Tag Archives: MSC Ocean Cay Marine Reserve

MSC’s Ocean Cay lights up when the sun goes down

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A Bahamian Junkanoo “street” parade winds its way to the beach as throngs of guests follow and dance along. Photo Credit: Johanna Jainchill

OCEAN CAY MARINE RESERVE — MSC Cruises’ recently opened private island, Ocean Cay MSC Marine Reserve, is unique in several ways, but for passengers, its nocturnal activities particularly set it apart.

Ocean Cay is the only cruise line offering nighttime activities — for now. Royal Caribbean plans to have evening activities on CocoCay and hosted a few late-night test calls in 2019, but has no more on the books. Virgin Voyages’ beach club-style destination in Bimini, opening in March, will have Fire and Sunset Soirees and dance parties with celebrity DJs.

But right now, MSC is the only line that keeps every ship visiting its island docked there until the wee hours. And as I learned on a short MSC Divina trip to Ocean Cay, it makes for a great party.

At 6 p.m., when most cruise ship passengers are waving goodbye, I was one of many MSC passengers that made their way to the island’s Lighthouse Bar for sunset. A guitar player performed while guests sipped cocktails and snapped selfies during the golden hour. The aptly named and nearby Sunset Beach was equally as popular for people to sit in the sand and watch the sun go down.

Ocean Cay provides several lunch options — food trucks, a buffet and a restaurant for MSC Yacht Club guests — but there is no dinner service on the island. A lone food truck stays open and serves a small menu of hot dogs, burgers and pasta salad. Although the Lighthouse Bar has a menu that in theory serves light bites at night, patrons were told the kitchen had closed.

MSC encourages people to take time before the real festivities begin to go back to the ship and have dinner onboard, which my press group did before returning to the island around 8:30 when the party begins. Because the ship is docked right at the island, getting on and off is relatively easy. There was one slight security backup one of the three times I went back on board, but it only added about five minutes.

When the light show ends, a DJ starts the dance party on the beach.
When the light show ends, a DJ starts the dance party on the beach. Photo Credit: Johanna Jainchill

A Bahamian Junkanoo “street” parade starts at Springer’s Bar and winds its way to the beach as throngs of guests follow and dance along. The high-energy parade, with horn players and dancers in costumes, ends at Lighthouse Bay at 9 p.m., where the beach bar was packed, people sat around fire pits in the sand, and the 115-foot tall lighthouse began one of two nightly light shows. Guests still onboard lined the balconies and open decks on the lit-up Divina to watch from above. When the light show ends, the DJ starts the beach dance party.

As we followed the Junkanoo parade, MSC Cruises COO Ken Muskat said “the whole vibe changes at night” on the island. He was right.

Muskat said the island’s proximity to Miami, only 61 miles away, allows the ships to stay as late as they do and still be in Miami by morning.

Also unique to Ocean Cay are several evening tours, including beachside stargazing with a state-of-the-art telescope, a sunset champagne cruise or sunset beach picnic, and nighttime stand-up paddleboarding atop a paddleboard fitted with LED lights that attract fish. I wanted to do this, but the tour was sold out.

MSC and Hurtigruten detail their green initiatives

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Hurtigruten’s Roald Amundsen is the world’s first hybrid-electric cruise ship.

FORT LAUDERDALE — Cruise lines are cutting carbon emissions, reducing single-use plastics and campaigning to restore endangered coral reefs around the world, an audience at Cruise World learned on Friday.

Two cruise lines with different solutions to environmental preservation led to a discussion of how they’re making progress.

Hurtigruten’s unique solution comes in the form of batteries, which on its newest ships store energy produced by the engines and cut greenhouse gas emissions by up to 20%.

Hurtigruten president of the Americas John Downey said the 630-passenger ships can sail for several hours at slow speeds by battery power alone, and for a little less than an hour at normal cruising speed.

That could be important as soon as 2026 when Norway has mandated that ships sailing in two of its most historic fjords be 100% emission-free. Few ships in the current cruise fleet could qualify, Downey said.

“We can do it today. If we go 100% batteries, we can sail in there emissions-free,” Downey said.

At MSC Cruises, executives just announced that it will become the first large cruise line to become carbon neutral by countering its engine emissions through purchased carbon offsets. By investing in companies that plant trees and purchase wetlands, the line will absorb carbon dioxide in the atmosphere equal to the greenhouse gasses it produces.

“This is super exciting for us,” said Bonnie Levengood, MSC Cruises USA’s senior vice president for marketing. “As we’re investing in new technology to be more eco-friendly, we’re also looking at what is our current carbon footprint and how can we reduce that now.”

MSC is also developing a coral education and restoration program on the new MSC Ocean Cay Marine Reserve, its private island near Bimini scheduled to open Dec. 5.

The line is working with universities and researchers to develop a strain of super coral that will be more resistant to coral bleaching, a byproduct of warmer water temperatures. If the research is fruitful, it could help not only the Bahamas but other areas with coral reefs.

“Coral is a big attraction for tourists all over the world,” Levengood said.

Both companies are reducing sulfur emissions from their exhaust as required by International Maritime Organization rules that have been phased in over the past decade, but they differ on methodology.

Hurtigruten switched to low-sulfur fuel 10 years ago for its fleet of small ships, which prevents the sulfur from getting into the exhaust, while MSC mainly uses exhaust stack “scrubbers” that use seawater to capture the sulfur before it leaves the funnel.

Downey said the captured sulfur must still be disposed of somehow. “Our approach is you start at the root cause instead of band-aiding,” he said, adding that MSC prefers scrubbers because low-sulfur fuel is expensive.

Levengood responded that every environmental technology has its positives and negatives. She pointed out, for example, that Hurtigurten’s batteries use metals that have to be mined, and that the mining process produces greenhouse gases, even if the end product may not.