chengkp75

The Trust Company of the Marshall Islands is basically the Marshall Islands Registry for ships. This intimates to me that while the Braemar was transferred to VVR as Bahamian flag, VVR intends to reflag to Marshall Islands.

To divert a container to another port, the container needs to be offloaded from the ship headed to the US either before or after calling at the US, and then there needs to be a ship from that port to where the cruise ship is going to call. All this takes time, about as much as the strike will.

VVR is actually "domiciled", or incorporated, in Delaware.

Well, if they are hemorrhaging money the way they seem to be, by not paying for USCG and USPH inspections for port calls, and the FMC bond for embarkations, they postpone the inevitable failure of the operation. Canada has similar requirements regarding the Certificate of Compliance. As you mentioned before, the visa cost is also there for the crew, when calling in either nation.

The mandate is that the USPH, working for the CDC, are to board and inspect foreign flag cruise ships every time they enter the US from a foreign port. If a vessel/cruise line decides to adhere to the CDC's VSP (Vessel Sanitation Program), both from a construction as well as an operational standpoint, then USPH/CDC will only do one or two surprise inspections per year. So, by adhering to the regulations all the time, they reduce the number of inspections. Now, since the Braemar never called at a US port before, there needs to be an initial inspection prior to the ship calling in the US. The USCG also needs to complete a "Certificate of Compliance" inspection prior to any cruise ship entering US waters.

any links?

Boston has the Children's Museum, Tea Party Ship, Old Ironsides, Lego Discovery Center (if you're up in Charlestown for Navy Yard, it's in Somerville), Museum of Science, Aquarium, the Rose Kennedy Greenway, and Boston Common. Portland has the Children's Museum & Theater, the Escape Room, Southworth Planetarium, Narrow Gauge Railway, schooner tours of Casco Bay, lobster boat excursions, the Portland Mailboat, and lots of fine dining, as well as casual lobster shacks.

Do you have a source for this? I've never heard of this. I know they have banned older tonnage from domestic trade, but wasn't aware of any proscription on international vessels.

Actually, during WW2, the Japanese didn't have enough tankers, or control of the sea lanes to get crude oil from Sumatra to the refineries in Japan, and were burning crude oil in their boilers. Efficiency went down the hopper and repairs increased exponentially, but the ships kept moving after a fashion.

I just did a quick calculation, based on the deck plans (had to estimate how many of each type of cabin, because they're not real clear), and selling all the cabins, and collecting double occupancy monthly fees. If VVR are planning on operating on just the monthly fees alone (and I assumed that the monthly fees by owners is more than the "pay as you go" payments), then they are looking at $81/passenger/day. RCI, on one of their Vision class ships, like Grandeur, their oldest, spend $164/passenger/day. That is a hurricane warning flag for me, and should have been looked at by anyone looking to invest in this operation. Just saw the post above this, and my figures show that they can't operate on this budget today, let alone guaranteed time in the future.

LNG buses use a spark plug for ignition, but marine diesels are too big for that. Wartsila has developed many years ago, an engine that runs on crude oil, so offshore oil platforms can take crude straight from the wellhead and use it to power the platform.

LNG is a fuel for a diesel engine. Diesel engines can run on a variety of fuels, from crude oil to flour or coal dust. It just depends on how you set up the fuel system. But, Icon's diesel engines are always using about 5% diesel and 95% LNG, since LNG will not auto-ignite in a diesel the way that most fuels will. The 5% diesel fuel "gets the party going" by igniting when sprayed into the combustion chamber, and this heat then ignites the LNG (which is no longer LNG actually, but gaseous propane when injected into the engine).

Given Icon's diesel configuration, unless they have two or more engines down for repair, it is most likely an azipod failure. Though it is interesting that Icon's large diesels are smaller than the large diesels on Oasis class.

Uh, no it doesn't. What CBP is looking for, is when a passenger permanently disembarks the ship. To "permanently disembark" you settle your account, and take your luggage off the ship, which I don't think anyone on a B2B has ever done. CBP specifically mentions in their guidelines, that how a trip is advertised, or sold, in other words, as one cruise or many, does not matter, the only thing that is important is where the passenger embarks the ship, and where they permanently disembark the ship.

I was not criticizing the Captain, the fault falls on the engineers, especially the Chief who formulates engineering procedures onboard. From my reading of the official investigation report, I don't recall (and I don't feel like digging it out again), that the engines were damaged, it was just that without main power, the pumps to refill the engines with oil could not be run. You take it wrong. Propulsion is a much larger power draw than hotel load, and that 25 minutes would be for operating at very low propulsion levels while cruising in a fjord. In a storm, that amount of power would be used up in minutes. The hybrid feature of the Amundsen is for one thing, zero emissions while sightseeing in a restricted fjord, not redundancy. The fact that the system only provides less than a half hour of power shows that the systems are still in their infancy, and not ready to scale up to cruise ships.