The Wetter The Better

Thirty feet below the surface, the color red disappears. Your lips look gray; peel them back and your gums are blue.

As you descend farther, you lose orange, then yellow, green and so on through the spectrum, until presumably even the deep violets look black.

But we are not going that deep this afternoon. We'll bottom out in Snapper Valley, 80 feet below the surface, where a green sea turtle lumbering behind a giant tureen of coral appears painted in delicate sepia against a pale aqua backdrop.

Please do not be fooled: I am no undersea jock. I'm sitting dry in an air-conditioned, 48-passenger Atlantis submarine, peering into the water through a porthole the size of a trash can lid. This is underwater exploration for the Discovery Channel set, reef diving performed from a butt-form plastic seat. The first red thing I saw lose its color was the soda stain on my son Jordan's T-shirt.

Our dive takes place about five miles offshore from St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. As one of the most visited cruise ship ports in the Caribbean, the island is full of fun, if not quite authentic, attractions like the Atlantis submarine. Any water activity that might appeal to a tenderful of cruise ship evacuees -- fishing, jet-skiing, sailboarding, water skiing, snorkeling and scuba diving -- is available. There were so many parasailors in the air one day that I wondered if the folks in the tower at Cyril E. King Airport should be keeping an eye on them.

I don't mean to sound like one of those snobs who look down on islands that have ATMs and fluoridated drinking water. You can work hard and find some remote pockets in St. Thomas -- the proverbial deserted crescents of white sand backed by verdant mountains rising from the sea.

But mostly you'll find decent resorts and condos on handsome beaches, along with a bewildering number of jewelry and liquor stores, a tiny coterie of Danish colonial buildings, a small theme park, an upmarket golf course and development that ranges from Euro-chic to still-not-rebuilt-from-the-last-hurricane cinder block.

You'll also find a tram leading to a magnificent mountaintop view of Charlotte Amalie. From the bar and restaurant at the top, you enjoy an expansive vista of the coast, the city and the harbor -- and of the cruise ships that provide customers for all of it.

Ah, the cruise ships. Don't even think of going to St. Thomas if you don't like the idea of sharing space with -- or having to navigate your way around -- the thousands of people who visit the island via Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Disney and other cruise lines. In 2003, 817 cruise ships brought more than 1.6 million people to the island for a visit.When the ships drop their human loads, the tiny city of Charlotte Amalie clogs with shoppers, some very polite cabbies form a gantlet by the pier, and buses full of day-trippers scatter among the historic sites, beaches and natural features that appear on guidebooks' must-do lists.

But there are days when no ships are in port and (if the attractions are not closed as a result) you have the run of the place. Even on days when the ships cast their shadows on the capital, you can do some work-arounds. The legendarily beauteous Magens Bay beach is deserted every morning until about 10 a.m. The Mahogany Run Golf Course, a Fazio design with a cluster of cliffside holes called the Devil's Triangle, has wide-open tee times most late afternoons.

Because of the "U.S." part of the U.S. Virgin Islands, the island has a familiar feel. This is either good or bad, depending on one's viewpoint -- and depending on how "ugly" the Americans on either side of a transaction happen to be. Everyone speaks English, traffic is messy, parking can be a chore, and Burger Kings and KFCs are always within reach. There are several unsettling billboards warning locals about the big fines for owning handguns, and street crime is a well-reported problem, especially at night in the menacing alleys just a few blocks from the jewelry stores on Main Street.

On the Atlantis submarine, guests can become submerged in St. Thomas.

But there's still plenty to recommend St. Thomas, including the Atlantis sub, where my two boys and I and about 30 others enjoyed a fine performance by a swarm of curious yellowtail snapper, a small band of indifferent Caribbean reef sharks, two sea turtles, a flutter of stingrays, and waggly schools of blue chromis, French grunts, striped damselfish, beaky parrotfish and groupers the size of kindergartners trailing droopy Rasta mustaches. We saw brain, pillar and fan corals. A handy laminated card chained near the porthole helped identify them all.