cruise 24. Right not I am torn whether to do it or or not. The primary reason I am considering it is that it goes west. I live in Ct. Farthest west I have gotten is California. I have nearly completely covered North and South America and nearly all of Europe. This itinerary's attraction is that it hits everything from Hawaii to New Zealand. I really, I know all of us do, but I really hate flying. This cruise would ease a lot of misery. On the other hand, and this should dissuade me, I had just started to get bored on the 2 legs of the Grand Voyage I took, I was learning bridge-never in my life had I thought I would play bridge-I just ordered Bridge for Dummies. My question is, and I know there is a lot of enthusiasm expressed above, but has anyone gone into a world cruise, initially having some doubt, and then had the doubt confirmed, and hated it. I was so ambivalent about the 31days. In the end it was really hard to get off. But committing to 4 times that has me, perhaps too, nervous.