Earlier this year, I made my first visit in Liverpool in the north west of England since 1996. Quite a bit had changed since then, the waterfront for which the city is well known had seen probably the biggest development in the dozen of years that separated my two visits.
A new cruise terminal had been built at the Pier Head. A terminal for Ferries 'Cross the Mersey - to cite a 1964 song by Jerry and the Pacemakers - had stood there from before. The new cruise terminal is a floating structure as the River Mersey is tidal: the difference between the high and low tide is several metres and the current really strong as the tides come and go.
Interestingly, the terminal is only geared to handle calling cruise ships, but no turn arounds. It lacks the facilities to check in passengers and their luggage and to store them once they have been offloaded after a cruise.
It may be difficult to add these features, because next to the terminal developers have built office blocks and good quality two hotels. It seems that there is, quite simply, not enough space to accomodate cars and coaches that inevitably arrive in large numbers whenever a cruise ship is embarking or disembarking passengers at a turn around.
On a positive side, the terminal is within a comfortable walking distance from the city centre and major sights, such as the Albert Dock and its museums and galleries. A new museum is being built on the Pier Head itself, just next to the ferry terminal and the Mersey Docks and Harbours Company head office.
Talking about the Albert Dock, I dropped in at the Merseyside Maritime Museum. However, the main building of the museum now housed a museum of slavery as well. Liverpool, like many other British seaports, made money on slave trade until 1833, when the British government abolished slavery in British colonies and dependencies.
What I saw did not impress.
As I experienced it, the exhibitions and in particular some videos that formed parts of the displays, seemed to support the view that Africa's current problems are only due to ills of the past.
It is not my intention to defend slavery: you cannot defend the indefensible, a crime against humanity.
However I experienced this particular museum as an attempt to stir up emotion in visitors, particularly so as writing blocks were placed there so that visitors could express their feelings about what they saw.
What purpose does it serve to comment on what happened more than 200 years ago? As for Africa's ills, of course slavery and slave trade were human tragedies on colossal scale. But the same goes for the genocide against Jews committed by Hitler. Yet nobody is arguing that Jews have become less entrepreneurial or successful after those horrors that took place only some 65 years ago.
When it comes to Africa, it seems that in many discussions outsourcing responsibility over the persistent underperformance of large parts of that continent is not only perfectly acceptable, it is the only politically correct approach to discuss the issue in public.
Soon after the visit to Liverpool, I bought a book called "The Trouble With Africa" by Robert Calderisi, a Canadian diplomat. In brief, he argues that Africa will only stop underperforming by abandoning its victim mentality.
I agree.
My native Finland was under Swedish rule from about 1155 to 1809 and then under the rule of Russia until 1917. This is far longer than any African country was under the rule of European colonial powers, yet whatever problems there are in Finland today, people do not blame the past for them.
Furthermore, I we want to judge our predecessors by writing down our feelings after visting a place like the said museum, we should accept that future generations will pass equal judgements on us. It was Oscar Wilde who said that a cynic is a person who knows the price of everything but not the value of anything. In my opinion, that describes our time well and Wilde's words could therefore act as the basis for such judgements in the future.
Tuesday 25 August 2009
Friday 21 August 2009
Ship design - the good present days and bad (quite) old days
Some 30 years ago, shipyards around Europe built several passenger vessels on which the cabins were placed forward in the superstructure and the public areas aft. The logic was that passengers could sleep in peace, without being exposed to noise from a nightclub or bar just above or below their cabin.
It sounded good.
However, in my view, that concept produced some of the worst ships in terms of passenger flow. Besides, these ships frequently lacked a Room With a View - forward, that is. By the time the 1977-built cruise ferry Finnjet entered service in may of that year, the concept had been firmly rooted in the minds of shipbuilders. Silja Line operated three French built 12,000 gross ton cruise ferries between Finland and Sweden that had entered service in 1975 and whose layout was based on this concept. Competitor Viking Line soon followed suit.
By the mid-198os, several companies had built cruise ferries along these lines, including Olau Line and TT-Line that operated in the North Sea and the soutern Baltic respectively. Like Finnjet, these were huge, boxy vessels in whose exterior design any consideration to aesthetic grace had been flushed down the toilet. Then, in 1982, Hapag-Lloyd's Europa became the most upscale ship to date built on this concept.
