Captain Alan's Awesome?

[drewdie]

Has anyone gone on the 3 snorkel trip that they offer? We are looking for a small group or private boat tour in St. Martin. Captain Alan's looks great, but I need more feedback from people who have been on the tour.

[Wineguys]

 

This is cut from the post "3 Island Tour" on the next page and modified:

 

We had a fantastic day with Paul and Carol (Carol is Alan's sister and Paul is his brother in law). We had originally booked a 5 hour tour through Island Marketing for our group of 14 people (which is basically booking the whole boat for the entire day). Now, there were really only 10 of us which was a very comfortable number of people for the Awesome Too. Lots of room for lounging about on board. The fact that one was a small child helped as well, but it was a beautiful boat.

 

Island Marketing screwed some things up (see the Island Marketing post), but nothing too bad, however we would probably book directly through www.captainalan.com next trip, and I would probably never use Island Marketing again I think for various reasons - it all worked out, but they are very hard to get ahold of. The Island Marketing driver was 25 minutes late in picking us up, thorugh no fault of his own. It was $720 for the 5 hour trip (which was really more like 5-1/2 hours) for the entire boat. It all worked for us to $70 a person for the 5-1/2 hour tour, I think. Smaller groups pay about the same price for the 4 hour tour.

 

The "Awesome Too" was a 30 ft. 225hp double engine powerboat that seated up to 14 persons (said that, huh) and was a beauty to behold. It was a wet and wild day from the moment we left the marina at Oyster Pond at 12:30pm to our 6:00 pm return. Our itinerary was opposite what a normal itinerary would be because of what we wanted to do. Usually it is Tintamar, Pinel, Green. We started out with snorkeling at Pinel Island (which was great and we had a 5 year old on board and Carol was just great with her - she was really patient and taught her so much about snorkeling!). Then we went to Green Key which was a tougher snorkel out towards the white buoy, but a gorgeous glide back to the boat. The fish and the coral were magnificent. These people know their island, the waters surrounding them and they know exactly what they are doing. We then went way around the northern tip to Grand Case, pulled up at a dock to have a bite to eat (great burgers, fish, chicken, chips, etc.) with an incredible steel band playing. The food took a long time to come because it was New Year's Day and they had been open all night, but it was worth the wait. Finally, a 4th stop at Tintamar, where we anchored close to the beach and then walked inland a few feet to get a fantastic exfoliating mud bath, sat on the beach as it dried on us and watched the sun go down over Sint Maarten/St. Martin. A wonderful experience. We had great snorkeling experiences in St. Thomas, St. Johns, Tortola, Barbados and other places, but everyone on this excursion said - THIS WAS THE BEST EXCURSION OF THE ENTIRE CRUISE!!!!

 

So, in answer to your questions, I've used Paul (via Alan), the Awesome Too (almost the same as the Awesome), the maxiumum was 14 (although the Awesome holds more I think), and they can arrange for a van to pick you up at the pier because they are at Oyster Pond, right over on the French Side, it's about $6 a person each way to get to them.

 

So if you contact Captain Alan, and get to talk with Paul or Carol, send regards from Patrick and his motley crew of Americans, Canadians, Quebecois and Brits from the best New Years Day we all ever spent! BTW, I think if your group is big enough (use your Roll Call!), you can get enough people (all you need is about 9 or so for the same price as individuals), you can probably rent the boat out for yourselves and ask to snorkel Creole Rock and other out of the way places.[/color]