The Port:
Avalon Bay, Santa Catalina Island—22 miles off the Southern California coast. There is NO cruise dock: this is a 100% tender port.
Key Insight:
Ships anchor about ¼ mile offshore and tender guests to the Cabrillo Mole. Tendering is weather-dependent—heavy swell or wind can delay it, or (rarely) cancel the visit entirely.
Avalon’s 1929 Art Deco icon—despite the name, never a gambling hall. It holds a grand circular ballroom and the ornate Avalon Theatre with a working pipe organ. The Discover the Casino tour covers its Hollywood history; a Behind-the-Scenes tour adds restricted areas. ~10–15min walk north.
See the Lover’s Cove Marine Preserve without getting wet. The semi-submarine glides below the surface through golden kelp forests full of bright-orange Garibaldi; the classic glass-bottom boat is the cheaper, quicker option. Both depart steps from the tender landing. Great for all ages.
Five zip lines drop roughly 600ft down Descanso Canyon at speeds nearing 35mph, with ocean views the whole way. About 2 hours including the narrated ride up. Reserve well ahead—spots sell out on cruise days. Closed-toe shoes required; weight limits apply.
Avalon is largely car-free, so a rented golf cart is the classic way to explore. Wind up to the Wrigley Memorial, panoramic overlooks, and residential hills. Carts seat 4–6; rentals are hourly (2 hours is typical); cash is preferred, and a valid license is required. Note: carts cannot enter the protected interior.
The only way to reach Catalina’s wild interior—88% of the island is protected Conservancy land closed to private vehicles. Open-air Hummer/Jeep safaris (Cape Canyon) or the narrated Skyline Drive climb ~1,600ft past canyons, hidden coves, the free-roaming bison herd, and the historic Airport in the Sky.
Just past the Casino, Descanso Beach Club offers a private cove with a beachfront bar, chairs, and cabanas. The adjacent Casino Point Dive Park and nearby Lover’s Cove are free, easy-entry snorkel spots inside a marine preserve. Gear is available to rent on-site; guided snorkel tours from ~$59. Water is cool—wetsuit advised.
Golden Rule: Catalina is a tender port: the last tender leaves well before all-aboard, and lines build late in the day. Your ship’s all-aboard time is the LAST moment you can board—not when you should reach the Mole.
RESULT: Be at the Cabrillo Mole by 3:15pm
Catalina Island port-day questions, answered
Answers verified August 2026 against port-operator and official sources.
It is the story everyone tells, and it does not hold up. Fourteen bison were landed on Catalina in the winter of 1924, and the usual account credits a silent Western - most often The Vanishing American - whose crew supposedly abandoned them. The trouble is that there are no bison in that film, and much of it was shot in Arizona; the Catalina museum's own curator debunked the tale on television back in the 1990s, and a 1938 island newspaper piece pointed to a different film entirely. The likelier explanation is duller: surplus animals parked on the island as standing stock for future productions. Either way, they stayed, and the herd is now actively managed rather than left to grow.
Almost everything except the tender ride. Two Harbors is a hamlet at the island's narrow waist - a general store, a handful of buildings, and a beach - rather than a town, so the Casino, the shops, the golf carts, the glass-bottom boats, and the zip line are all back in Avalon and not reachable on foot. What you get instead is quiet: kayaking, snorkeling straight off the beach, hiking, and a genuinely undeveloped stretch of coast. It is a good day if you were coming for the outdoors and a thin one if you were coming for Avalon, so check which anchorage your ship uses before you plan around this page's Top Six.
You can get in without a guide, but not without a ticket. The operator sells a self-guided general admission that lets you walk the Avalon Theatre, the circular Wrigley ballroom, the Marine Bar, and the ocean promenade at your own pace, and a separate guided backstage tour that adds the restricted areas. There is no free public walk-through of the interior. What is free is the outside: the promenade wrapping the building and the walk out to Casino Point cost nothing, and the dive park directly below is where most of the photographs of the building are actually taken from.
The hillside loop above the bay and the road out toward the Wrigley Memorial - and that is genuinely about all you can fit into an hour. Two limits shape the route: carts cannot enter the protected interior at all, which the page already flags, and, less obviously, they are barred from certain streets inside Avalon itself, so the rental company hands you a marked map of where you may drive. Take it seriously, because the fines are real. If the Wrigley Memorial and Botanic Garden is the thing you want, the cart is the comfortable way to do it; on foot it is a solid uphill walk each way.
Because Avalon is the only city in California with state-granted power to cap how many vehicles exist inside its limits, an authority granted by state legislation in the 1980s. The cap sits in the hundreds, two existing permits generally have to disappear before a new residential one is issued, and fewer than ten become available in a typical year - which is why the waiting list is measured in decades rather than months. That is also why there are no rental cars here: the golf cart is not a tourist novelty; it is how people get around the island.
They did, for the better part of thirty years. William Wrigley Jr owned both Catalina and the Cubs, so from the early 1920s until 1951 the team trained on the island, on a field laid out to Wrigley Field's own infield dimensions. The ballpark itself came down in the 1960s and only a marker shows where it stood, but the clubhouse Wrigley built for the team survives as the Catalina Island Country Club, walkable or a short cart ride from town. The jerseys, tickets, and photographs are in the Catalina Museum for Art and History on Metropole Avenue, a few minutes inland from the waterfront and a useful indoor option if the weather turns.
Probably not during a port day, and it is worth knowing why rather than hoping. The Catalina island fox exists nowhere else on earth and is the smallest wild canid in North America, roughly cat-sized; a canine distemper outbreak in 1999 cut the population from over a thousand to around a hundred, and the recovery since is held up as one of the fastest for any protected mammal in the United States. They are mostly active at dawn and dusk and mostly live in the interior, so an afternoon on Crescent Avenue will not produce one. An interior safari gives you a chance, not a promise - and if you do see one, keep your distance, because their vulnerability to disease carried in from the mainland is precisely why they are still listed.
This guide draws on the official institutions below, cross-checked against current cruise schedules and traveler reports.
Listed sources are not affiliated with and do not endorse CruiseProdigy.
Researched and reviewed by Richard Nicholson, founder of CruiseProdigy. · Spotted an update? Report it →