Getting to know your 2007 Cruise Ships: Empress of the North

The Tacoma News Tribune had their big Seattle cruise season preview a few weeks ago: 191 cruise ship calls, 3,000 busloads of passengers from the airport to the cruise terminals, 14,082 cruise industry jobs created in 2005, 1 article we couldn’t get completely through. Harpers index it ain’t. Unless this is it, we’re still waiting for the Seattle dailies to publish their yearly love poems to the cruise industry.

Empress of the North

The Empress of the North is definitely one of the more interesting cruise ships that will be coming through Seattle this season, but it’s only going to call a few times. It’s a sternwheeler and spends most of the year on the river in and out of its home port of Portland. There are few Seattle-Alaska trips on the schedule, though, as well as a few 4-night trips around the Sound and local Seattle lakes, including a flush through the locks into Lake Union for a while.

Check out this video of one of the Empress of the North’s sister ships--the boat looks awesome, but then the first activity they show is bingo and none of the passengers are under 65. Not exactly your contraband party in the 80’s lounge till dawn type of cruise... It isn’t exactly Mark Twain either as the rooms have DVD players and the sternwheel is much more for show than for go. Four Caterpillar 3516s paddle your ass up to 14 knots via two propellers. Despite the miniscule 12’ draft designed specifically for river cruising, the Empress of the North ran aground on the Columbia about a year ago. Running aground shouldn’t be a problem in the channels the cruise ships take up the Inside Passage, particularly for a boat this shallow, but we’re guessing weather can push it around something fierce with such a small amount of the boat under water. Only 235 passengers on this 360' ‘lil guy. The Empress of the North will be at Pier 66 sometime next week for your viewing pleasure before it embarks on an 11-day cruise up to Alaska.

The ms Zaandam--which we talked about recently--sails today out of Terminal 30 over by Harbor Island. We meant to stop down over the weekend and wave a hankie at it (or hold the rapidly blackening thing over our mouths to filter the diesel particulate) but ultimately didn’t make it. Good thing: the boat sailed from Vancouver as (according to this press release) part of an Earth Day celebration. Sounds like the Zaandam just spent time getting an emission-reduction water scrubber installed. The EPA and the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency helped Holland America bear the $1.5 million cost.