Fri, Jan 12 – No Costa Maya – boo!

Usually by the time I wake up at 8 am, the ship is still and quiet, having been docked for at least an hour or so. Such was not the case this morning.

I went up to breakfast at 8:15 and noticed only water on every side of the ship, which seemed to be moving along at a fair clip. “Strange,” I thought, “Maybe we’re running a little late today.” After all, the waves were showing a bit more whitecaps than usual.

But at 9 am, as I was finishing breakfast with still no land in sight, I knew something was up. About the same time, the captain made an official announcement. When we had arrived to Costa Maya about 6:30 this morning, the waves were far too choppy to permit us to dock safely at the pier. The forces of the surface water were such that our large ship could have knocked out the pier, or the pier could have caused significant damage to the ship. So from our vantage just outside of Costa Maya, he had made the decision to turn around and go ahead to start heading home to Tampa. Too bad, because this was going to be the only COOL port we were looking forward to all week.

As the day went on, this really turned out to have been the right decision. Because of the rough seas, we had to slow down to a crawl just to keep some semblance of stability. Carnival CL’s Miracle had done the same thing, skipped Costa Maya on their way back to Tampa, so we had a bit of fun watching them alongside us for two days.