DocF

Well, for what it is worth, I would head for the inflatable rafts. I'm convinced they are much superior to rigid lifeboats. Part of this I base on the last three Great Lakes sinking where the three survivors were all on rafts rather than the lifeboats. I also have seen the lifeboats from the Edmund Fitzgerald. Their state is such that no one would have survived in them.

Doc

I have been involved with organizing these events on several cruises. My experience indicates that the effort of doing something formal is not worth doing. What has worked best for us is to designate an area of the ship and the time and suggest all interested drop by.

Doc

Hi,

Can I get advice on how to choose the deck level? If everything else are the same, between the lower level and upper level, which one we will feel more stable(in other words, less impacted by the sea)?

 

Thanks.

This would indicate that you need to select a stateroom on a lower deck and about midship. This is where you will find the least motion.

We prefer to be as high as possible and forward for the view.

Doc:D

I am fairly adventurous regarding driving, afterall, I live is a city with the worst drivers in the country. That being said, I would not even contemplate trying to drive in any of the ports in the Caribbean that we have been in. The conditions are incredibly bad and dangerous for non-locals. Negotiate a rate for a cab by the day instead.

Doc :eek:

I am currently reading an article in the January, 2016 issue of Civil Engineering magazine regarding Amber Cove. It is a cooperative development of Carnival Corp. and the Dominican government. The facility is designed to handle two post panamax ships at one time. It is interesting to note that about a quarter of the land for the port is "made" land and is environmentally sourced. The whole development is intended to have a positive environmental impact. This is quite a change from the bad old days of cruise line development.

Doc

Most people start counting down to retirement about the time they are hired. :rolleyes:

I guess some of the poster here would be suspicious if I fasten a really long handle to our dachshund and claim she is my guide dog.:p

Seriously, she can sense my highs and lows and acts upon them, but I would no more take her along as a support beast than I would an alligator.

Doc

NOTE: The dog in my sig cut is Elmo, the uber dachshund. He is no longer with us as all 46 pounds of him had to go back to the weenie dog ranch as he continually misbehaved.

DW and I always carry a clock with us as we like to see the time and having to get up to find the phone is a pain. The current one cost about $7.00 at WallyWorld.

Doc:)

Do I detect the smell of very sour grapes in Mr. Westover's blog?

I would hope that the United States has a future. It would be a great tribute to my late friend Russ Powell, who did the takeoffs for this ship's construction while he worked at Newport News Shipbuilding.

Doc.

There is a huge problem with organizing any sort of a roll call meet and greet. That is one has no idea who or how many will show up.

I have had 40 people say they would be there and had literally almost 200 show. It was fun and we had a great time and I was glad we had planned very little as it would not have worked well.

I have also had 40 people say they would be there and had two others show up. We picked up two stray couples and had a fine time chatting, but I would have been more than disappointed if I had planned much of anything besides getting together and saying "Hey" to each other.

Most of the time the results are somewhere in between. The best ones have been extremely casual with little planned. The one that had lots of planning put in to it, was not very good and the other planner and I felt we has wasted a lot of effort.

Be guided accordingly.

Doc:p

It's great to see such an active discussion on that forum.

 

Hoping to retire this thread if Crystal moves ahead with The Grand Plan. :cool:

 

In the meantime, thanks to all who have posted here, keeping the SS United States relevant and yes, that includes those naysayers who felt the ship had no chance at all for a second life.

 

It's not over yet.

The most relevant part of all your posts to date is "It's not over yet." I sincerely hope that Crystal decides that there is economic justification to rebuild the United States into a new and functional cruise ship. I hate to see the efforts that the conservancy have put forth be for naught.

Doc

Unless they have changed the policy, neither passport is going to accepted by Carnival for that cruise as they require at least 6 weeks of life left in a passport.

Get them both renewed now. If you guys figure you will never need them again, opt for the cheap passport card which will do for a cruise or going to Mexico or Canada.

Doc

The big advantage of spinner cases is when one is flying on a plane that is small enough or old enough that the bags are not placed in a container (can). The baggage get thrown from the door to the pile in the baggage compartment unless the case is a spinner. Then they sit it on the wheels and give it a shove.

Now the hard side cases (plastic) survive unbelievable abuse by airlines and cruise lines. One of our giraffe cases arrived in Hawaii with the imprint of a structural beam in it. Yet it survived and I heated it and pretty much fixed the damage. A fabric bag would have been toast.

I thought I wanted a Zero Haliburton bag until I saw one arrive in Rome ripped in half. No, the top was not demounted from the bottom; both were torn in half. It was interesting, to say the least.

Doc:p

In this case, a visit to the tourist trap shops in the port and the immediate vicinity will be a good chance to pick up souvenirs for a lot less than in most ports we have visited.

This is a case of, "When life gives you lemons, hope you can find a bottle of gin and make a Tom Collins."

Doc:p

One is never wrong to wear a tuxedo or dinner jacket. I can't speak for your cruise, but a few days later, I will bring mine for our cruise.

