We were an hour late due to the rough seas. The Captain let us stay an extra hour, but this port call was already scheduled for the afternoon, and just for five hours. An extra hour in San Juan at night isn't that useful, but we had dinner at El Jibarito and pina coladas at Barrachina. San Juan is a lot of fun, and I would recommend originating a cruise there (and tacking on a full day in Old San Juan either before or after the actual cruise).

We took the Fan Ta Sea 6-hour catamaran excursion. Because we were combined with another Celebrity ship that had to leave earlier than we did, this became a five hour excursion. We shared this with the shore excursion desk and they refunded us 20%, which was a fair resolution. The snorkeling was OK (about 40 minutes in the water). Most of the 5 hour trip was spent getting to the snorkeling area, getting on over to Nevis, and on the Nevis beach. It was fun, but we would have preferred an excursion with more time actually snorkeling.

Our priority was to see some cool landings at the airport from Maho Beach. We checked the flight schedule and it looked like the largest concentration of large planes would land around 1:30 PM. We forgot to account for the fact that St. Maarten was actually an hour ahead of ship's time, so when we arrived, it was already 2:30 PM local time (our fault!). This was still a lot of fun. We rented two beach chairs and an umbrella at the Sunset Bar for $20. Note that the Sunset Bar didn't have WiFi. The bar at the other end of the beach might have (we didn't check). We did see a couple of 737/A320 type planes land, and numerous smaller commuter prop-style planes. The taxi ride to and from the beach was in a shared van and took about 30 minutes in bumper-to-bumper traffic on St. Maarten's main road.