All About Bar Harbor Cruise Ships

While cruise ships come into Bar Harbor throughout the summer, the height of cruise ship season comes in September and October when cruises come nearly every day. Sometimes more than one are scheduled for a single day! If you want to know what’s going on related to cruise ships in Bar Harbor, this post has all the information you may need.

Passengers are in town around lunchtime.

Most passengers from the ship are in our town from  11am to 2pm. Even if the last tender to reboard the ship isn’t until 4pm, for instance, most passengers like to be back on board earlier, often for fear of missing the last tender and not getting back on the boat.

Don’t get closer to the ships than 100 meters.

If you are in the harbor kayaking or boating, you must stay at least 100 meters away from all points of the ship. This 100-meter perimeter is a security rule mandated and enforced by the United States Coast Guard. That said, many of these ships are so big that 100 meters away still gets you some very good views of these impressive structures. When the ship is underway and moving, in addition to the 100-meter perimeter, all vessels must be clear at least a quarter of a mile ahead of the cruise ship.

There is a passenger limit.

While there may be more than one cruise ship in town at any given point, there is a maximum of 3,000 passengers allowed into port at any given time. In other words, there is a limit to how many people are in town from a cruise ship at any given point.

Below is a list of cruise ships and some information about them. And if you want to see the full season schedule, take a look here at the cruise ship schedule (Town of Bar Harbor site, PDF) or check out a Google Calendar version you can add to your own calendar assembled by Virtual Tours Downeast.

Ships:

If cruise ships aren’t your favorite, stay tuned for our second post in this series about dealing with cruise ships on Mount Desert Island.