Getting To Know Your 2007 Cruise Ships: Golden Princess

Princess Cruises and Holland America are both currently in a kind of limbo in Seattle. They use Terminal 30 by Harbor Island which the Port wants to convert back to something that can be used by container ships. The plan is to move the cruise berths to Terminal 91 in Magnolia where they can be properly outfitted with shore power and whatnot, but the cruise lines aren't excited about it because that will mean a bigger moorage bill for them and they'll have to schlep their passengers that much farther from the airport. Last month the Port announced that it was delaying the project, uh, until construction prices come down? Does the Port know something we don't? Construction prices don't come down.

And Ship's Blogger? Let us know if you come across that staff position.

Anyway, let's get to today's boat. It gets kinda rant-y towards the end here so you may want to stick around.

Golden Princess
Princess Cruises' vessel the Golden Princess departs from Terminal 30 on Saturday, kicking off a seven-day float up the Inside Passage--you can track its location here. All of the ships we've talked about previously have had some defining characteristic or feature (or gimmick) but in the case of the GP she's just a giant, hulking cruise ship. Atlantis Casino, Skywalkers Nightclub, Players Cigar Bar; a whole lot of that kind of thing. 951 feet long, 118 feet wide, 26 foot draft, 18 decks, 2,600 passengers, 1,100 crew, GMT V-16 diesel engines, blah blah blah.

What is interesting about the Golden Princess is that she made a tourist trip to the Antarctic recently, one of the largest cruise ships to do so to date, but, apparently, indicative of an alarming trend in cruising. If you read The Believer you might recall an article (part 1, part 2) in last month's issue about two brothers who cruised with their mother to the North Pole on a Russian ice breaker. We were hoping for a Travels with my Aunt on the ice shelf kind of thing when picking it up, but it turned out to be really weird and a bit of a letdown. Anyway, that's where cruising is heading: adventure cruising, xtreme cruising, let's-despoil-the-farthest-reaches-of-Earth-so-we-can-tick- something-off-our-yuppie-life-achievements-list cruising.

The 30th annual Antarctic treaty meeting began on Tuesday and one of the things they're freaking out about are these cruises, particularly the eventuality of a fuel spill in the region. In fact, a tourist ship already ran aground last January and spilled a little gas in the water off Antarctica. Seattlest, for one, is in favor of leaving the Antarctic to the scientists, the terns and the occasional freakshow in a kayak. Cruise ships? What are the odds that the penguin fuckers who pay to drive these diesel bombs down there actually think they're environmentalists? It's going to take a hell of a lot of fancy light bulbs in the chandeliers above the dining room to make up for this little eco-adventure, asshole. Can't you just know it's there? Can that be good enough for once? Another Princess Cruise ship, the Sun Princess, leaves Terminal 30 on Sunday for pristine Alaska and will make the Antarctic run sometime this year.

This series has previously explored the Zaandam and the Empress of the North.

Golden Princess image courtesy of Tomcod.