It’s been said that your best customer is an existing customer, and Marriott/Westin timeshare resorts certainly seem to live by that saying. When you check in, you meet with a “concierge” who gives you information about the resort, a discount card, some reusable bags, and offers an inducement to get you to go to an “Owner’s Update”…which is a session intended to get you to buy some more timeshare points.

We usually say “no” and skip the update because we’d rather be on vacation than listen to a sales pitch, but once in a while we say “yes”, either because there actually are changes in the program that we’d like to know about or because the inducement is worthwhile. Usually, they offer resort credit or Marriott points, neither of which is very exciting, but this time our concierge Max offered us a free Teralani Adventures sunset cruise, so we bit.

Our session was at 8:30am this morning (good timing, because it left the rest of the day free), and it was painless. The salesman, Ray, was entertaining and informative – he even answered a few questions we had. And (unlike some previous sessions we’d endured) there was no hard-sell! Yes, he did suggest that we buy more points, and his manager Andy drew up an offer, but they took “no” for an answer very easily, and we were out of the session in the promised 90 minutes, in plenty of time to walk to Whalers Village for lunch at Leilani’s on the Beach.

Diane had had problems with her mask when we went snorkeling yesterday, so we visited The Snorkel Store to see if they could help. They didn’t try to sell her a new mask; instead, they said that the seal looked good and suggested she might have over-tightened the mask. We’ll find out if that solves the problem tomorrow.

And then it was time to walk back down towards Whalers Village to check in for our free sailing. They do “beach boarding” (no gangway – you walk through shallow water to reach the ship and climb up the stairs). They couldn’t use their usual boarding location because of high waves, so the whole group walked to the other side of the Sheraton at Black Rock where things were much calmer.

Soon, we were out on the ocean, enjoying the views, some adult beverages, and some appetizers.

The wind meant that they could put up the sail instead of relying on the engine.

It was a little rough at times, but nothing to worry about.

We returned to the beach as it was getting dark.

And then we walked back to the Westin; it was a very good day.

We rented our fins for this trip from The Snorkel Store. Their tagline is “We Get You Turtle Ready” – and they mean it. They publish a daily Snorkel Report for Maui; this morning’s report said that conditions at Kahekili (Airport) Beach would be excellent this morning, so we got ourselves ready and hiked the 200 steps to the beach from our resort, put on our gear, set up our cameras (I had my iPhone 15 Pro in a drybag; Diane had her trusty Olympus TG-4 camera), and swam out to the reef (maybe 100 yards from shore).

We saw one turtle – see if you can guess which photo Diane took. We also saw lots of fish; my photos of them were even worse than my photo of the turtle.

Diane’s mask started to leak, so we didn’t stay in the water very long.

After we dried out, we had lunch at Pizza Paradiso, where our lunch was brought to us by their “Pineapple Robot”.

We drove Upcountry again to make our usual visit to the Kula Botanical Garden; our previous visits have all been during the depths of winter, and we wanted to see what the place looked like in the summer. We spent more than an hour in the garden and saw just about everything.

We headed back to use up the gift cards we’d gotten as part of our Maui Chocolate tour in December. Diane had their “Maui Grown” flight (four chocolate squares, each grown on Maui, along with some Maui Brewing Company porter and some Taylor Fladgate 20 year old tawny port (probably not grown in Maui)); I had the “Dessert Wine” flight – the same port, a sherry, and a Zibbiba, each paired with an appropriate chocolate.

We might go back and do another tasting, even without gift cards as an excuse.