Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas

The bad thing about cruises is that we only have a short amount of time in any port. There are so many things to choose from to do and we could only hope we made the right decision. Charlotte Amalie is known for shopping. We went to a few shopping in port seminars in the ballroom of the ship in preparation for docking in Charlotte Amalie. We had a few things on our list of things to get. However, we went snorkeling instead. It was great.
We arrived in Charlotte Amalie just ahead of a huge rainstorm. We where on the edge of Hurricane Thomas the whole time. This is one of the few times that the effects of the hurricane hit us. It didn't last long and we were on our way on a hour long ride on a catamaran to go snorkeling. It was kind of wavy going out there and we sat on the front leading edge of the catamaran. We were thoroughly soaked when we got to the snorkel spot. We snorkeled over a sunken boat that had seen its better days smuggling drugs. There were plenty of fish, turtles and other sea creatures I had never seen and plenty of other boats and people in the water. The only way I could keep my eyes on Jim was to go underwater and look for his swimming trucks, which I seemed to be doing constantly.
We then took an hour boat ride back to the ship and by then we were hungry and dirty. After we took care of that, we had no more time to go into town. We would have needed several hours.
One interesting thing about St. Thomas. Hurricane Pearl had come through in September and did some damage. There were about 20 wrecked boats that had been pushed ashore and laying around the harbor. I included a few photos of them.