The Rum Bum and the Iguanas
The boat was called the Rum Bum. I did not make that up. It is a real boat, operated by a real company called Billy Bones Boat Charters out of Simpson Bay, and its entire business model is: get on this boat, drink rum punch, look at things from the water. I was sold before the sentence was finished. You can book a full-day boat charter from Simpson Bay — similar operations all leave from the Princess Port de Plaisance marina area, and the format is essentially identical: open bar, snorkeling stops, coastline tour, iguanas at the dock on return. If a full day on the water is more than you want, there are also dedicated sunset sailing excursions from the same marina — shorter, quieter, aimed at the horizon rather than the coast.
Getting there was straightforward — a short drive from the resort to the Simpson Bay marina, parked the car, walked to the dock. Princess Port de Plaisance, the main marina complex, is a working yacht club surrounded by superyachts that make you reconsider every financial decision you have ever made. The boat operators are right on the water, and you are underway within minutes of arrival.
The excursion left from the marina in the morning — a powerboat loaded with sunscreen, snorkeling gear, and an open bar that started the moment the engine did. The rum punch was strong and sweet and came in a shade of orange that does not exist in nature. I was handed one before I had finished applying sunscreen. This is the Caribbean approach to hospitality: start immediately, ask questions never.
Through the Drawbridge
Leaving Simpson Bay Lagoon by boat means passing through the Simpson Bay drawbridge, and watching it from the water is a completely different experience than watching it from the road. From the road, the bridge opening is an inconvenience — a delay, a line of idling cars, someone honking because they do not understand how islands work. From the water, it is a show. The bridge lifts. The road traffic stops. Your boat slides through the gap with maybe twenty feet of clearance on either side, and for a moment you are the reason everything paused. It is a small power trip. I am not above enjoying it.
What Irma Left Behind
Not far from the marina, still inside the lagoon, a sunken wreck sat half-submerged in the shallows. The hull was visible just below the waterline, rusted and listing, with the colorful houses of the French side rising behind it like a postcard that someone had torn in half and reassembled wrong.
Hurricane Irma hit Saint Martin on September 6, 2017. Category 5, with sustained winds of 185 miles per hour for more than 30 hours — one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes ever recorded. On the Dutch side, more than 90 percent of structures were damaged or destroyed. Princess Juliana Airport was wrecked. Looting broke out in Philipsburg within hours, and the Dutch government deployed marines to restore order. On the French side, 95 percent of buildings were damaged. The entire island, both halves, was effectively flattened.
In the lagoon alone, between 1,200 and 1,300 boats were sunk or damaged. The formal salvage operation identified 139 shipwrecks requiring removal — nearly 4,000 metric tons of waste. Some wrecks were pulled out. Some were left as artificial reefs. Some, like this one, just stayed where they sank, becoming part of the landscape. Four years later, in November 2021, the reconstruction was still ongoing everywhere you looked — roofless shells next to new builds, tarps where walls should have been, construction equipment parked in lots that used to be hotels. The wreck in the harbor is not just scenery. It is a timestamp of one of the worst Caribbean disasters in modern history.
Irma did not just damage Saint Martin. It rewrote the island’s geography. Buildings that had stood for decades were gone. Coastlines shifted. The lagoon, which had been a pristine anchorage, became a graveyard. And the recovery — slow, expensive, incomplete — was still visible everywhere if you knew where to look. From a boat in the harbor, you did not need to know where to look. It was right there.
The Island from the Water
Once through the bridge and past the lagoon, the boat turned and followed the coastline, and the island became something else entirely. From the ground, Saint Martin is roads and restaurants and rental cars and roosters. From the water, it is rock and green and blue. Rocky islands jutted out of the sea like something geological that had not finished deciding what it wanted to be. Cliffs rose straight from the waterline, covered in scrub and cactus, the kind of landscape that looks hostile until you realize it has been doing fine without human input for millions of years.
The route followed most of the island’s Atlantic and northern coastline. In the distance, the low village profile of Grand Case appeared — the French side’s self-designated culinary capital, a single main street of Creole restaurants that comes alive at night for Harmony Nights, a weekly street festival where vendors set up under strings of lights and the whole village smells like grilled fish and spiced rum. From the water it looks like nothing. That is the point. You would never know it from the road what is inside.
Further along, the small mass of Îlet Pinel came into view — an uninhabited island just offshore that you can reach by ferry in ten minutes from Cul-de-Sac. From the boat it is just a green rise above turquoise water, but it sits at the heart of some of the island’s best snorkeling, the reef systems doing what reef systems do when nobody has put a parking lot on top of them.
And then the hotel strip came into view — high-rise towers, white sand, the turquoise water that every brochure promises and that, annoyingly, actually exists. Seeing the resort side of the island from the ocean puts it in perspective. The buildings are tall but the cliffs are taller. The beaches are wide but the sea is wider. The hotels will be there for decades, maybe. The rock has been there for epochs.
The snorkeling stop on the tour was near a rocky outcrop off the coast — the kind of spot where the reef is close enough to the surface that you do not need to dive deep to see it. If you want to do a dedicated snorkeling excursion, Creole Rock is the go-to — a small uninhabited islet just off Grand Case with some of the best snorkeling on the island. Most boat tours include it as a stop.
The Iguanas Own the Dock
Back at the marina after the excursion, sunburned and full of rum punch and salt air, I stepped off the boat and immediately encountered the dock’s other residents. Green iguanas. Plural. Everywhere.
Green iguanas (Iguana iguana) are not native to Saint Martin. The story — and this is real — is that a shipment of them arrived by air freight sometime in the mid-1990s, was never claimed, and a sympathetic airport employee released them rather than let them die. That single act of compassion produced what is now one of the island’s most visible and most photographed populations. They are everywhere: on docks, on walls, in gardens, sunning themselves on roads with the same disregard for traffic that the roosters show. The roosters and the iguanas have apparently reached some kind of territorial understanding.
The one on the dock was easily three feet long, nose to tail. During mating season, adult males turn a deep, vivid orange — not subtle, not gradual, the kind of orange that looks like a special effect. November was close enough to mating season that this particular male was already shifting color, sitting on the concrete edge of the dock with the confidence of something that knows it has no natural predators on this island and has made its peace with being stared at by tourists.
Kim Sha, Then Fritters
On the drive back from the marina, I swung by Kim Sha Beach — a west-facing strip of sand five minutes from the marina that does not appear on tourist maps in the way that Orient Bay or Maho do. It is the beach that people staying in the Simpson Bay area find on Day Two or Three when they want to swim without cruise-ship infrastructure. West-facing means direct line to the sunset, and on this particular evening the light was doing exactly what Caribbean evening light is supposed to do. The water was calm, the crowd was thin, the beach bar nearby was open. Did not stay long — dinner was waiting — but I noted it for later in the trip.
Dinner was more Indian food. The Indian and Sindhi merchant community has deep roots on duty-free islands like Sint Maarten — the commercial hub of the Dutch side has been an international trading port for centuries, and Indian merchants have been part of that ecosystem for generations. The result is Indian food that is both authentic and adapted, and on an island where most restaurants are aimed squarely at cruise ship passengers, it stands out for actually having flavor.
Tonight it was fritters — crispy, golden, served with a green chutney that had enough cilantro and chili to remind my sunburned face that it was sunburned. I ate them on a patio in the warm dark, salt still in my hair, iguana orange still in my phone’s camera roll, and thought about how a day that started on a boat called the Rum Bum had somehow become one of the best days of the trip.
