RJE

Hello everyone. I am debating on what to do from our dock in Crown Bay at St Thomas next week. I am referencing the excursion STY4, "St. John on your own" that says it runs from 9am to 1pm. Our ship is docked from 7am to 4pm. I am concerned that the excursion won't provide us much time on St. John - I'm assuming that we leave at 9am, arrive at 9:45, then have to be back at 12:15 or earlier, leaving just 2.5 hours on St. John. If anyone has been on this particular excursion, could you confirm that is how they time it? I read about person saying that they actually had 5-6 hours total according to their timestamps. This excursion would be vs taking a taxi to Red Hook, then Red Hook to Cruz Bay via ferry. I am not an experienced cruiser but read that it can take 30min-1hr after our 7am dock time to actually get off the ship. So if we don't get off until 7:45 we could make the 8:30 ferry to Cruz Bay, meaning we would arrive at 8:50. We would then get back to the Cruz bay ferry to Red Hook at 12:50 to catch the 1pm, meaning we would have 4 hours total on St John. Does that sound reasonable?

We are sailing in 3 weeks on Symphony, out of Miami and have a check in time of 1:30. I've read/seen online that it can take a while to get through everything to get on board and that they will not accept us outside of our time. I don't know the layout of the port either, so what time would be best for us to physically get dropped off at the port in order to make our 1:30 time? Thanks in advance

I'm going to try wrapping the tag in packing tape, basically a cheapo laminate. I've heard it works well.