St. Thomas and St. Maarten

[Pooh93]

Any updates from recent cruisers for these islands regarding hurricane recovery? We cruise on May 19 and just curious. We will have a fabulous time regardless. TIA

 

[lbus42]

We just finished an Apr 21 - 28 cruise.

St Maarten was hit very hard. They are still recovering. We did a tour of the island and you could see damage everywhere, but they are slowly rebuilding.

St Thomas did not seem to have as much damage and it appeared that most if not all excursions were functioning normally.

 

[DisneyFanThi]

I was at St. Thomas and St. Maarten in April. St. Thomas was pretty far along with it's recovery. We did a little bit of a driving tour through the island, and the main thing I noticed was that most of the resorts were closed until 2019 for repairs. The port and a lot of the tourist areas were pretty well fixed. You could see a lot more damage at St. Maarten. There were a lot to damaged buildings and toppled shipping containers and other signs of storm damage. When we drove by the harbor there were still several damaged and sunken yachts in the harbor. Overall both islands were still pretty fun and amazing despite the damage.

 

[_auroraborealis_]

If you look, in Charlotte Amalie and on St. John you will see many blue roofs. These are tarps, still. There are definite signs of damage on both St. Thomas and St. John. Many of the beaches are operational. I understand the turtle cove for snorkeling the turtles have not returned.

St. Maarten is still cleaning up, and in the port it is definitely visible. Worth mentioning that all of the islands have a trash disposal problem with the ruins from the hurricanes, as there is no easy place to dump it and getting it all off-island has to be negotiated. Right now, Dutch St. Maarten is still in better shape than the French side, based on how support funding has been flowing. We did a non-DCL excursion in St. Maarten, and I'm happy with that decision as I heard a bunch of people kind of nonplussed with the DCL tours, but our day was pretty great and had good snorkeling, good beach, and plenty of sunshine and beer and airplane landings and etc.

 

[kkayluvsdis]

Our boat captain on our St. Maarten tour with Soualiga destinations in February told us that it would take them at least five years to fully recover from this past hurricane season. He followed that up by clarifying, "and that's only if we don't have another hurricane in that five year time frame."

We were taken aback by the devastation we saw. The number of sunken boats/yachts still in the water was incredible. I can't imagine how it must have looked just prior to the storms.

 

[Pooh93]

Thank you everyone. It will be interesting. I am glad for the heads up regarding the still sunken yachts. That is so sad. In St. Maarten, we are doing the Two Nations Vacation, so we will be on the water more than on the island I am guessing.

 

[oakleycat]

We were also on the 4/21 Fantasy and did the Soualiga Destinations excursion. I am so glad we did because we had an amazing day and some of the DCL excursions did not get such great reviews. But as everyone has said, there's still a lot of devastation. The amount of sunken yachts was incredible.