Three Special Thames River Cruises
Three Special Thames River Cruises give Connecticut Maritime Heritage Festival visitors three very different ways to experience New London and Groton from the water September 12 and 13, from free transportation between festival sites to narrated history cruises and a Saturday night trip beneath a 300-drone light show.
Thames River Heritage Park is expanding its normal role during festival weekend with free Hop On, Hop Off Harbor Cruises Saturday and Sunday, four free 45-minute historic boat tours Sunday, and a special Saturday night Drone Show Cruise that heads downriver toward New London Ledge Light before returning to the harbor for the festival’s nighttime spectacle.
Together, the trips also demonstrate what makes Thames River Heritage Park a little unusual.
It isn’t one park.
It’s a network of historic and cultural sites spread along both shores of the Thames River, with the river itself serving as the connection between them.
And for one weekend, much of that connection is free.
1. Ride the Thames for Free All Weekend
The most useful cruise of the weekend may also be the simplest.
Thames River Heritage Park’s Hop On, Hop Off Harbor Cruise will be completely free from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, with the Connecticut Maritime Heritage Festival sponsoring the service.
Normally, an adult Harbor Cruise ticket costs $15.
During the festival, visitors can simply use the boats to move among three major locations:
Fort Trumbull State Park in New London
City Pier in downtown New London
Thames River Landing in Groton
There is an important change from the Heritage Park’s regular summer schedule.
During festival weekend, there will be no fixed departure or arrival times. The boats will travel continuously among the three landings, and boarding will be first-come, first-served.
That makes the service part transportation and part attraction.
Someone attending the festival at Fort Trumbull can board a boat, cross the harbor to Groton, get off to explore and later catch another boat back to downtown New London.
Or visitors can simply stay aboard and see the harbor from the water.
The Boats Have a Navy History of Their Own
Even the vessels carrying festival visitors are pieces of maritime history.
Thames River Heritage Park operates refurbished former U.S. Navy liberty boats.
Utility boats like these weren’t designed as sightseeing vessels. They transported sailors between larger Navy ships and shore, including taking crews ashore for “liberty,” the Navy term for authorized time away from a ship.
One of the Heritage Park boats was assigned to the USS La Salle, which served as flagship for Commander Middle East Force beginning in 1988.
Another was assigned to the USS Hunley, a submarine tender that supported the Navy’s Polaris ballistic-missile submarine fleet.
Now, instead of carrying sailors ashore, the old Navy boats carry visitors through the same harbor that remains home to one of America’s most important naval communities.
It’s particularly fitting in 2026.
The United States is celebrating the Navy’s 250th anniversary, while the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London is celebrating its 150th.
A River Where American Naval History Is Still Happening
The scenery from the boat isn’t simply historic.
The Thames remains a working military and commercial river.
The U.S. Coast Guard Academy occupies the New London shoreline farther upriver.
Across the Thames in Groton is Naval Submarine Base New London, the Navy’s primary East Coast submarine base and a place so closely associated with undersea warfare that Groton calls itself the Submarine Capital of the World.
Nearby is the historic USS Nautilus, the world’s first operational nuclear-powered submarine.
Downriver, Fort Trumbull stands near the entrance to New London Harbor, while ferries, fishing boats, recreational craft, commercial traffic and military vessels continue using the water around it.
But the history stretches much farther back.
New London became one of America’s major whaling ports during the 19th century.
The river witnessed colonial trade, privateering and the American Revolution.
Indigenous people had lived along and traveled these waters for thousands of years before Europeans arrived.
The Heritage Park’s weekend cruises approach those overlapping histories in very different ways.
2. Sunday Brings Four Free 45-Minute History Cruises
Sunday offers the best deal for visitors who want more than transportation.
Thames River Heritage Park will operate four free narrated historic boat tours from City Pier in New London.
These aren’t the regular Hop On, Hop Off rides.
Each is a 45-minute mini-tour led by a Heritage Park docent, concentrating on a particular part of the region’s history.
Normally, Thames River Heritage Park’s full historic boat tours cost $35 for adults.
The four festival mini-tours are free, sponsored by the Connecticut Maritime Heritage Festival, and available first-come, first-served.
Two different subjects alternate throughout the afternoon.
11 a.m. — Black Heritage Along the Thames: The Half That’s Never Been Told
The first departure introduces stories that were often missing from traditional accounts of New London’s history.
Black Heritage Along the Thames: The Half That’s Never Been Told draws from Thames River Heritage Park’s larger tour of the same name, which explores approximately 400 years of local history through the experiences and contributions of the region’s Black community.