If you pile public areas on top of each other on three decks, which was the format with the said concept, you ask your passengers to trot up and down the stairs all the time and to queue for lifts. You also deny them a proper view forward, unless you e.g. have an observation lounge on top of the bridge, as was the case on Europa. Such a ship feels cramped, disjointed and irrational.
The 1970s and the early 1980s marked a low point in ship design. Before the Second World War, air conditioning was a luxury and therefore even fairly modest vessels, particularly on tropical routes, featured public rooms two decks high. From the 1950s onwards, such public spaces became increasingly rare as air conditioning took care of the pragmatic side of keeping passengers happy and at the same time, limiting deckheight kept the company accountants pleased with your design as well.
Even such great liners of the postwar era as United States (1952) or Michelangelo (1965) had nothing comparable to the greatest public rooms on pre-war ships: while one or two rooms could rise through two decks on each ship, the grandeur of the previous age was gone for good.
As the first cruise liners of the modern age entered service in the late 1960s, it was hard to envisage majestic public rooms on those vessels of 10,000 to 20,000 gross tons. They were small ships by liner-age standards and their design was based on entirely different premises from the liners. The modern cruise ships targeted middle-America and it was their tastes - or the lack of taste in some cases - that set the tone in design of their interiors.
Liners, meanwhile, had been manifestations of national pride and high culture. To some extent, ships like Italian Line's Michelangelo or France (1962) of the French Line succeeded quite well in conveying this ambition to the public, but this was hardly any more the case with Cunard Line's Queen Elizabeth 2 (1969). What had been hip and cool in the late 1960s was hopelessly out of fashion by 1994, when transformation of the ship to meet changing tastes was started in earnest.
I recall a visit to Eugenio C (1965), then flagship of what is Costa Crociere today, when the ship called at Helsinki in 1980. True, there were no public rooms two decks high. However, as you walked from an oval shaped first class lounge overlooking the bow towards the tourst class lido on the aft deck, you passed through a magnificent procession of public rooms. The ship had linoleum floors rather than carpets, so it did not look new. But the rooms and the furniture, desgned mainly by Nino Zoncada, presented timeless elegance and simplicity that aged gracefully indeed.
It would take a long time before designes of modern of cruise liners could boast with anything equally sophisticated and grand. P&O Cruises' Oriana (1995) certainly did that. You could say the same about the newbuildings of Celebrity Cruises that entered service in the middle of the same decade.
However, by then interior designers of cruise liners had finally come to appreciate that paying homage to what had gone before could work well in efforts to impress cruise passengers of today and tomorrow. In addition, they had come to appreciate the importance of deckheight as well: atria and soon other public spaces as well started to rise through two decks and more, creating a feeling of space where to breathe.
Most cruise liners that enter service today are much larger than the liners of the inter-war era and certainly hugely bigger than the first-generation cruise liners built 30-40 years ago. The size of the modern ships has allowed a liberal reintroduction of deckheight. The cabins forward-public space aft concept has long since been abandoned in the design of major passenger vessels.
In fact, in certain ways a modern ship like Celebrity Cruises' 122,000 gross ton Celebrity Equinox has far more in common with a great liner of the past like Ile de France (1927) than a first generation cruise liner: the moment you step on board, the ship's design makes a statement, has wow! effect. And that is exactly how it should be!
It sounded good.
However, in my view, that concept produced some of the worst ships in terms of passenger flow. Besides, these ships frequently lacked a Room With a View - forward, that is. By the time the 1977-built cruise ferry Finnjet entered service in may of that year, the concept had been firmly rooted in the minds of shipbuilders. Silja Line operated three French built 12,000 gross ton cruise ferries between Finland and Sweden that had entered service in 1975 and whose layout was based on this concept. Competitor Viking Line soon followed suit.
