Tuesday February 10th, 2026 Queen Anne, Victoria, Seychelles
- Neil Wylie
- Jan 4
- 2 min read
Updated: Feb 15
We’d been looking forward this unplanned stop, the first of the replacement ports due the bad weather over Reunion and Mauritius. Even though the Seychelles is mainly known for luxurious beach resorts, not really our cup of tea, the town of Victoria looked like a nice place for a stroll.
The Queen Anne moored just north of the tiny Ile Au Cerf, about 2 miles from the port in Victoria on Mahe Island, and operated a tender service, using the ship’s lifeboats to get passengers ashore. The port of Victoria is not a regular stop of cruise ships and as such the facilities on shore were very limited, in particular there was no pier where the tender boats could dock – only a single concrete staircase from the water level to the dock. This situation severely restricted the rate at which the ship could offload passengers, in addition, priority for the tenders was given to those who had booked a Cunard shore excursion.
We decided to wait until the queue had reduced before heading for the tender boat, but by 11AM the queue had not diminished, in fact it had got worse – we’ve never experienced this situation on any of our prior cruises, but at this point we were not aware of the severe bottle neck on shore. We waited about 2 hours and were then informed that it would be at least another 90 minutes before we could get a tender to the shore. Realizing that even if we made it to the island our time there would be pretty limited and we’d be faced with the same queuing situation when trying to return to the ship – only this time in the blazing sun and high humidity. We opted to stay on the ship; later we heard of extremely long queues for the return tender, with no shade and several passengers in distress due to the conditions.
Many passengers had a great time in the Seychelles, just not us – we were a bit unhappy and learned that in an “unknown port” it’s best to get in line for the tender first thing in the morning. The captain later acknowledged the difficult situation and promised us a better experience in The Maldives, our second replacement port.
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