Boat Tours & Day Cruises from Split

Twenty well-reviewed boats leave Split on a normal summer day, priced from $23 to $407, in four routes. Blue Lagoon speedboat runs from $65 are half a day at Krknjaši bay and two more islands. Five-island Blue Cave trips from $92 cross to Biševo and Vis and return via Hvar. Hvar, Brač and Pakleni cruises from $86 are the slow island day. The Krka trip at $37 is not really a sea day at all.

Split's advantage over most Adriatic ports is that the boats start where you are staying. Matejuška, the fishermen's quay at the western end of the Riva, is five minutes on foot from Diocletian's Palace and sends out most speedboats; the Riva itself takes the cruisers and the party boats. Nothing needs a bus — unless your voucher says Trogir or Kaštela, and four of these boats do.

If your only goal is to stand on an island, the public boats do it for a few euro: Jadrolinija's line 631 to Supetar on Brač is €6.50, and the Krilo catamarans reach Hvar Town in about an hour. What no scheduled ferry does is Biševo's Blue Cave, the swim stops or the Blue Lagoon. The arithmetic is below, with the fees collected in cash at the far end.

Matejuška is the working fishermen's quay at the western end of the Riva, below Marjan hill, and most speedboats load there — five minutes on foot from Diocletian's Palace, close enough that the meeting time on a Blue Lagoon voucher assumes you walked. It is crowded at 08:30, operators hold a sign with the boat's name, and the boat is often rafted second or third out, so you cross other hulls to reach it.

The Riva and Obala Lazareta, running east towards the city port, take the larger craft: cruisers on the all-inclusive island days and the party boats, which need a gangway rather than a step down onto a deck. Gat sv. Duje and its neighbours are the city port proper, where Jadrolinija and Krilo berth alongside the Ancona ferry — few excursions use it, but the public services that undercut them do.

Then the trap. Four listings here are sold as Split/Trogir or Split/Kaštela/Trogir: tour 11, tour 13, tour 16 and the Trogir-based tour 19. Trogir is 30 kilometres west. Promet Split's line 37 covers it for €2.50 from the driver or €1.25 in the operator's app, in roughly 40 minutes with airport traffic in it — manageable if you read the voucher the night before, a lost booking if you read it on the quay at Matejuška.

Rain rarely cancels a boat out of Split. Wind does, and here it has three names. The bura falls off the mountains behind the city from the northeast, arrives with a hard clear sky, and can take the ferry lines down with it in the cold months. The jugo blows in warm and damp from the southeast, builds a long swell over a day or two and holds it after the wind drops — it is the wind that closes the Blue Cave, because the entrance is low and narrow and half a metre of swell is enough for the cave authority to stop the transfer boats.

The maestral is the one you want: a thermal wind filling in from the northwest as the mainland heats through the afternoon, blowing from about mid-May to mid-September and dying at sunset. It is why morning departures are the reliable ones — at 08:00 the sea off Matejuška is usually flat, and by 15:00 it is not. If the forecast says jugo, take a covered cruiser rather than a speedboat.