By the mid-198os, several companies had built cruise ferries along these lines, including Olau Line and TT-Line that operated in the North Sea and the soutern Baltic respectively. Like Finnjet, these were huge, boxy vessels in whose exterior design any consideration to aesthetic grace had been flushed down the toilet. Then, in 1982, Hapag-Lloyd's Europa became the most upscale ship to date built on this concept.
If you pile public areas on top of each other on three decks, which was the format with the said concept, you ask your passengers to trot up and down the stairs all the time and to queue for lifts. You also deny them a proper view forward, unless you e.g. have an observation lounge on top of the bridge, as was the case on Europa. Such a ship feels cramped, disjointed and irrational.
The 1970s and the early 1980s marked a low point in ship design. Before the Second World War, air conditioning was a luxury and therefore even fairly modest vessels, particularly on tropical routes, featured public rooms two decks high. From the 1950s onwards, such public spaces became increasingly rare as air conditioning took care of the pragmatic side of keeping passengers happy and at the same time, limiting deckheight kept the company accountants pleased with your design as well.
Even such great liners of the postwar era as United States (1952) or Michelangelo (1965) had nothing comparable to the greatest public rooms on pre-war ships: while one or two rooms could rise through two decks on each ship, the grandeur of the previous age was gone for good.
As the first cruise liners of the modern age entered service in the late 1960s, it was hard to envisage majestic public rooms on those vessels of 10,000 to 20,000 gross tons. They were small ships by liner-age standards and their design was based on entirely different premises from the liners. The modern cruise ships targeted middle-America and it was their tastes - or the lack of taste in some cases - that set the tone in design of their interiors.
Liners, meanwhile, had been manifestations of national pride and high culture. To some extent, ships like Italian Line's Michelangelo or France (1962) of the French Line succeeded quite well in conveying this ambition to the public, but this was hardly any more the case with Cunard Line's Queen Elizabeth 2 (1969). What had been hip and cool in the late 1960s was hopelessly out of fashion by 1994, when transformation of the ship to meet changing tastes was started in earnest.
I recall a visit to Eugenio C (1965), then flagship of what is Costa Crociere today, when the ship called at Helsinki in 1980. True, there were no public rooms two decks high. However, as you walked from an oval shaped first class lounge overlooking the bow towards the tourst class lido on the aft deck, you passed through a magnificent procession of public rooms. The ship had linoleum floors rather than carpets, so it did not look new. But the rooms and the furniture, desgned mainly by Nino Zoncada, presented timeless elegance and simplicity that aged gracefully indeed.
It would take a long time before designes of modern of cruise liners could boast with anything equally sophisticated and grand. P&O Cruises' Oriana (1995) certainly did that. You could say the same about the newbuildings of Celebrity Cruises that entered service in the middle of the same decade.
However, by then interior designers of cruise liners had finally come to appreciate that paying homage to what had gone before could work well in efforts to impress cruise passengers of today and tomorrow. In addition, they had come to appreciate the importance of deckheight as well: atria and soon other public spaces as well started to rise through two decks and more, creating a feeling of space where to breathe.
Most cruise liners that enter service today are much larger than the liners of the inter-war era and certainly hugely bigger than the first-generation cruise liners built 30-40 years ago. The size of the modern ships has allowed a liberal reintroduction of deckheight. The cabins forward-public space aft concept has long since been abandoned in the design of major passenger vessels.
In fact, in certain ways a modern ship like Celebrity Cruises' 122,000 gross ton Celebrity Equinox has far more in common with a great liner of the past like Ile de France (1927) than a first generation cruise liner: the moment you step on board, the ship's design makes a statement, has wow! effect. And that is exactly how it should be!
Friday 14 August 2009
Cruise & Maritime's focus on regional UK ports could work
Cruise & Maritime Voyages (CMV) is the name of a new kid on the block on the UK cruise market. The Dartford based company that has acted as general sales agent for Louis and Transocean, will set up a new operation next year and bring the 22,080 gross ton Marco Polo and the 17,600 gross ton Ocean Countess to the British market on year-round basis.
Marco Polo will be based in Tilbury near London, while Ocean Countess that was built in 1976 as Cunard Countess, will operate from a number of ports - Plymouth, Liverpool, Greenock, Leith, Newcastle and Hull.
