No. of Recommendations: 4
It was supposed to be a sunny summer in New Zealand, but it rained every day – including during our visit to Timaru, their popular beach resort. We were tracked by a major storm along the coast and skipped two ports to avoid even poorer weather than we were bouncing through. A cynic would wonder why we couldn‘t dock a day earlier at Sydney giving us a longer stay, but while cruise lines will go out of their way to save money, spending incremental amounts to optimize customer satisfaction apparently isn’t in the cards.
Fortunately, our cruising through the Fiordland national; park – notorious for rainy weather – was sunny, pleasant and scenic. The landscape (sans-snow) is reminiscent of those seen in the fjords of Chile and Norway.
As I write this, we are sailing across the Tasman Sea towards Sydney, Australia. This strait has the same sort of reputation as the Drake Passage, the Bay of Biscay and a number of other notorious stretches of water – sometimes calm as a lake, sometime like a Posiden’s gates of hell.
This time, tonight it’s a bit bouncy and the ship’s dancers and singers have swapped their show with a guest singer to prevent accidents. But, as Einstein said, everything is relative.
I’ll digress as memories have popped up.
Back during January, 1999, we took a cruise where we were the only Americans on a ship full of Aussies and Kiwis. While traveling between Sydney, Australia and New Caledonia on the Constellation Line’s “Norwegian Star”, we spent a day and a half plowing through a cyclone which produced 15-meter waves and 85-knot winds. Visualize trying to walk down a hotel corridor where the end point is rising and falling by three or four stories – with a crash. At the same time, the ship was rolling from side to side. There were people crawling on their hands and knees to the medical office. We went into the dining room for dinner (heck, I paid for the meal, so why not) and the waiters were all sea-sick. They wet the tablecloths so the plates and silverware wouldn’t slide.
We stayed aboard for back-to-back cruises of the South Pacific and northern Australia. The ship had a PADI scuba school aboard and you could dive along the route for the cost of air (about $5) and I ended up with my second scuba certification (my first had been by CMAS, a French outfit). That meant that all of my training was in metric units.
For history buffs, I ended up going down the rabbit-hole:
While, technically speaking, in 1900, the Prinzessin Victoria Luise, was the first purpose-built cruise ship (HAPAG), ocean liners, designed for point-to-point speed (e.g., Cunard's Queens at 30+ knots), dominated transatlantic transport until jets like the Boeing 707 (1958) slashed crossings from 5 days to 6 hours. By 1961, 95% of Atlantic passengers flew, collapsing liner viability.
The Queen Mary retired in 1967 amid the jet boom. During the 1970’s, purpose-built cruise ships (e.g., Song of Norway) emphasizing amenities over speed began to appear.
Designs changed. Liners prioritized stability and speed (pointed bows, stabilizers), but cruises favored capacity/entertainment (wider beams, balcony proliferation). The economics flipped as exchanging one-way transport lost to leisure revenue.
Some ships were modified to be more acceptable to cruisers (e.g. the SS France (built in 1962) survived by becoming the Norway (in 1979) and pioneered "floating resorts" with itineraries as the destination, rather than point-to-point travel). Lines like Cunard, P&O, and Holland America converted liners to leisure voyages offering shorter roundtrips to the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, adding pools/casinos.
During the 1980’s, mega-ships like Sovereign of the Seas scaled up mass-market cruising taking advantages of economies of scale. Companies like Carnival, Royal Caribbean and Norwegian Cruise we able to finance the purchase of other cruise lines which were demographically differentiated to attempt to diversify their customer bases.
They succeeded in creating critical mass because they:
Built bigger ships for scale
Focused on onboard revenue
Marketed aggressively in North America
Targeted middle-class vacationers
Turned cruising into mainstream tourism
Various recessions (as well as the COVID event) were responsible for over-leveraged, quickly expanding cruise lines, such as Royal Viking, Renaissance, Crystal, Azamara and others, to go out of business or be sold – recycling their ships under new flags.
Luxury lines didn’t disappear — but they became niche. Small ships, charging higher fares for a more deluxe experience (e.g. Silversea Cruises, Seabourn Cruise Line, Regent, Crystal, Viking Ocean Cruises) cater to a different demographic than the mega-ships.
The last remaining ocean liner is the Queen Mary II. It is a heavy-weight, fast and extremely stable ship and has succeeded in living a hybrid existence which still includes “crossings” of the Atlantic in its itinerary.