That history begins long before the Civil War.
Slavery existed in colonial Connecticut.
Enslaved people lived and worked in New London and Groton, including within households whose surviving homes and documents are now used to interpret colonial life.
Black sailors worked from New London’s waterfront.
The city’s history intersects with abolition, education, military service and the long struggle for civil rights.
And one of the most consequential events in American history arrived in New London Harbor aboard a ship in 1839.
The schooner La Amistad was seized off Long Island after captive Africans aboard the vessel revolted against the men illegally transporting them into slavery.
The ship was brought to New London.
The legal battle that followed eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where former President John Quincy Adams helped argue the Africans’ case.
The Court ruled in their favor in 1841.
It is one of the most internationally significant stories connected to the New London waterfront, but it is only one part of the Black history preserved along the Thames.
Departure: Sunday at 11 a.m. from City Pier
Noon — The Mashantucket Pequot’s Story
At noon, the perspective shifts much farther back.
The Mashantucket Pequot’s Story focuses on the Indigenous history of the region and the people who lived here long before New London or Groton existed.
The Pequot homeland historically encompassed portions of southeastern Connecticut.
The waterways of the region weren’t barriers separating communities. They were transportation corridors and sources of food, trade and communication.
Then European colonization transformed the landscape.
Tensions over land, trade and political power culminated in the Pequot War of 1636–1637, one of the defining conflicts of early colonial New England.
The war devastated the Pequot population, but it did not eliminate the Pequot people.
That distinction matters.
For generations, popular histories often treated Native nations as if they disappeared when a particular colonial-era chapter ended.
The Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation is very much a living community today, headquartered just a few miles from the Thames River.
The tour offers a chance to look at familiar southeastern Connecticut shoreline through a story that began thousands of years before the forts, submarines and whaling ships.
Departure: Sunday at noon from City Pier
1 p.m. — Black Heritage Along the Thames
The Black heritage mini-tour receives a second departure at 1 p.m.
That gives visitors who spend the morning elsewhere at the festival another opportunity to take the 45-minute narrated cruise.
Departure: Sunday at 1 p.m. from City Pier
2 p.m. — The Mashantucket Pequot’s Story
The final free history cruise of the weekend repeats the Mashantucket Pequot program at 2 p.m.
All four tours depart from City Pier in downtown New London, not from the other Hop On, Hop Off landings.
And because they’re free and first-come, first-served, arriving early makes sense.
Departure: Sunday at 2 p.m. from City Pier
3. Saturday Night Goes From History to 300 Drones
Saturday’s third special cruise is completely different.
After the daytime festival winds down and the sun disappears, Thames River Heritage Park heads back onto the water for its Connecticut Maritime Heritage Festival Drone Show Cruise.
The evening begins with a trip down the Thames River.
Weather and marine traffic permitting, the boat will continue beyond New London Harbor toward New London Ledge Light, the distinctive lighthouse sitting near the mouth of the Thames.
Then it turns around.
The boat returns to position itself for a front-row view of the festival’s 300-drone light show over the New London waterfront.
Instead of watching from the shore, passengers watch from the water beneath the display.
New London Ledge Light Is Worth the Trip by Itself
Even before the drones appear, the cruise has an unusual destination.
New London Ledge Light stands at the entrance to the Thames River, where New London Harbor opens toward Long Island Sound.
Completed in 1909, it doesn’t resemble the stereotypical round New England lighthouse.
Instead, the three-story brick building looks almost like a substantial waterfront home that somebody inexplicably placed in the middle of the water and then put a lantern on top.
Local tradition has also supplied the lighthouse with its own ghost.
For decades, stories have circulated about “Ernie,” the supposed spirit of an early keeper said to haunt the lighthouse.
The legend has become part of Ledge Light’s identity, although the more elaborate details attached to Ernie are folklore rather than established history.
From the Drone Show Cruise, passengers get a nighttime maritime trip toward one of the region’s most recognizable navigational landmarks before returning to the festival.
Then 300 Drones Take Over the Sky
The show waiting back in New London Harbor is part of the America’s Navy 250 Celebration.
Three hundred illuminated drones will fly coordinated patterns over the waterfront, synchronized with music.
The planned display celebrates 250 years of the United States Navy, using the drones to form patriotic imagery and naval symbols above the harbor.
It’s a striking place to do it.
New London’s relationship with the Navy stretches back to the Revolutionary era, while the Groton side of the Thames became one of the most important submarine-building and submarine-operating centers in the world.