Obviously, this will be an entry level operation, or a budget market one, if you so prefer. In the US, budget operators disappeared with the collapse of Premier Cruises in the aftermath of 911. Germany has traditionally been the stronghold of the operator that charters ships on contracts of various durations and terms and focuses on just the commercial side of the business.
Given the number and size of new ships that will enter service on the British market next year, CMV's move could be seen as daring. Celebrity Cruises will introduce the 122,000 gross ton Celebrity Eclipse; P&O Cruises their 116,000 gross ton Azura and Cunard Line the 90,000 gross ton Queen Elizabeth.
Well, there will be some deductions as well: Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines will decommission the 43 year old Black Prince in the autumn as will Saga Cruises their one year older Saga Rose. The two Ocean Village ships will migrate to Australia, so all the newcomers are not just net increase in the supply.
But then there are second hand arrivals as well: Saga Pearl II will join the Saga fleet in April and Thomson Cruises will introduce Thomson Dream, the present day Costa Europa the same month. So, prior to the CMV news, four ships were scheduled to leave and five to enter the British cruise market over the next 18 months. Now the number of newcomers has climbed to seven.
CMV say they want to offer a small ship experience and to bring their ships close to where people live, so that they do not need to travel to Southampton or Dover to join their cruise and make the journey in the opposite direction after their holiday is over.
It is probably here that CMV has a niche to captalise on: Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines and to some extent Saga Cruises have been among the very few operators that have sailed from regional UK ports. Thomson Cruises used to do this as well, but they will position all their six ships to the Mediterranean next year and fly passengers from various British airports to join them.
CMV and its German counterparts differ in a few significant ways from their failed US counterparts, such as Premier Cruises or the mid-1990s casualty called Regency Cruises. CMV and its counterparts firstly do not own their ships but they charter them, whereas the US lines mentioned earlier owned their ships too.
While CMV has not as yet published its 2010 itineraries, at least some of its cruises are long ones, in October Marco Polo will sail on a 32-night Caribbean return voyage from Tilbury. Premier and Regency competed head-on on the same seven-night markets as their significantly larger and stronger competitors.
That said, the UK market probably differs from the US one in that in Britain there are at least in relative to the size of the market more long cruises than in the US.
Still, the year 2010 promises to be an interesting one on the UK cruise scene: CMV's arrival will add 27,000 beds to the supply side. It may sound like much, but it is not really: Celebrity Eclipse alone adds 40,000 beds that the industry needs to sell next year.
Marco Polo will be based in Tilbury near London, while Ocean Countess that was built in 1976 as Cunard Countess, will operate from a number of ports - Plymouth, Liverpool, Greenock, Leith, Newcastle and Hull.
Obviously, this will be an entry level operation, or a budget market one, if you so prefer. In the US, budget operators disappeared with the collapse of Premier Cruises in the aftermath of 911. Germany has traditionally been the stronghold of the operator that charters ships on contracts of various durations and terms and focuses on just the commercial side of the business.
Given the number and size of new ships that will enter service on the British market next year, CMV's move could be seen as daring. Celebrity Cruises will introduce the 122,000 gross ton Celebrity Eclipse; P&O Cruises their 116,000 gross ton Azura and Cunard Line the 90,000 gross ton Queen Elizabeth.
Well, there will be some deductions as well: Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines will decommission the 43 year old Black Prince in the autumn as will Saga Cruises their one year older Saga Rose. The two Ocean Village ships will migrate to Australia, so all the newcomers are not just net increase in the supply.
But then there are second hand arrivals as well: Saga Pearl II will join the Saga fleet in April and Thomson Cruises will introduce Thomson Dream, the present day Costa Europa the same month. So, prior to the CMV news, four ships were scheduled to leave and five to enter the British cruise market over the next 18 months. Now the number of newcomers has climbed to seven.
CMV say they want to offer a small ship experience and to bring their ships close to where people live, so that they do not need to travel to Southampton or Dover to join their cruise and make the journey in the opposite direction after their holiday is over.
It is probably here that CMV has a niche to captalise on: Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines and to some extent Saga Cruises have been among the very few operators that have sailed from regional UK ports. Thomson Cruises used to do this as well, but they will position all their six ships to the Mediterranean next year and fly passengers from various British airports to join them.
