What We Did in St. Maarten

ETA 3/15/18:  Unfortunately, it appears that Top Secret Private Excursions is no longer in business as their website is no longer working and they haven’t had a review on TripAdvisor since March 2017.

While we were on our 7 night Eastern Caribbean cruise on the Disney Magic in October 2014 we stopped in the port of St. Maarten.  We decided to spend the day on a private boat charter with Top Secret Private Excursions.  They have excellent reviews on Trip Advisor and the owner, Myles, was very nice and helpful before the cruise via email.  I really liked the fact that he didn’t require a deposit and allowed us to pay in cash the day of the excursion.  This way, I didn’t have to worry about giving out my credit card number and what might happen in the event that the ship was not able to make it to port that day.

The scenery was beautiful when we pulled into the port that morning:

Once we got off the ship, we walked through the port area and straight to the water taxi as Myles had instructed.  Along the way we took the obligatory photo in front of the St. Maarten sign:

The water taxi was easy to find right in the port area and I think it cost $7 per person for the whole day.  They gave us a green wristband to wear.  During the ride, one of my girls was resting up for the busy day ahead:

We got off at the first stop which was at Bobby’s Marina and immediately saw the Top Secret boat.  It looked like Myles and his first mate Danny were still prepping things so because we were about 20 minutes early, we hung back and waited at a little seating area.  After about 5 minutes, Myles and Danny came over, introduced themselves and told us we could go ahead and get started!  The led us onto the boat and showed us around.  It was a really nice boat and down below had a living area, kitchen area, bedroom and bathroom.  It was air conditioned too.   There were also 3 or 4 areas up above where we could hang out.  Soon, we began sailing out of the harbor:

Here is the little boat being towed behind us.  We used this later for tubing:

As we were heading out of the harbor Myles asked us what we would like to do that day.  I told him we wanted to snorkel, go tubing, play on a beach, and see the huge airplane (which I think was an Airbus A340) land at Maho Beach, which only happens once a day.  So, we headed to our first stop which was snorkeling.  During the ride, Myles told us all about a big hurricane that had hit the island a few weeks prior and how he was still in the process of repairing his roof.  There was quite a bit of damage all over the island, some of which we would see later.  We soon arrived at the snorkeling spot and Myles got us all set up with our snorkel gear.  We happened to be right next to an area where people do snuba, so there were some neat things underwater for us to see.  Here is the sunken ship:

Here is Myles swimming down to pick up a sea urchin for the girls to hold:

FYI, you can read all about my favorite waterproof camera here.

More underwater stuff:

We saw a stingray swim under us!

After snorkeling, Myles suggested sailing over to the French side of the island for a little sightseeing.  The girls and I decided to ride up front:

There was a rain shower in the distance, but it never came our way:

We passed a lot of impressive beach front estates, and Myles told us that Donald Trump had recently bought this one:

My older two sat way at the front and enjoyed the scenery:

While my youngest did this:

I guess all that snorkeling wore her out!  It was so nice of Myles to toss her a couch pillow to use up front.  He was a really cool guy.  When we arrived at the French side of the island, we immediately noticed all of the damage from the hurricane.  There were so many boats pushed up on the beach.  I asked Myles how they were going to get them back into the water and he said he had no idea.  Apparently it had been a really long time since a storm this bad had hit the island and this type of damage had occurred:

After our nice sail to the French side Myles took us to a secluded little cove where we were going to go tubing with Danny while Myles cooked lunch.  Here is Myles dropping the anchor:

My youngest was still doing this:

So, we woke her up and the older two got into the tube:

The other 3 of us got into the jet boat with Danny and we were moving pretty fast!  We had to hang on tight:

This was our view of the boat while we were tubing:

Myles actually had a grill on the back of the boat and was grilling our lunch here.  If you look closely at the picture above you can see it.  Here is another view of the boat where you can see the grill on the very back:

Here are a few more tubing pictures:

When we finished tubing, we got back on board to enjoy lunch.  I wish I had taken better pictures of it, but this is the only one I got:

After lunch, we used the jet boat to get over to the little beach right beside us.  My youngest two and I spent some time playing in the waves and discovering things while my husband took our oldest snorkeling along the rock wall.  Myles told us that he had seen octopus on that wall before so they were hoping to find one (they didn’t).  Here they are preparing to go in:

Playing on the beach:

They found a shell but nothing was inside:

They also found a small cave but didn’t go in:

And right outside the cave they found this:

Don’t worry, we didn’t touch it or even get very close to it.  I zoomed in to take this photo.  It was HUGE!  I would estimate that the wing span was in the 8 – 12 inch range.  Here is another view of our boat from the beach:

And one of my favorite pictures from the entire vacation:

After we got back in the boat, it was time to head over to Maho Beach to watch the big Airbus A340 land.  For some reason I stopped taking pictures at this point, but I did get some great video of several planes landing.  They were all pretty small planes until we saw the Airbus approaching.  Here is the video:

It was amazing to be right under the plane like that.  My video camera was not zoomed in at all.  This was something that I had been looking forward to since we booked the cruise and I am so glad that Myles timed everything just right.

After the airplanes, it was time to head back to the harbor and get back to the ship.  Once we were back, we settled our bill and said our goodbyes.  It was a short walk back to the water taxi and then after that, a short walk back to the ship.  It was a fantastic day!

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If you would like to read about some of our other shore excursions, you can do that here.

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