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.