Where are the Disney ships?

Every large ship broadcasts its position over AIS, a public maritime transponder system, and anyone with a receiver can hear it. We take the feed from aisstream.io on our own server, store a fix every five minutes per ship, and draw this page from our rows. Your browser never talks to the AIS network — partly because their terms require it, and partly because it means the map works with JavaScript switched off.

A gap is normal and is not a fault, and here it is a big one. Our feed is terrestrial: it hears a ship through volunteer shore receivers rather than through satellites. A ship out of range of a contributing receiver is transmitting perfectly well and simply does not reach us.

Measured on 8 September 2026, because guessing at this would be worse than saying it. In twenty-four hours our recorder received 32 position frames, every one of them the Disney Dream, which was crossing the Irish Sea towards Liverpool. The other seven ships produced nothing at all — not one frame, ever.

That is not the ships being quiet, and it is worth being precise about why. Probing the feed over Florida and the Bahamas heard 462 different vessels in three minutes and no Disney ship among them. At the same moment, a commercial tracker had the Disney Wonder off the coast of British Columbia with a position one minute old, and the Disney Wish in the Bahamas with one nineteen hours old. So the Wonder is being heard right now by networks that are not ours, and the Wish is hard for everybody.

The honest summary: this free feed's contributor network reaches some waters and not others, and in practice it has shown us one ship out of eight. That is the whole reason the trackers that charge money buy satellite AIS. Anything older than 6 hours loses its ring here and carries its date, because the alternative is a map that looks equally confident whether a position is four minutes or four months old.

The part nobody else keeps is the history. Every Disney ship tracker shows the present and discards it, so none of them can tell you whether a sailing actually made Castaway Cay or how long it stayed. We keep every fix, and the measured calls are below. Ours starts 2024-01-01 and holds 407,205 positions.

Most of that we did not record — we recovered it. The US Coast Guard publishes its decoded AIS archive through MarineCadastre in the public domain, so the years before this site existed are not lost, they are just nobody's priority to load. We loaded the Disney fleet out of it: 2024-01-01 to 2026-03-31, and only the years each ship was actually in service, so a hull is never plotted before its maiden voyage. That archive covers US waters only and it lags real time by months, which is exactly why it is history and not a tracker.

Positions are approximate to the projection used here: a world map rounds a coastline to about eleven kilometres, so read the map for where a ship broadly is and the table for where it says it is.