The island is starting to get busy, which means it’s time to keep an eye on the St. Thomas cruise ship schedule.
Our busy season coincides with the winter months in the States. The colder you all are up there, the busier we tend to get down here. This also holds true for the cruise ships. We’ve seen an increase in people visiting St. John over the past month or so, and now I am starting to see a pretty decent uptick in cruise ship visitors.
You may be wondering why this matters when the larger ships dock over in St. Thomas. (We get the smaller ships that anchor off of St. John, which I posted about last week. Click here to read all about that.) Well those folks, like many of you, prefer to spend their day on St. John. Many of those ships provide their own ferry service to St. John, and then their guests hop into taxis and head to the beach. And overwhelmingly, that beach is Trunk Bay.
So if you have a ton of ships docked in St. Thomas, you may want to skip Trunk Bay. Next Wednesday, for example, has more than 15,000 people visiting on five ships in St. Thomas. I’d highly recommend picking another beach that day.
So how do you know when there are a lot of ships scheduled to dock in St. Thomas? VINow.com keeps a comprehensive list on its website. It includes the name of the ship, the number of people expected to be on board, and the hours that it will be in port. Here’s a quick portion of next week’s schedule:
WICO is the dock near Havensight in St. Thomas. CB stands for Crown Bay, which is also in St. Thomas. If a ship is scheduled to anchor off of St. John, it will say Cruz Bay on the schedule.
If you would like to see which ships are scheduled to visit, please click here to visit vinow.com. Schedules are posted months in advance.
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Great advice, Jenn. In addition to checking the cruise ship schedule, we also checkout the Windy app each morning before deciding on a beach for the day. There’s nothing worse than hauling a beach bag, cooler and chairs down to Cinnamon just to find out the wind is howling and throwing up a sand storm! 🙂