Well, back to the original story. The Constellation Line’s “Star” started its life as the Royal Viking Sea. This luxury cruise liner was built in 1973 by Wärtsilä Helsinki Shipyard, Finland, for Royal Viking Line's inaugural fleet. Originally 20,119 GRT, it was stretched in 1982 (inserted 21.3m midsection) to 28,613 GRT, with 380 cabins (about 800 passengers).
In 1991, the Royal Viking Line was dissolved, the ship was renamed the Royal Odyssey (1991–1997) — Under the Royal Cruise Line brand after being transferred by parent company Kloster.
It was then renamed, as a joint venture with Capricorn Cruise lines, as the Norwegian Star between 1997-2001 (the period we took it). Genting Hong Kong (then Star Cruises) acquired control of Norwegian Cruise Line in 2000 and, between 2001-2004, the ship was named Star Cruise’s Superstar Capricorn.
In 2004, the Star Cruises' SuperStar Capricorn (ex-Royal Viking Sea) was sold to Iberocruceros (Spain), renamed the Grand Latino, and operated Mediterranean cruises from Spain.
In 2008, (after lengthening by 32.2m to 37,753 GRT) it was sold to Fred Olsen Cruise Lines (Norway/UK), and renamed the Balmoral. It continued serving as the Balmoral from 2008-2020 serving northern Europe cruises until it was laid up during COVID. In 2021, it was withdrawn from service and towed to Aliağa, Turkey, for scrapping (arrived May, dismantled by July).
This ended the 48-year career of the 1973-built vessel.
Fred Olsen Cruise lines had ended up with most of the Royal Viking Line’s ships and subsequently scrapped them during the COVID period – replacing them with the former Holland America Line’s Amsterdam and Rotterdam and kept the Balmoral (a ship we sailed on as the NCL Crown, but which started life in 1988 as the luxurious Royal Crown Odessey).
The only former Royal Viking Line ship still sailing was originally the Royal Viking Sun (built 1988) which became the Cunard Royal Viking, then the Seabourn Sun and then ended up as the HAL Prinsendam – a favorite of ours for a number of years, before being sold to Phoenix Reisen in 2019, where it still sails under the name MS Amera.
Ah well, I thought it was interesting 😊
Jeff
No. of Recommendations: 0
We were tracked by a major storm along the coast and skipped two ports to avoid even poorer weather than we were bouncing through.
This is one of my major hesitations about cruising. We have done one cruise, about 29 years ago, me pregnant with Youngest and a 3 year old in tow. It was fine, but then again we paid something like $500 for the 3 of us for a 7 day cruise and flights. I am sure that we did not get a full picture of what cruising is like, as we minimized time that our son spent in kids camp and did very few adult things on board. It was a last minute cruise, so pretty good idea of what weather would be like. Booking in advance gives me pause, particularly after hearing about the impact of drought on Sis' Viking cruise, and now rain on yours. If we were in an apartment somewhere, we could, and have, dealt with poor weather.
I have pretty good sea legs, but DH would be retching in the conditions you describe. I am not a hotel person, so the idea of being trapped by bad weather on what is essentially a crowded floating hotel makes me panic. What am I missing? What biases should I challenge? The concept of cruising is lovely, with the ability to see many places without unpacking. I think it would be a great overview of an area of the world I am not familiar with so that we could decide where to head back to for an extended visit, but even with the sales we see regularly hitting the internet, we find ourselves unable to pull the trigger and buy tickets.
Any advice?
IP
No. of Recommendations: 2
Any advice?
Well, first of all, the showstopper we had in 1999 was one day out of 2,200 we've been on - so finite possibility, but near zero probability. The smaller the ship, the posher and more expensive it tends to be, but the larger the ship, the less it tends to rock. The epitome of stability is the Queen Mary II (its unique ability to imitate a rock is not shared by other Cunard ships - or any others for that matter).
There are also specific spots in the world which, in some seasons, are prone to rough seas (but are unlikely to be found in places like the Mediterranean or, outside of hurricane season, in the Caribbean, for example.
After watching literally thousands of passengers wrestle with the idea of seasickness, while some seem to absolutely be prone to it, the following is also true:
Sea-Bands - elastic bands worn on both wrists, with buttons that press on acupuncture spots really DO work (as do sea-sickness pills), but for many, the fear of seasickness has a psychosomatic tendency to be a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Jeff
