Results tagged “insidepassage”

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.

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 that it has a much shallower draft than a standard cruise ship. Why does this smaller vessel have problems between Seattle and Juneau where other, much gianter, vessels roam freely? We're guessing that either the Empress plays a little loose with its shallow draft and repeatedly wanders off the beaten path into waters where other boats dare not go, or that its big, broad cruise ship sides and its little bitty non-cruise ship draft repeatedly cause it to be blown onto rocks. Here's what Seattlest wrote in April:

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.

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.

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.