Day fourteen January 19

Today brought us back to Maui but this time in Lahaina on the other side of the island.

They have a saying here "Maui No Ka Oi" means Maui's the best. We can understand now why friends and family continue to vacation on this island as it is really beautiful with so much to do and see.

We arrived a 8:00am but due to staffing shortages and the virus there was not enough security to allow passengers off the ship until 09:45 at the earliest.

This was the first port to require a tendering system. If the ship is too big then passengers must use a tendering system to get to shore. This means that we must take a small tender boat from the ship to shore. Those passengers on ship tours have preference over those of us who just want to leave the ship. Luckily, since we are on a small ship which is ony at half capacity it is not really an issue or a long wait.

Our whale watching tour was schueduled at 9:45 but we were fortunate to be able to change it to 12:00. We were joined by our friends Jane and Claude from Chicago/Arizona on the tour. We are not very lucky when it comes to whale tours. There were no whale breaching sightings close to us and many passengers on the ship seemed to see more whales than we did.

There is only one way into the harbor so upon returning we needed to wait our turn as the tender boats from the ship came and went and apparently they had the right a way over our whale watching boat. Two other small boats within the harbor also sailed out before it was our time. The Captain of any boat trying to sail into the harbor before its your time could be fined.

Jane and Claude were gracious enough to drive us to Kapalua for lunch at the Plantation restaurant and allow us to do some power shopping in the proshop before rushing back to the ship for our next and last Hawaiin stop in Kona. For those of you who golf, Kapalua is the golf course where the past year's winners on the PGA Tour play in the first event of the new year.

The last tender was at 17:30 with departure at 18:00. This the first time in all of our cruises where Janice and I were the last couple on the tender boat, but since we were not late it wasn't a big deal. In fact I was the last passenger to check in. The technology has improved dramatically since pre Covid times as everything is now visually electronic. They take a picture of you when you first arrive on the ship and compare it to the picture of you leaving and returning to the ship so there is no way anyone can get on the ship that isn't registered.

The island had the features that we thought Hawaii would look like with the quaint shops and restaurants.