CMV and its German counterparts differ in a few significant ways from their failed US counterparts, such as Premier Cruises or the mid-1990s casualty called Regency Cruises. CMV and its counterparts firstly do not own their ships but they charter them, whereas the US lines mentioned earlier owned their ships too.
While CMV has not as yet published its 2010 itineraries, at least some of its cruises are long ones, in October Marco Polo will sail on a 32-night Caribbean return voyage from Tilbury. Premier and Regency competed head-on on the same seven-night markets as their significantly larger and stronger competitors.
That said, the UK market probably differs from the US one in that in Britain there are at least in relative to the size of the market more long cruises than in the US.
Still, the year 2010 promises to be an interesting one on the UK cruise scene: CMV's arrival will add 27,000 beds to the supply side. It may sound like much, but it is not really: Celebrity Eclipse alone adds 40,000 beds that the industry needs to sell next year.
Thursday 13 August 2009
Norwegian Cruise Line's long path to recovery
Norwegian cruise Line (NCL)reported a 2Q09 net profit of $15.2 million earlier this week, much better than the $5.4 million it earned in the previous three months and a significant improvement from the $27.0 million loss the company had suffered a year earlier.
A lot of the recovery came from lower costs, but CEO Kevin Sheehan had something positive to say. Firstly, he belives that the decline in ticket prices has come to an and and the latest figures already indicated that people spend moreon board their ships than what they had done before.
So far so good!
NCL has had a rough ride in the recent past. The launch of NCL America, a US flag operation in the Hawaii islands that was meant to generate high returns as a year-round premium priced operation, did exactly the opposite.
This was not the first time the NCL management has had an issue of strategic nature on its plate, which has taken an awful lot of resources to sort out. In 1980, the intyroduction of SS Norway was hailed as a true coup and indeed for a while, it put NCL in the very forefront of the Caribbean cruise industry. That is, the SS Norway was there.
The ship was roughly of equal tonnage than the other four vessels of the company put together. If you think what Carnival Cruise Lines (CCL) or what is Royal Caribbean International (RCI) today did in that period, there is a marked difference to NCL.
CCL in particular increased the number of ships rather than the size of them in its early years. RCI was mare aggressive to grow the size of its vessels too - and still is - but as all their ships were designed and built for them , certain similarities could be retained in the ambiance of the fleet.
NCL's great leap forward negated it this possibility to gradual, step by step growth. As the industry developed, a pattern of success had become obviouys by the mid-1990s. You would need big ships to have economies of scale on the ship level and many, preferrably similar vessels to obtain the same on the corporate level.
Throughout the 1990s, NCL was left to compete against CCL and RCI with a fleeet that was falling further and further behind each time either competititor introduced a newbuilding. By the end of the decade the situation had become critical. With Norwegian Sky and Norwegian Sun NCL had its first modern, large vessels, but the fleet mainly consisted of old and small units that were no match in competition against CCL and RCI.
The NCL product had become a watered down version of that of their competition, which only added to the worries of the then top brass. The introduction of Freestyle Cruising by the company early this decade gave it spark that it had been lacking for a long time and all of a sudden, the NCL brand was fashionable again.
Today, it has a modern, consistent fleet and the revamped Freestyle Cruising product continues to provide a platform on which the company should be able to build its future success. Norwegian Epic, at 150,000 gross tons, is its sole newbuilding on order at the moment. It is far larger than any other ship in the fleet. There seems to be no indication that the newcomer would cannibalise sales of cruises on NCL's other ships.
Let us hope that it will not prevent future investment in ships - probably not of the same size as the Epic - that will help the company to grow without compromising flexibility in fleet deployment.
A lot of the recovery came from lower costs, but CEO Kevin Sheehan had something positive to say. Firstly, he belives that the decline in ticket prices has come to an and and the latest figures already indicated that people spend moreon board their ships than what they had done before.
So far so good!
NCL has had a rough ride in the recent past. The launch of NCL America, a US flag operation in the Hawaii islands that was meant to generate high returns as a year-round premium priced operation, did exactly the opposite.
