I may have been sick our whole weekend in Sorrento and Capri, but one thing I didn’t miss out on was our excursion into the Blue Grotto, which is famous for only being accessible during peak conditions of low tides and calm seas.

We took what was supposed to be a two-hour boat tour around the island of Capri in the morning. We saw some incredible sights as we jetted through the beautiful teal water of Capri. Our tour guide even pointed out the Dolce & Gabbana yacht as we passed by it and let me tell you, it was a stunner.

Toward the end of our tour, we came upon the Blue Grotto. It’s a cave measuring about 200 feet by 80 feet where the walls don’t touch the bottom, allowing sunlight in through the gap between the bottom of the cave walls and the sea floor. The light filtering in through the water creates the most magical blue color in the water all around you in the dark cave. It’s an experience that’s hard to put into words and while pictures can capture the beauty, they still don’t do the color justice.

Getting into the cave is a whole other story. You have to take a small wooden rowboat powered by a skipper and two oars. Only four people (or five if you’re small enough) can fit in the boat and you just sit on the bottom down in the boat with your shoulder practically flush with the side of the boat.

The rowboats can be accessed by boat from the water, which is what we did, or by steps on land leading down to the sea. From noon to about 2 o’clock, the line is consistently at least an hour long. Of course, that’s the time we got there so we had to sit on our tour boat, that didn’t have shade, rocking in the waves for an hour just waiting for our turn. For someone who was already under the weather and slightly nauseous, that was not an enjoyable experience. I could not have been more grateful to get off that boat and into the little dinghy to go into the grotto.

As I mentioned before, tours of the Blue Grotto aren’t guaranteed. The conditions have to be just right with low tides and calm water and we quickly found out why this was necessary when we went to enter the grotto. To get in, the skipper approaches the low mouth of the grotto and it looks like it would be impossible for just the rowboat to enter it, let alone people on the boat. The mouth is only six feet wide and three feet tall!

The skipper grabs a chain on the side of the mouth and yells for everyone to lay down on the bottom of the boat. Not a great day to wear a skirt, but how was I to know? Everyone including the skipper lays down and as he pulls the chain to guide the boat inside, the whole boat shoots through the mouth and into the cave. When we were cleared to sit up without fear of our heads getting chopped off, we were mesmerized.

The water was so blue and clear where the sun illuminates it from below. I later found out the water in the Blue Grotto is almost 500 feet deep. I’m kind of glad I didn’t know that beforehand. There are quite a few other rowboats inside the grotto at the same time and our skippers even started singing together while paddling around the cave. Their singing echoed off the cave walls and was mixed with the shrieks of other people entering the cave through the miniscule opening. After one lap around, we headed toward the mouth of the cave to go back out.

We repeated the same procedure of lying as flat as possible against the bottom of the boat as we flew through the opening and out into the open water again. We were only in the cave no more than five minutes, but I would highly recommend this experience to anyone visiting Capri. The best time to go for the bluest water is between noon and 2 p.m., which is when lines are the longest, but it was so worth the wait.

I didn’t take many pictures inside because I just wanted to bask in the beauty of this natural wonder and I know those memories will stay with me forever.