Majestic America is a Seattle-based company and the Empress of the North sailed out of Seattle before hitting a rock and drifting near Juneau--We just can't be satisfied with "it hit something during a turn." Last week while Seattlest was bitching about the lack of information on the grounding of the Empress a commenter suggested we check the gCaptain blog. According to gCaptain the grounding took place during a Third Mate's watch, Third Mate being......

A cruise ship out of Seattle ran aground in Alaska over the weekend. As fortune would have it Seattlest profiled this ship in our 'Getting to Know Your 2007 Cruise Ships' series, so you may remember the faux-sternwheeler Empress of the North. It would seem odd that this ship in particular would have problems running aground--it's happened in the past on its home stretch of Columbia down by Portland--when you take into consideration the fact......

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......

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......

A Celebrity cruise ship returns to port today after doing the Inside Passage with 115 norovirus infected passengers. You never hear of noroviruses (norovirii?) unless a whole cruise ship or an entire school is infected because they're common enough to be unremarkable. Just some highly contagious digestive issues - When it ruins a cruise, though, we can't let it pass without comment. Seattle Times says the ship left from Seattle last Friday so they must......