This was not the first time the NCL management has had an issue of strategic nature on its plate, which has taken an awful lot of resources to sort out. In 1980, the intyroduction of SS Norway was hailed as a true coup and indeed for a while, it put NCL in the very forefront of the Caribbean cruise industry. That is, the SS Norway was there.
The ship was roughly of equal tonnage than the other four vessels of the company put together. If you think what Carnival Cruise Lines (CCL) or what is Royal Caribbean International (RCI) today did in that period, there is a marked difference to NCL.
CCL in particular increased the number of ships rather than the size of them in its early years. RCI was mare aggressive to grow the size of its vessels too - and still is - but as all their ships were designed and built for them , certain similarities could be retained in the ambiance of the fleet.
NCL's great leap forward negated it this possibility to gradual, step by step growth. As the industry developed, a pattern of success had become obviouys by the mid-1990s. You would need big ships to have economies of scale on the ship level and many, preferrably similar vessels to obtain the same on the corporate level.
Throughout the 1990s, NCL was left to compete against CCL and RCI with a fleeet that was falling further and further behind each time either competititor introduced a newbuilding. By the end of the decade the situation had become critical. With Norwegian Sky and Norwegian Sun NCL had its first modern, large vessels, but the fleet mainly consisted of old and small units that were no match in competition against CCL and RCI.
The NCL product had become a watered down version of that of their competition, which only added to the worries of the then top brass. The introduction of Freestyle Cruising by the company early this decade gave it spark that it had been lacking for a long time and all of a sudden, the NCL brand was fashionable again.
Today, it has a modern, consistent fleet and the revamped Freestyle Cruising product continues to provide a platform on which the company should be able to build its future success. Norwegian Epic, at 150,000 gross tons, is its sole newbuilding on order at the moment. It is far larger than any other ship in the fleet. There seems to be no indication that the newcomer would cannibalise sales of cruises on NCL's other ships.
Let us hope that it will not prevent future investment in ships - probably not of the same size as the Epic - that will help the company to grow without compromising flexibility in fleet deployment.
Sunday 9 August 2009
On nocturnal vigils and advances in passenger shipping
On the night to 31 July, I happened to wake up in the middle of the night.
Lying on my back, I gazed out through the windows that led to the balcony of my cabin: a huge cruise liner, with thousands of lights, was heading to the opposite direction. Quietly I got out of bed, put my glasses on and sneaked to the balcony door. I opened it as quietly as I could not to wake up Harvey, my travel companion. He is 6'1'', does bodybuilding and kickboxing and complains that I snore. Unfortunately, he is right: I do.
This time, however, he was fast asleep and I managed not to change that state of affairs. I opened the door to the balcony and stepped out: the huge cruise liner was either Grand Princess or Crown Princess, one of the two Post-Panamax ships Princess Cruises operates from Southampton this summer.
While standing there, a memory from the autumn of 1976 came back to my mind. In October of that year, I had travelled to visit my sister and her family who had recently moved to Stockholm in Sweden from our native Finland. On the way back, I had booked an outside cabin on the 8,523 gross ton Silja Line ferry Bore I (Bore is king of the north winds in Scandinavian mythology and thus does not refer to a dull person in this context).
I slept little that night as I wanted to see the lights of the ferries that were making a westbound crossing from Turku or Naantali, such as Silja Line's 1966 built Fennia of 6,397 gross tons. And when I did see any of these vessels, I thought that was a majestic sight.
And I was not alone: the next morning a retired couple, probably in their early seventies, were looking a cutaway drawing of Bore I. "An enormous thing this is, eight floors high," the old chap declared to his wife.
The brand new Celebrity Equinox, the vessel from which I watched the Princess Cruises' ship, measures about 122,000 gross tons and has about twice the number of decks - or floors - the Bore I had. Making any further comparisons would be utterly pointless.
Next morning in Southampton, docked in the port were P&O Cruises' Arcadia, the same company's Ventura and the other Princess Cruises' ship that trades out of the UK port this summer. Compare that with Marella (3,930 grt / 1970) or Viking 4 (4,485 / 1974) that would dock next to Bore I in Turku the October morning that followed my noctural vigil.
