Sliding Along at Pelican Plunge on Disney's Castaway Cay
A water slide “island” called Pelican Plunge offers a fun way to get into the water at Castaway Cay, the private island of the Disney Cruise Line. But the only trick to it is that to get into the water by sliding down the slide, you first have to get into the water to swim over to the water slide. Seriously.
While we were on our Disney Cruise last summer, we all seemed to enjoy Castaway Cay in various ways, because we split up and went in three or four different directions. After we swam at the family beach for a while, Laura and Katie decided they wanted to try Pelican Plunge, the big water slide that some of them had gone down on our previous Castaway Cay visit. As you can see here, Pelican Plunge is out in the middle of a lagoon, and the only way to get out to it is to swim. And yes, you do have to swim and not just walk in the water, because the bottom of the lagoon drops down pretty deep pretty quickly. After all, you wouldn’t want to splash down into the water and suddenly hit the lagoon floor with a thud, would you?
And as you can also see, having to swim out there doesn’t keep the crowds away, as there is usually a line like the one you can see here. The line does move fairly quickly, although if you were out in there on a sunny day with the sun heating you up the line may not seem to move quickly enough. But that wasn’t a problem when we were there, as you can see. In fact, once you got all wet by swimming over there, the lack of sun made it feel a bit chilly when the breeze would blow.
How do I know? Because after Laura and Katie had made a few trips down the slide, they talked me into swimming out there to go down it, too. And yes, it was fun! Although I didn’t slide down nearly as many times as they did. Because I’m not quite as young as Katie is, and I’m not quite as much of a big kid as Laura is. But I still did it.
You also might notice that one of the slides is mostly enclosed, and the other slide is open. If you are looking for speed, the enclosed slide is much faster, as we could tell each time people would start at the same time. It wasn’t much of a race, because the enclosed slide would always win. However, while there is just one line going up the stairs, once at the top most people want to go on the open slide. Apparently, the enclosed slide is a little scary or something. Not that there are any creatures that jump out at you in there, but I guess not seeing when you are almost at the end can be a little scary to some people. So of course I went with the shorter line/faster slide, and it didn’t bother me at all. What’s so scary about not seeing where you are? But I can see how some people might not like it.
So if you are looking for something interesting to do at Castaway Cay, swim on out and give Pelican Plunge a try!
Long ago the heavens and the earth were brought about from water and through water by the word of God. - 2 Peter 3:5
About the Photo
I used a single RAW file to produce three different “exposures” - one normal, one dark (underexposed), and one bright (overexposed). I masked in different parts of the dark and bright exposures to increase the dynamic range just a bit. Because I wasn’t happy with the coloring, I used a selective color filter in Photoshop to change some of the color values, removing a good bit of the green hue that was present, and then I was much happier with everything. Sometimes it pays to try something new!
Photo: A single RAW exposure, processed in Photoshop. Read more about the photo software and gear I use at the camera gear page.
Camera: Olympus OM-D E-M10
Lens: Olympus M.Zukio 25mm f1.8
Date: June 3, 2015
Location: Castaway Cay, Bahamas
