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.