Hi Tom
The format of the cruise is "you are on vacation...no schedules, no must dos (except for the fire/emergency drill the 1st day)". You can chose to do reserved seating for dining at a certain time (like 6:00pm) or you can do walk in sit down anytime from like 7:30am till 10:00pm (I think). The cafeteria buffet is open almost 24 hours with something available. If lobster is being served you can have 10 of them if you want (even in the sit down...they will go back and get you another serving if you ask). At dinner you can chose your table size for the cruise...from just 2 of you to up to 12 person table. In the buffet you can sit where you want. We almost always had seating to ourselves in the buffet. In the dining we were at a 8 top table which I thought was perfect.
The crab boat and train ride were excursions for us (you pay for those separately). There were probably 30 or more excursions you could pick from with activity levels from mild to very active (zip line, kayaking, etc). For the excursions you do have a certain time you have to be at the pick up meet up point.
All those little pamplets I put in the video near the end, each of those is a daily "newsletter" which contains a schedule of the ships daily events...when and where things are going on. It's up to you to decide if you which you want to go to. And many of the lounges have live music for most of the day. There was a "jazz" lounge...John and I loved that one.
Another add on that we didn't know about when we 1st booked the cruise were the "beverage packages". You have to buy at least a basic package per person. We opted for what they called a "classic non-alcoholic" package which gave us unlimited specialty bottled water, pops of any kind/name brand, specialty coffees, and frozen blended non-alcoholic drinks. All of these are unlimited during your cruise and you don't pay anything extra for them as the package price covers them. There are also alcohol included packages available but those are quite a bit pricier. I was afraid we were to purchase one of those we would feel the need to drink cocktails or wine all day long to get our monies worth. I think we made a good choice. You can still get a glass of wine or a cocktail at the lounges or dinner but you have to pay for those. We did get some wine with a couple of dinners.