The Best Ways To Avoid Cruise Ship Crowds On Your Grand Cayman Vacation

If you live in George Town on Grand Cayman Island, you know better than to set foot in Rackham's around 3 p.m. on certain days of the week. That's when the groovy tiki bar named after pirate Jack Rackham is overrun with cruise ship passengers having one for the road — make that one for the sea — before reboarding their vessels at 4 p.m. By 4:05 p.m., Rackham's belongs to the locals once again. If you're in town on vacation, chances are you want to avoid those straw-hatted throngs as much as local residents do, and luckily, the Grand Cayman Port Authority (GCPA) has your back.

The GCPA publishes a cruise ship schedule on its website that lists not only the names of the boats that will be arriving, when they will dock, and when they will leave, but a head count with totals for the day as well. This info allows you to avoid visiting popular attractions like Stingray City, Seven Mile Beach, or the Turtle Farm on a Tuesday when the MSC Seascape and Disney Fantasy are disgorging a total of nearly 10,000 passengers for the day. That's not just a crowd; that's a horde!

Consulting the calendar, you'll see that there are always a handful of days, usually weekdays, when there's a hole in the schedule with no cruise ships in town at all. If you book your travel with this in mind, you can strategically visit the most popular attractions happy and horde-free.

Sometimes you can swap a popular activity for a hidden gem. Smith Barcadere, or Smith Cove, is a lovely snorkeling spot, and one of the 10 best beaches in the Cayman Islands, but it's likely to be packed on cruise ship days, as it's right next to the port. Instead, you'll have better luck at lesser-known Spotts Beach, where you can swim near wild sea turtles.

However, you shouldn't give some attractions a pass just because the only day you can visit them coincides with six cruise ships docking at once. Stingray City (pictured) is the top attraction in Grand Cayman, and marketed heavily to cruise ships, as it's just the right bite-sized activity for a port day. It's a shallow, offshore sand bar you can only get to by boat, where you can wade in waist-deep water, shuffling your feet as you go, and get up close and personal with the population of around 50 rays that live there. To avoid the crowds, just book the first tour boat of the day (there are even sunrise tours) or else go after 2 p.m., by which time the cruisers will have begun heading back to port.

Anthony Bourdain's trick for finding the best local restaurants will work equally well for avoiding cruise ship passengers: Find out where the locals eat, and go there. Bourdain especially liked to visit local food markets, where there are usually food stalls selling local cuisine, and George Town's splendid Hamlin Stephenson Farmer's Market at the Cricket Grounds is no exception, packed with chefs, artisans, and farmers instead of tourists.

At lunchtime, you can get fresh squeezed lemonade and cassava cakes from Estella's, or breadfruit taco from Smokies Cayman. By the time the dinner hour rolls around, you'll have the island to yourself again — relatively speaking. Bourdain also relied on local food bloggers, and following in his footsteps, you now have Instagram's @caymanislandfoodie to thank for discovering the mouthwatering conch fritters at beachfront shack Heritage Kitchen.

One sure-fire way to completely avoid throngs of cruise ship daytrippers on Seven Mile Beach (pictured above, on a slow day) is to stay at a hotel with a private beach, like the Kimpton Seafire Resort, a Tripadvisor Best of the Best Traveler's Choice award winner. This high-design boutique property's section of beach is one of the few on Seven Mile Beach where there's great snorkeling right offshore. Not only will the hotel furnish you with all the snorkel gear you need, they'll even loan you a GoPro to capture the magic.