Swimming with dolphins (and sharks)

TravelMole associate editor Linsey McNeill took two very family friendly excursions on a Norwegian Breakaway seven-night Caribbean cruise.

Our first port of call on our seven-night Caribbean cruise aboard the Norwegian Breakaway was Port Canaveral, Florida, where we were to spend just eight hours before setting sail again for the Bahamas.

Anxious not to waste a second, we queued to be amongst the first of the 4,000 passengers to get off the ship when it pulled in to port shortly before midday.

While the majority of Breakaway’s passengers were bussed off to Florida’s Disney theme parks, Seaworld, Universal Studios or the Kennedy Space Center, we took a pre-booked taxi to Discovery Cove, opposite Seaworld, for an encounter with dolphins and tropical fish.

The drive took just 45 minutes and, as our dolphin encounter wasn’t until 15:45, we had plenty of time to enjoy the complimentary buffet lunch at Discovery Cove, (good, but not as good as on the ship!), snorkel in a pool filled with multi-coloured, exotic fish, stroking rays as they flapped slowly along the bottom, and coming face to face with sharks, safely behind an underwater glass screen. As it was hot, we also lay for a time on its man-made beach.

Our encounter with Roxy, a 16-year-old dolphin lasted about 45 minutes in a shallow pool where she swam slowly up and down, allowing us to stroke her back, chortled as us through her blow-hole and flipped on to her back and clapped her fins for laughs.

Each of us then took turns to wrap our arms around her to be pulled through the water for 10 seconds or so. "It wasn’t really ‘swimming with dolphins’," my hard-to-please 12-year-old pointed out, but it was an amazing experience.

We would have liked to have spent longer at Discovery Cove – it opens from 08:00 till 19:00 hours and breakfast, lunch, drinks and snacks are included in the price – but we had to get back to the Breakaway, which was sailing that night for the Bahamas.

Unfortunately our next stop, at Norwegian Cruise Line’s private island Great Stirrup Cay, was cancelled. The captain said the sea, which had seemed calm to us, was too choppy for us to safely reach the tenders that we to take us to the island.

Our only other stop was Nassau in the Bahamas, where Norwegian offered a number of organised trips. We decided to take a 15-minute taxi ride to Atlantis on Paradise Island, where I was hoping a day spent in the giant Aquaventure water park would compensate my son for being too small to go down the largest slides on the Breakawway.

It didn’t disappoint. The kids loved the scariest rides, the Leap of Faith (which throws riders down a nearly vertical drop) and one that spits you out into a glass tube running through a shark-infested tank. I preferred the Lazy River Ride on a rubber dingy, lazing on its white sandy beach and swimming in the warm(ish) Caribbean.

Aquaventure in Nassau forms part of the original Atlantis resort. A second has since opened in Dubai and a third will open on China’s Hainan Island in 2016.

Altogether there were 10 rides (easily enough to keep the children entertained for a whole day), plus several pools (including three kids’ pools) and a pretty large aquarium. Plus, we saw turtles basking in a lagoon.

There were short queues for some of the rides but we walked straight on to most of them, which was great as our stay was so short. By 17.30 we had to be back on the ship for the two-day return journey to New York.