In general, this is what a day aboard the Wilderness Discoverer looks like:
- Wake up between 4:30 a.m. and 7:30 a.m.
- Hot Breakfast at 7:30 a.m.
- Before lunch: your choice of guided kayak, open kayak, SUP, skiff tour, or hike
- Buffet lunch at 12:30
- After lunch: your choice of guided kayak, open kayak, SUP, skiff tour, or hike
- Hot tub time (this pretty much applied to only a few guests)
- Cocktail hour at 5:30 p.m.
- Dinner at 6:30 p.m.
The expedition crew did a good job of trying to accommodate all of the requests for all of the guests based on their individual preferences. For us, we preferred to kayak in the morning before the winds picked up, so that meant we had a few good early morning kayak trips (both guided and on our own), with hiking in the afternoon. There was a lot of time for sitting on the sun deck, taking in the views of the surrounding area, hanging out with fellow passengers in the forward lounge, reading, napping, or game playing. The first week I made Alan play Scrabble with me a couple of times even though he hates it. Then, as payback, he them beat me soundly at Yahtzee a few times.
As I mentioned in my previous post, our first stop was in the Magoun Islands. Since we had taken a kayaking lesson back in December, we skipped out on the kayak 101 trip, which in hindsight was probably a bad idea because it meant that the only other activity we had at our disposal that day was a skiff ride in the late afternoon. A number of people on the boat were a little agro about how the scheduling worked, and while I felt like we hadn't made the best of our first full day on the boat, it gave me an understanding of what the process was, and how to best work with the process to maximize the number of activities we'd be able to do in a given day, and thus maximize our enjoyment of the overall expedition.
