Starhorse Shipping Lines Schedules 2026

Starhorse Shipping Lines works southern Luzon and the Visayas, and its three routes are so different in scale that they barely look like the same company: a two-hour shuttle, a twelve-hour overnight, and a six-hour link between two islands.

Six crossings a day to Marinduque

Lucena to Balanacan is the backbone — 120 minutes, six departures a day, every day, spread from 02:30 to 22:30. A first sailing at half past two in the morning tells you what this route carries: cargo and traders moving to Marinduque overnight so the island’s markets open on time.

Twelve hours to Masbate, once, on selected days

Lucena to Masbate takes 720 minutes — a full twelve hours — leaving at 13:00 and running on a restricted day pattern rather than daily. That is an overnight passage in everything but name, and on a single-sailing route a missed departure costs days rather than hours.

And a route that never touches Luzon

Masbate to Calbayog runs 360 minutes at 02:00, again on selected days only. It links Masbate to Samar without going back to the mainland — the kind of inter-island leg that makes a Visayan journey possible in one direction and impossible in the other, depending on the day.

Two o'clock departures are the norm here, not the exception

Two of this operator’s three routes have sailings at 02:00 or 02:30. In Philippine inter-island shipping that timing is standard: it puts the ship alongside at dawn, lets cargo clear before the heat, and gets passengers to onward buses that leave in the early morning. It is not a red-eye service; it is the main service.

Southern Luzon and the Visayas, by design

The company states its aim as being the best domestic shipping line in the southern Luzon and Visayas region, and the route pattern matches that exactly — no Manila, no Mindanao, no international legs. It is a regional operator with a regional network, and the three routes here are a genuine sample of it rather than a fragment of something much bigger.