Cruise Ships

One of my favourite cruise ships, Fred Olsen's Black Watch, is about to be spruced up. The ship will go into dry-dock on December 2, when she returns from a trip to the Canary islands, and will be back at sea in time to sail on a five-day Christmas markets cruise leaving Southampton on December 14. Soft furnishings will be replaced in the Neptune Lounge theatre and adjoining Pipers Bar, the splendid Observatory bar, and in the main Glentanar restaurant. A number of cabins will have their bathrooms re-fitted. The biggest change will be the creation of a new casual [...]

UPDATE: For a detailed first-person report and pictures of the coming-together, take a look at John Heald's blog. You'll have to scroll through his opening remarks, his answers to dozens of questions, and an interview with fellow-CD Ryan Fitzgerald, but it's well worth the effort. Regular readers of the informative blog compiled by Prinsendam captain Albert Schoonderbeek will be well aware of the problems that winds, tides and currents can cause when a cruise ship is entering or leaving harbour. And those problems became apparent last night when Carnival Legend was leaving port in the Mexican resort of Cozumel. Caught [...]

It's still more than a year before Cunard's newest ship, Queen Elizabeth, is scheduled to make her maiden voyage, but the publicity machine is already being cranked into gear. Alastair Greener, entertainments director on board sister ship Queen Victoria, has visited the Fincantieri shipyard at Monfalcone, in north-east Italy and reported back with a selection of pictures and video clips on his We Are Cunard blog. Intrepid Alastair even climbed a 200-ft crane to get some good pictures. "Everywhere you looked you could see parts of our new ship. Each carefully numbered block will eventually become part of this massive [...]

The future of Artemis, P&O's smallest cruise ship, became clearer today. I reported a couple of weeks ago that there were rumours the 1,200-passenger vessel was about to be sold to German cruise line Phoenix Reisen and at that time P&O confirmed they had received an enquiry from an unnamed source. In a statement today, the company confirms the ship has been sold, and that it will continue to operate under the P&O flag until it has completed all the cruises currently listed in P&O's brochures. An initial statement reads: "P&O Cruises can confirm that it has signed contracts for [...]

Royal Caribbean boss Richard Fain has an interesting problem to tackle as final preparations are being made for the maiden voyage of the biggest cruise ship in the world. One of the many innovations on Oasis of the Seas is Central Park, an open-air leafy garden in the middle of the ship. Climatic conditions in Finland, where construction is nearing completion, are rather different from those in the Caribbean, where the ship will be sailing regularly from the end of November. So it is not possible to plant up the park before the 5,400-passenger, 220,000-ton ship sets out across the [...]

The England football team may have confirmed their place in next year's World Cup, but there are new doubts over plans to move the QE2 to South Africa to provide accommodation for visiting fans. The former Cunard liner, which retired from service last year, has been in Dubai since November, waiting for work to start to convert it into a luxury floating hotel. The global financial crisis placed those plans on hold, just as they put a stop to other building work in Dubai. New owners Nakheel then announced the ship would move to Cape Town for 18 months, in [...]

There's a bit of a mystery developing over the future of Artemis, the smallest ship in P&O's fleet. The French website Mer et Marine reported earlier today that the vessel had been sold to German cruise line Phoenix Reisen and could be sailing under a new flag by next summer. Which struck me as rather unlikely, because P&O announced earlier this week that Artemis was scheduled to set out on a spectacular 98-night grand voyage to the Far East in January 2011. My first call to P&O's head office in Southampton was met with a flat denial. By the afternoon, [...]