From the cruise boat, passengers will be watching a 21st-century aerial light show about American naval history while floating in the middle of a river where much of that history actually happened.
One Timing Detail Is Worth Watching
Thames River Heritage Park currently has two slightly different departure times published for the Drone Show Cruise.
The dedicated festival-weekend schedule lists departure at 7:55 p.m.
A more recent Heritage Park event announcement lists 7:45 p.m.
Because this is a ticketed trip and the difference could result in someone literally missing the boat, passengers should use the departure time shown on their ticket confirmation and verify it with Thames River Heritage Park before Saturday.
The Heritage Park also notes that only a small number of seats remained when it published its latest festival information.
Passengers may bring snacks and drinks aboard, but glass is prohibited, and there is no restroom on the boat.
The trip to Ledge Light is also conditional on weather and boat traffic.
These Aren’t ADA-Accessible Tour Boats
There’s another important practical consideration for all three experiences.
The Heritage Park’s refurbished Navy boats are not ADA compliant.
Passengers must be capable of walking up and down four stairs and boarding the vessel independently with only minimal courtesy assistance from the crew.
They must also be capable of disembarking without assistance if an emergency requires it.
The boats do not have restrooms.
The Heritage Park encourages passengers who require assistance to travel with a companion, but the captain ultimately determines whether a passenger can safely board.
That’s particularly important information for anyone considering the cruises as an easy alternative to walking around the festival.
For some visitors, they may not be.
The Free Harbor Cruise Can Change How You Do the Festival
For visitors who can board safely, the free Hop On, Hop Off service creates an interesting possibility.
Don’t think of the Connecticut Maritime Heritage Festival as one event site.
Think of the Thames as its main street.
Start at Fort Trumbull.
Board an old Navy liberty boat.
Cross to Groton.
Come back to City Pier.
Explore downtown New London.
On Sunday, trade the transportation ride for a narrated mini-tour and learn the stories of Black residents or the Mashantucket Pequot people who shaped the region.
And Saturday night, those with Drone Show Cruise tickets can return to the river after dark, head toward Ledge Light and finish beneath 300 points of light moving across the sky.
For most of the year, the Thames separates New London from Groton.
For Connecticut Maritime Heritage Festival weekend, Thames River Heritage Park turns it into the thing connecting everything together.
Details
Event: Three Special Thames River Cruises at the Connecticut Maritime Heritage Festival
Presented By: Thames River Heritage Park
Festival: Connecticut Maritime Heritage Festival
Dates: Saturday, September 12 and Sunday, September 13, 2026
Location: Thames River, New London and Groton
Hop On, Hop Off Harbor Cruise
Dates: Saturday and Sunday
Time: 10 a.m.–5 p.m.
Admission: Free during festival weekend
Boarding: First-come, first-served
Schedule: Continuous loop with no fixed departure or arrival times during the festival
Stops: Fort Trumbull State Park, City Pier and Thames River Landing in Groton
Free Historic Boat Tours
Date: Sunday, September 13
Length: Approximately 45 minutes each
Admission: Free
Boarding: First-come, first-served
Departure Location: City Pier, New London
11 a.m.: Black Heritage Along the Thames: The Half That’s Never Been Told
Noon: The Mashantucket Pequot’s Story
1 p.m.: Black Heritage Along the Thames: The Half That’s Never Been Told
2 p.m.: The Mashantucket Pequot’s Story
Drone Show Cruise
Date: Saturday, September 12
Departure: Heritage Park currently publishes both 7:45 and 7:55 p.m.; passengers should follow their ticket confirmation and verify the departure time before arriving
Route: Down the Thames River and, weather and boat traffic permitting, out to New London Ledge Light before returning for the drone show
Drone Show: 300-drone display synchronized to music as part of America’s Navy 250 Celebration
Tickets: Advance ticket purchase required; Heritage Park reports limited availability
Food and Drink: Snacks and drinks may be brought aboard; no glass
Restrooms: None aboard
Accessibility: Heritage Park’s former Navy utility boats are not ADA compliant. Passengers must be able to negotiate four stairs and independently board and disembark with minimal courtesy assistance.
Boat Operations: 860-407-5655
Weather: Boat operations and the Ledge Light portion of the evening cruise are weather-dependent; check with Thames River Heritage Park for current operating information.
More information is available at the Event Website link below.
Featured image is an artistic representation inspired by the event and may not depict the actual people, location, or activities shown.