We purchased the dive excursion with Dive Safaris in St. Maarten for $95 each. As we signed up onboard the Norway we were told that we needed to have at least 20 dives under our belt to qualify for this excursion. We were told that this was due to the sea conditions at St. Maarten. We went anyway. The dive leaders were all very good, the wet suits (shorty) were all very bad. We joked that they all had a panel pre-ripped so you could scratch your butt if needed. In spite of their appearance they worked well. I don't think that anyone was cold at all, and a couple of divers went without a wet suit at all. The BCDs and regs were all pretty new and in good shape. We did the dive briefing on the pier outside the dive shop because the sea conditions made it tough to do the briefing at the dive site. We headed out to sea right past where the Norway was anchored to a site called the Fish Bowl. The swells seemed pretty big to me, and to compound matters they had a hard time getting tied off to the dive buoy. When we got into the water, the swells got even bigger (or we just got closer to them) so we headed down to the bottom immediately. The bottom was only about 50' feet, and there was still a pretty good current present. One of the DMs said that this was more current than he had experienced in the 6 months he had been in St. Maarten. Because of the current, we never made it the actual dive site. We did see a number of pretty fish and some assorted coral. To visualize our safety stop, imagine a wind chime in a hurricane. We were pretty jumbled up. The minute that we hit the boat we were chumming. We moved to the next dive site, Lucy's Barge, and hit the water as soon as we could gear up and drop. The current was a little more manageable here, and the barge was pretty much under the buoy so we did not have to swim to it. We saw a couple of nice barracuda, a nice Eel, and other assorted fish. There was more coral here as well. We did the wind chime in the wind safety stop, one more stop on the chum line and then we were done. The dive masters were very good. I was impressed that they told us that they would report us if we tried to take any flora or fauna home with us. One of them did tease the Eel out of hiding with his knife, but they did not do some of the hold this, puff this type of stuff that I have seen others do. They also took us out in smaller groups so that there was a better diver to dive master ratio that I have seen elsewhere. There are more experienced divers who prefer a more hands off approach, but I am still rookie enough to want a pro around. If you have a cast iron stomach, or if you don't mind doing some chumming between dives this was a good excursion. The DMs did say that the ocean is much calmer 6 months of the year during the summer. Others in the group did the tour excursions and reported that they were interesting. Some of the group spent time on Orient Beach in search of Naked Baywatch and reported that it was more like Naked WeightWatchers. After the diving we all met up, stored our dive gear in a locker at the Everything Cool Bar ($4) and headed to the French side for dinner. We had seven in our group at this time so the van fare was $35, but we didn't even try to ask for a better price. We ate at Le Belle Époque, a restaurant recommended by one of the dive masters. The pizza was simply awesome, and the pasta dishes were also pretty good. We spent about another hour shopping for trinkets and then met the van driver for the ride back to the Dutch side of the island, and our tender ride back to the Norway. We ended up on the 6:00pm tender (last tender at 6:30)