Tuesday 6:00 p.m. EST: Hurricane Ernesto has maximum sustained winds of 80 mph winds and moving is west at 15 mph.
Cruise Changes:
Carnival Freedom: Stops in ports Ocho Rios, Jamaica and Grand Cayman have been swapped with each other.
Carnival Legend: The ship will skip the ports of Belize and Mahogany Bay, Honduras and will now be stopping in Montego Bay, Jamaica.
Carnival Magic: The cruise line has announced that the itinerary will change for this weeks cruise but hasn’t yet decided on the exact ports of call that will be visited.
Carnival has announced that the Carnival Triumph will switch 2 port days due to the storm. The ship will leave Galveston, Texas today and will now stop in Cozumel on Monday and Progreso on Tuesday.
Visit Carnival.com for the latest updates on their ship’s itineraries.
The Disney Fantasy, that is sailing out of Port Canaveral on Saturday, will be sailing to the Eastern Caribbean this coming week instead of to the Western Caribbean.
Original Article: Tropical Storm Ernesto, the 5th tropical storm of the 2012 hurricane season, formed just west of popular vacation spots in the southern Caribbean. Ernesto currently has maximum sustained winds of 65 mph and is moving west at 12 mph.
The storm is currently located a few hundred miles south of Jamaica and a tropical storm watch is in effect Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, and for the coast of Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, and parts of Mexico.
Current models have Ernesto heading toward the Yucatan Peninsula, Cozumel, and the Gulf of Mexico by the beginning of next week. The storm is expected to pass south of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands. The National Hurricane Center predicts the storm will become Hurricane Ernesto sometime on Monday. Tropical storms become hurricanes when winds exceed 74 mph.
However, it is important to note that tropical storms and hurricanes can be extremely hard to predict. The 2012 hurricane season (June 1-November 30) started off early with 2 named storms before June 1. However, July was a quiet month in tropical waters as there were no tropical storms formed.
Cruise Fever will continue to monitor this storm and will update this page as cruise lines make any changes to cruise itineraries.
It is worth noting that cruises are rarely canceled due to tropical storms and hurricanes. Cruise ships will often change or miss ports to stay out of the path of storms.