Doc:D

Here is how I do it. Your mileage will undoubtedly vary.

I figure on carrying enough cash to tip the shuttle driver for our offsite parking (both ways), the longshoreman who takes our checked bags (both on and off the ship), dining room waiter(s) if service is exemplary, cabin steward(s) if service is exemplary, $25.00 in ones for room service waiters, and less than $200 to spend ashore in ports. We are not big shoppers.

Al told, this comes to about $450.00 for a 7-10 day cruise.

Doc

If one is flying, one must put his insulin in the clear one quart plastic bag for the benefit of the TSA twinkies. Put syringes and all other non-liquid medications in your carry-on bag.

DW once packed her meds in her checked bag when going to Hawaii. Due to miss connections, her bag went to LA and we went to Honolulu. It took five days to get her meds back in hand.

Doc

We have flown to several cruises, flown home from several cruises, have flown to visit relatives in Hawaii at least five times. We have been on a dozen cruises.

I put my drugs, both OTC and prescription in the daily pill pouches that one can buy at most pharmacies. No one, not customs, not port security, not ship security, not TSA twinkies, not even the guys in evil Franco era uniforms in Spain, has given them a second thought. I had issues with a TSA twinkie at Houston's Bush airport over a peppermint candy, but not over my pills.

Doc:p

I think that Sen. Nelson has been chosen by the group that is behind asking the NTSB to investigate why the ship was sent forth into a serious storm that was well forecast to happen because he is from Florida.

Now I know the Royal supporters here will not be happy with the prospect that Fain and his cohorts are found to have screwed up "royally", but the fact remains that the ship sailed from a U. S. port and the majority of the passengers were U. S. citizens.

Facts are needed, not speculation and the only way we will determine the reasons for the ship being put in harms way is by having expert investigators conduct an investigation.

Doc

There isn't really a rule of thumb for this, but I'll give some rough idea. The center of buoyancy is well below the waterline (since the buoyancy is only caused by the water displaced by the hull in the water), and the center of gravity for a ship like Anthem will be maybe 3-4 meters above this. So the center of gravity (the theoretical spot where all the mass of the ship could be represented in one spot), will still be below the promenade deck. My guess would be somewhere around deck 2.

If one wants a very good explanation of this part of marine engineering and vessel stability, one must read the late George W. Hilton's great book Eastland: The Legacy of the Titanic. It is somewhat involved, but it is much more clearly explained than I have found anywhere else.

I do not suggest reading this book before going on a cruise. :eek:

Doc

If the main dining room food was better, I would say Holland America. Of course our small sample size makes this a very unreliable conclusion.:rolleyes:

Doc

Is this dude up for re-election?

Need to get his name out there?

No he is not up for re-election. Nelson is a fairly consistent critic of the way cruise line operate out of his home territory. He is especially critical of RCI as they contribute to his opponents.

Doc

We were on the Carnival Splendor TA several years ago. We got hit by a storm in the closed end of the Mediterranean. Winds reached 85 knots and

wave action was bad enough so many passengers ended up with broken bones.

Now the absolute worst weather I have ever encountered was delivering a Roamer yacht across Lake Michigan in early December. We caught a pretty bad storm and were very heavily iced up by the time we made Milwaukee. We were worried about capsizing as we had as much a six inches of ice on the vessel.

Doc

Wow/ there's some real misinformation. Exchange booths in airports are among the most costly in bad rates and/or added fees. Their parent company websites are not much better.

Use foreign bank ATMs that accept your home bank ATM card, as long as it's a bank that charges no foreign transaction fees and, better still, refunds fees charged by other banks (e.g., Mechanics Bank in northern California) are the least costly. Likewise, such banks can be used for amassing some "pocket change" to get you started in a foreign port if that planned ATM stop doesn't work.

Of course, never use a credit card for a cash advance.

I'm very sorry, but the late unlamented Wachovia Bank charged at least twice the fee that the Travelex booths in Atlanta and Detroit did. If you happen to deal with one of the few banks that does not tack on fees for everything one does, then what you say may be true; I never found that situation. Wachovia wanted 8-12% depending on the currency one needed. Travelex charge less than 3% for the same transaction. Duh.

My little regional bank that I still deal with does not have free foreign credit card transactions, either through ATMs or for direct merchant payments. Since we do not travel enough to make it worth giving up the other generally favorable feature of this card, that makes your point even more moot.

What works for you would never work for me, nor, I suspect any number of other travelers.

Doc

Doc

The estimate of 800 Million comes from Crystal. If they can do it for that, so be it. They are planning on taking as long as 10-12 months to evaluate the situation and see if reconstructing the ship is feasible.

Now I have been told by a neutral source that the interior of the ship is gutted. Many of the mechanical gubbins have been taken to use on other ships. So redoing this ship will almost be like starting with a pile of steel plates and building a new ship.

Crystal plans to rebuild this ship as an 800 person cruise ship. This is considerably fewer passengers than the original capacity. I suspect the profile will differ enough to cause the zealots to cringe.

Anyway, we will see what we will see over the next year.

Doc