How long you actually get at Castaway Cay, measured from 124 port calls

How long is a Castaway Cay day?

The published schedule is eight hours: Disney's ships are listed as arriving at 08:00 and departing at 16:00, with the occasional 10:00 arrival.

We measured it independently and got 07:25 to 16:13.

That comes from our own AIS record — 403,881 satellite and shore-station position fixes for all eight Disney ships, covering 1 January 2024 to 31 March 2026 continuously, plus live tracking since September 2026. Filtering to the berth at Castaway Cay and to fixes where the ship is stationary gives 124 separate port calls across five ships.

The median first stationary fix is 07:25 and the median last is 16:13. That the independently measured window brackets the published 08:00 to 16:00 so closely is the main reason to trust the rest of this page: two entirely separate sources, agreeing.

The difference at each end is manoeuvring. A ship is alongside and stationary before the gangway opens and after the last guest is aboard, so the window we can see is slightly wider than the port call and considerably wider than the time you can actually be on the beach.

Which Disney ship gives you the most time at Castaway Cay?

Which ship you are on is the finding here, and it is not published anywhere else because nobody else holds the positions.

The Disney Magic is the outlier at the good end. Its median departure is 17:00, roughly three quarters of an hour later than every other ship in the fleet, and its median stationary time is 8.4 hours against a fleet median of 6.8.

The Disney Treasure is the outlier at the other end. Its median arrival is 08:45 — nearly ninety minutes after the Wish, the Magic and the Fantasy — and that shows up directly as the shortest island day we measured. Published schedules corroborate it: CruiseMapper lists Treasure calls arriving at 10:00 where other ships arrive at 08:00.

Between the Magic and the Treasure the gap is more than three hours of island time on a day that costs the same either way.

What the numbers do not say

Three limits, and they matter enough to state before anyone plans around this.

Every per-visit figure is a floor, not a measurement of the port call. Our record is built from AIS receivers, and coverage over the Bahamas is not continuous. A gap in reception looks exactly like a ship that left.

That is why the 25th percentile of measured dwell is 3.3 hours — not because any ship made a three-hour call, but because some visits are only partly observed. Forty-eight of the 124 calls were observed at eight hours or more.

The median clock times are the robust number and the mean dwell is not. A gap shortens an individual visit but does not move the middle of a hundred first-arrivals, which is why the arrival and departure columns above are the ones to plan against.

Stationary is not the same as ashore. We measure the ship at the pier below 1.5 knots. Guests are not on the island for all of that: the gangway opens after tie-up and closes before departure, so usable beach time is meaningfully less than the hours column.

Taken together: treat the arrival and departure times as reliable, treat the hours as an upper bound on what you get, and treat the ranking between ships as the useful part.

Why there is no Lookout Cay section

Because we cannot measure it honestly yet, and saying so is more useful than estimating.

Disney's second private destination, Lookout Cay at Lighthouse Point on south Eleuthera, appears in our record at 24.61°N, 76.16°W — with 65 position fixes in total, against 3,303 at Castaway Cay.

That is not a finding about how often ships call there. It is a finding about AIS coverage: the receivers that feed this data are shore stations and satellites, and south Eleuthera is much thinner than the Abacos. Sixty-five fixes cannot support a median, a range, or a comparison between ships.

When the coverage improves or the record lengthens enough, this page will carry Lookout Cay with the same table. Until then it carries this paragraph instead.

How this was measured

The method, so it can be argued with.

Source. Our own AIS ingestion. 403,881 fixes across all eight ships.

And there is a hole in it, which matters more than the total. The public MarineCadastre archive lags about five months, so our backfill runs continuously from 1 January 2024 to 31 March 2026 — 821 days — and then stops. Live ingestion from aisstream only began in September 2026.

April to August 2026 is missing entirely and will be filled as the archive catches up.

Every one of the 124 port calls below sits inside the continuous archive period, so the gap does not affect any figure on this page. It does mean this is a record of 2024 and 2025 with a little of early 2026, not a record of right now.

Geofence. Latitude 26.05 to 26.12, longitude −77.58 to −77.50. The berth itself sits at 26.08°N, 77.54°W, where 3,172 of 3,303 recorded fixes show a speed under 1.5 knots — which is how the pier identifies itself in the data without anyone having to look up its coordinates.

A visit is one ship on one calendar day, Eastern time, with at least four stationary fixes inside that box. Fewer than four and a single stray reading could invent a port call.

Cross-check. The published schedule at CruiseMapper lists Disney ships at Castaway Cay from 08:00 to 16:00, with some 10:00 arrivals. Our measured medians of 07:25 and 16:13, and the later Treasure arrivals, are consistent with both.

The figures are from the record as it stood on 10 September 2026 and will move as it grows. The 2026 season contributes only four calls, because the archive ends on 31 March.