St. John’s first cruise ship visit of the 2022-2023 season is scheduled for two months from today, so we figured this is a great time to start talking about the cruise ships.
The majority of the cruise ships that visit the USVI dock over in St. Thomas, either at the West Indian Company (Havensight) or at Crown Bay in Charlotte Amalie. St. John receives a small number of cruise ships each year, however these are much smaller ships that typically only carry a few hundred guests.
When a ship visits St. John, it anchors just off of Cruz Bay, and then it tenders guests ashore to the bulkhead area in the Cruz Bay creek. This is located between the Customs building and the National Park Visitors’ Center.
Looking ahead at December, SeaDream2 is scheduled to make three stops (thus far) in Cruz Bay – December 11th, December 16th and December 28th. Roughly 110 passengers are slated to be on SeaDream2 each visit.
When ships anchor off of Cruz Bay, it doesn’t affect the island too much because of the small amount of guests onboard. When we have numerous ships visiting St. Thomas, we definitely feel the effects on St. John. On November 17th, for example, more than 20,000 people are scheduled to visit St. Thomas via a cruise ship stop. A good amount of those folks will likely venture over to St. John, often checking out Cruz Bay, Trunk Bay, Maho and more. These are great days to venture a bit further out if you don’t love crowds, like out to the East End or Salt Pond Bay, for example.
According to VINow.com, there will be more than 163,000 guests visiting the US Virgin Islands via 51 ships during the month of November. (St. Croix numbers are included in those figures.) Nearly 217,000 guests are scheduled to visit in December with similar numbers the following month. Click here to check out the current cruise ship schedule on VInow.com.
As of today, it looks like only the three Seadream visits have been added to the schedule for December 2022. It is very likely that there will be additional cruise ship visits in Cruz Bay for the rest of the winter months and into early spring.
So is today’s post exciting? Not really. But is it important when planning your St. John vacation? Absolutely. 🙂
Click the following links to check out the upcoming cruise ship schedules:
October 2022 USVI Cruise Ship Schedule
November 2022 USVI Cruise Ship Schedule
December 2022 USVI Cruise Ship Schedule
January 2023 USVI Cruise Ship Schedule
February 2023 USVI Cruise Ship Schedule
March 2023 USVI Cruise Ship Schedule
April 2023 USVI Cruise Ship Schedule
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