TravelTalkOnline Forums Travel and Vacation Forums St. Maarten - St. Martin Seaweed

Last year I was there in June and there was a huge problem with sargassum seaweed almost across the whole island. I was wondering if that has subsided or is it still there? Thanks

It comes and goes and can change daily from one beach to another. Of late it seems to be worse in the Orient and Dawn Beach areas but nothing is guaranteed.

No Sargassum in Dawn Beach for the last couple of weeks, just "normal" weed pulled up from the ocean bed because of rough seas.

We have been at Dawn Beach for 3 1/2 weeks and there has been some seaweed, but it is manageable. It is cleaned up daily and does not stop people from swimming. It is far better than last September when you could not even walk the beach.

Lovely pictures, Maureen! The beach there really has improved since December.

Glad to hear it is much better. It was really disgusting on Dawn for quite a while.

From the pictures that have been posted of Orient, there has been some seaweed there, but not much.

It was on Kim Sha
last Friday & Sat. but gone to-day

Very well said, that is the correct answer to this question. I just came back from 30 days on Orient, of which 2 or 3 days it came in very heavy. Nothing you could predict. The rest of the time none or very very little.

On those heavy days, I would watch the tractors and the new and very cool seaweed machine clean the beach by 8:00am to be almost perfect clean of seaweed. By afternoon it would be a foot deep and maybe 3 feet wide of the stuff.

As I understand it, this is a Caribbean wide situation.

Sorry, I should add this is my observations at La Playa down to Coco Beach. In my afternoon walk the seaweed was always less or none from let's say KonTiki down to Papagayo.

Thank you all for the answers and the beautiful pics.