Passenger shipping has made such leaps forward in the past three decades that it is hard to believe how far the industry has come. Many insiders of the 1970s are probably equally surprised: in the summer of 1977, the then managing director of Cunard Line said that their new Cunard Princess of 17,586 gross tons might well be the last deep sea passenger vessel to be ever built.
In the depths of the gloominess that were the post-oil crisis 1970s, the statement did make sense. The recession that followed the events of 1973 stalled an expansion of the cruise industry that had started in the previous five or so years so that newbuilding activity really restarted first at the very end of the decade.
The current economic conditions are challenging as well. However, the cruise industry is now much better established on the marketplace than it was in the 1970s. Both in North America and in Europe - and mind you: increasingly so in Australia as well - cruising is a mainstream holiday option. This was not the case 35 years ago, when operators were both smaller and weaker than what they are today.
As the lights of the Princess ship gradually faded into the distance, I closed the door and slipped back into my bed past Harvey, still deep asleep. At the gentle age of 49, I would not spend all night waiting to see passing ships and their lights.
Lying on my back, I gazed out through the windows that led to the balcony of my cabin: a huge cruise liner, with thousands of lights, was heading to the opposite direction. Quietly I got out of bed, put my glasses on and sneaked to the balcony door. I opened it as quietly as I could not to wake up Harvey, my travel companion. He is 6'1'', does bodybuilding and kickboxing and complains that I snore. Unfortunately, he is right: I do.
This time, however, he was fast asleep and I managed not to change that state of affairs. I opened the door to the balcony and stepped out: the huge cruise liner was either Grand Princess or Crown Princess, one of the two Post-Panamax ships Princess Cruises operates from Southampton this summer.
While standing there, a memory from the autumn of 1976 came back to my mind. In October of that year, I had travelled to visit my sister and her family who had recently moved to Stockholm in Sweden from our native Finland. On the way back, I had booked an outside cabin on the 8,523 gross ton Silja Line ferry Bore I (Bore is king of the north winds in Scandinavian mythology and thus does not refer to a dull person in this context).
I slept little that night as I wanted to see the lights of the ferries that were making a westbound crossing from Turku or Naantali, such as Silja Line's 1966 built Fennia of 6,397 gross tons. And when I did see any of these vessels, I thought that was a majestic sight.
And I was not alone: the next morning a retired couple, probably in their early seventies, were looking a cutaway drawing of Bore I. "An enormous thing this is, eight floors high," the old chap declared to his wife.
The brand new Celebrity Equinox, the vessel from which I watched the Princess Cruises' ship, measures about 122,000 gross tons and has about twice the number of decks - or floors - the Bore I had. Making any further comparisons would be utterly pointless.
Next morning in Southampton, docked in the port were P&O Cruises' Arcadia, the same company's Ventura and the other Princess Cruises' ship that trades out of the UK port this summer. Compare that with Marella (3,930 grt / 1970) or Viking 4 (4,485 / 1974) that would dock next to Bore I in Turku the October morning that followed my noctural vigil.
Passenger shipping has made such leaps forward in the past three decades that it is hard to believe how far the industry has come. Many insiders of the 1970s are probably equally surprised: in the summer of 1977, the then managing director of Cunard Line said that their new Cunard Princess of 17,586 gross tons might well be the last deep sea passenger vessel to be ever built.
In the depths of the gloominess that were the post-oil crisis 1970s, the statement did make sense. The recession that followed the events of 1973 stalled an expansion of the cruise industry that had started in the previous five or so years so that newbuilding activity really restarted first at the very end of the decade.
The current economic conditions are challenging as well. However, the cruise industry is now much better established on the marketplace than it was in the 1970s. Both in North America and in Europe - and mind you: increasingly so in Australia as well - cruising is a mainstream holiday option. This was not the case 35 years ago, when operators were both smaller and weaker than what they are today.
As the lights of the Princess ship gradually faded into the distance, I closed the door and slipped back into my bed past Harvey, still deep asleep. At the gentle age of 49, I would not spend all night waiting to see passing ships and their lights.
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