Getting To Know Your 2007 Cruise Ships: Vision of the Seas
Before we get to today's boat, there's a half-assed explanation of the Empress of the North's Alaskan accident online as of yesterday--apparently they were making a turn and hit a rock... Well, cruise passengers should certainly slumber easily in their berths now that that whole thing has been exposed. There's also (another?) entirely fictitious accounting of the accident at The Spoof.
Vision of the Seas
Royal Caribbean's Vision of the Seas is another standard ship as far as we're concerned. Ready for a nap? It's 915' long, 105' wide, 2,435 passengers, 765 crew. It's ten years old. There's a rock wall and a big atrium. You will be very excited to learn that Tasha Walker herself was aboard the Vision of the Seas in 2007, and then you'll be equally disappointed to find out that Tasha Walker seems to be some random girl who scratched her name into the ship's Wikipedia entry. "Tash wuz here" for the digital age. The Vision of the Seas leaves Seattle today for Alaska.
Up in Alaska there's been a bunch of legislative wrangling over a program to monitor cruise ships by placing a marine engineer wastewater treatment operator on board for some legs of a cruise while the ship is in port, but the bill that would scuttle finance the program is currently held up in Alaska's Senate House. What's weird about the news article that explains all of this is that it loads a WAV file of clown music in the background while you read. Anyway, the first of these environmental rangers took a test flight on the Vision of the Seas recently and "he was able to gain full access to all records and areas of interest." However, even if the program is eventually funded, "the department anticipates it may have trouble reserving berths for the observers this season." Oh, brother.
Meanwhile, in Washington, the Department of Ecology has negotiated the extension of environmental protections in Washington waters to include all of the Olympic National Marine Sanctuary. The Port of Seattle has also gotten together with the ports of Tacoma and Vancouver to come up with what seems like a really wimpy maritime air emissions initiative--sometime between now and 2010 ships at berth in these ports will have to burn cleaner fuel. Not turn the engines off, no, let's leave them idling for days on end right there on our precious waterfront, but, you know, tone down the particulate a little. That'd be great, thanks.
In other Royal Caribbean news, the line recently announced Karin Stahre Janson as the first female captain of a major cruise ship (not the Vision) and when USA Today interviewed her for the momentous occasion the first question they asked was "When did you first feel the pull of the ocean?"
This series has previously explored the Zaandam , the Empress of the North and the Golden Princess.
Image of The Vision from Flickr user AlaskanLibrarian.
