Unless another court ruling overturns Bar Harbor’s new cruise ship limits, 2025 is expected to be the last year that large passenger ships drop anchor in Frenchman Bay.
But it could be sooner than that — or may have already passed — if a judge decides that the town must enforce the new limits this year.
“Large” can be a relative term when the smallest cruise ships that visit Bar Harbor are more than 200 feet long and can accommodate 100 paid passengers. Most of the ships that visit Bar Harbor, Maine’s busiest cruise ship port, are closer to 1,000 feet long and carry between 1,800 and 4,000 passengers per voyage.
It is these larger ships that effectively will be banned from visiting the tourist destination when the town’s new daily limit of 1,000 passengers per day starts being enforced. Of Bar Harbor’s current 104 cruise ship visits scheduled for this year, 70 would be prohibited if the daily limit was to go into effect before May 2, when the first large ship of the year, carrying nearly 2,400 passengers, is expected to arrive.
Of the ships that will still be allowed, most carry approximately 100 to 200 passengers and rarely do two of them appear in Bar Harbor on the same day. As a result, the town most likely will get only a couple hundred passengers ashore on cruise ship days — below the daily 1,000-passenger limit and far below the 2,000 to 5,000 passengers that have sometimes come ashore when multiple ships are in town at the same time.
But when the new limit will be fully enforced is a heated subject of debate in Bar Harbor, where the council says it will honor reservations made by large ships before voters approved the new limits on Nov. 8, 2022. Charles Sidman, a local resident who spearheaded the referendum vote, is taking the town to court to try to legally compel it to enforce the cap now.
In addition, a coalition of local businesses is challenging the new daily limit in federal court, arguing that it runs counter to federal maritime law and is unfairly onerous. A federal judge upheld the new daily limit in February, but the business group has said it intends to appeal the decision.
Regardless of which entity prevails in court, the number of annual cruise ship visits to Bar Harbor, which gets millions of visitors each year who arrive each year by car or bus, already is declining and likely will never regain the volume of recent years.
Outside the COVID-19 pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 — when the global cruise ship industry ground to a halt and no ships came to Bar Harbor — the town recently has averaged roughly 150 visits each year, all between late April and early November, and received an annual total between 200,000 and 250,000 passengers. This year, even if large ships are allowed, the town will get fewer than 200,000 passengers for the first time — apart from 2020 and 2021 — since 2016.
After cruise ships first started showing up sporadically off Bar Harbor in the 1980s, their numbers jumped above 50 per year in 2001 and then above 100 per year in 2008. The town’s first year with more than 100,000 cruise ship passengers was in 2004, when it welcomed 87 ships into Frenchman Bay.
Along the way, the town has worked with local cruise industry officials to find ways to manage the flow of passengers to and from the downtown waterfront. It moved anchorage points in the bay behind the Porcupine Islands to make the ships less visually imposing from downtown, and tried making adjustments to how tour buses come and go from West Street to relieve traffic congestion, even as the number of visits consistently increased over time.
But as complaints continued to come in, the town decided in 2021 — when annual visits to Acadia National Park soared to more than 4 million — to conduct a survey to ask local people what they thought about local cruise ship traffic. More than half of the survey’s respondents said the volume of cruise ship visits was hurting the town.
With the writing on the wall, both town officials and local cruise industry officials began discussing how to reduce the number of large ships that visit each year.
Together, they came up with a plan to impose a daily passenger cap of 3,800 passengers for May, June, September and October, and a daily cap of 3,500 for July and August. They also agreed on monthly caps of 30,000 passengers in May and June, 40,000 in July and August, and 65,000 in September and October.
But Sidman’s 2022 citizens’ petition effort, which led to the November referendum that year, derailed that plan.
For now, with Bar Harbor officials saying they plan to honor large cruise ship reservations made prior to the November 8, 2022 vote, the number of visits scheduled for 2025 stands at 18, all of which are large ships that together would bring nearly 57,000 ship passengers to town between late August and early October. The Regal Princess, which carries 3,560 passengers, would be the final large ship to visit Bar Harbor, on Oct. 28, 2025.
All large ship reservation requests that have come in since residents approved the daily 1,000-passenger cap have been denied, according to town officials.