Day Fifty Seven - March 3

Our arrival time was scheduled for 11:00 but we arrived around 10:00. The authorities came on board and the ship was cleared around 11:15.

We are docked in the port of Kingstown which is the capital of St. Vicent and the Grenadines. The island has a population of approximarely 111,000 which has remained constant since the early 1990s. It's main industry is tourism but not today which I will explain later.

Our ship is docked along side the P&O Crusises Britainnia. The ship has a maximum capacity of 4,400 guests so assuming only 30% occupancy then there is approximately 1,300 guests on board. It is massive when compared to our littlle ship. They do fourteen day cruises out of Barbados. Many of the guests are from England as it flies under the flag of England.

At breakast we decided with a few friends to try to find the area where the Pirates of the Caribbean was filmed and to do some snorkeling around the site.

The ship was cleared by the local authorities and all independent guests left the ship to explore only to find out that the port authorities were not allowing any guests from either ship to leave the port unless they were on a ship tour. No one from Insignia was aware of this situation so our chief purser on board tried negotiating with the St. Vincent authorities to try to come up with a solution.

It has been two hours and the day is wasting away with no solution as yet. They were thinking of a waiver for Oceania guests but I think with the big ship still in port that might be the problem. It is slowly becoming a wasted day.

The cruise director annoucement at 14:30 confirmed that the port authority declined to issue us a waiver for independent guests. The ship was not provided with this information prior to us docking. Apparently the issue was more related to the port wanting more money than Covid.

It is officially a wasted day. The picture above was our view of the town until it left around 18:00.

Tomorrow we are in Barbados for 2 days. We are also going to get another antigen test which is required for our port of call of Castries, St. Lucia during our next segment of the Magical Mystery Cruise.