After Thoughts-Silver Wind Norway/Copenhagen 6/22

[chrism23]

I apologize for the delay in getting this in print.  Stuff happens. I will upload a longer version to the Cruise Critic review site.  This should be long enough.  Even though late,  there should be information of value here.

Before I embarked on the Silver Wind on June 22 for a 14 day cruise to Norway I started a thread here on the Wind, its refurbishments and what I should expect.  It proved a lively thread with over 40 responses and hundreds of views.  I indicated I would write a post-cruise summary. So here goes.

Ship Shape:  I was initially worried about the Wind being tired even though it was partially refurbished last year which was the topic of my previous post.  I am glad to say its not.  New carpets, lighting and spruced up common areas gave it a newer feel.  I encountered no mechanical problems or complaints about the same from fellow passengers.  It seems I had been running into a string of unforeseen HVAC problems on the last couple of Silversea cruises, even on the Muse last year (which resulted in an upgrade to the owner’s suite-another story).  All systems seemed to be working fine.  Silversea ships always look sleek and well cared for. The crew is out everyday in a port with 30 foot long paint rollers touching up any looming rust spots.  The interior maintenance is constant and ungoing. All interior railings, glass surfaces, all public areas are being cleaned all the time.  Thus the ship is nearly always spotless.  

 

However, the current state of the ship is largely irrelevant because the Wind like its sister ship, the Silvercloud, is scheduled to go through a major overhaul to turn it into an ice class expedition ship within a year.  The Cloud and the Wind were the first 2 and smallest ships in the Silversea fleet, both with a capacity of 295 passengers. The retrofit will reduce the number to about 200.  Hopefully some of the suites will be made larger.  Now, for example the Veranda suites on the Wind are 245 square feet as contrasted to 387 sq feet (including veranda) on the Silver Muse.  I have more thoughts on what seems to be and industry wide shift to smaller expedition ships later.

 

Hopefully the retrofit will address the dangerous shower/bath configuration that requires the passenger to step over a steep tub edge to take a shower. The ship was rolling a couple of nights and quite a few passengers complained about how awkward this was. Otherwise the layout of the room was nearly identical to all other veranda suites on Silversea ships, perfectly adequate for 2-3 week sailings.  

 

Food:  A couple my fellow guests, and members of my stellar trivia team, had some complaints about the quality of the food in comparison to previous voyages on other ships. I disagree.  I had some major issues with the food and service, especially dinner in La Terrazza, on the Muse.   On the Wind, the buffet breakfasts and lunches were first rate, even to the point of the lunches being too opulent- e.g roast sucking pig for lunch. Dinners in the main dining room (MDR) were by and large first rate. There was an abundance of lobster, prime steaks, caviar and other goodies.  One change I hadn’t experienced before is that while the majority of the menu remains the same for several days, each day there is a page of specials, most tied to local produce, fish and meats.  This concept worked really well.  One lunch featured a raw bar with a variety of shell fish including about 100 pounds of king crab legs and knuckles.  On an excursion the day before we had pulled up a bunch of crab traps and boiled the crab on the dock, I expect we were eating some of this haul  It can’t get fresher than that.   To my pleasant surprise Silversea must have bought out a couple of days catch.  For the uninitiated king crab goes for about $40 bucks a pound at the Whole Foods at home. I gorged myself.  

 

Just a word about the expectations passengers have about ship board food.  I hate when it when writers get self-referential but here I need to. Quite a few decades ago I wrote a food column for a private food journal.  For the past 40 years I would characterize myself as partly a food tourist.  I sometimes go places primarily to eat. This has brought me to Noma, Mugaritz, and my home restaurant ElevenMadisonPark in NYC, all three have been rated the best restaurant in the world at various times.  One trip to Paris had me eating in every 2 starred Michelin restaurants in the city.   I say this just to underscore that I know my stuff.

 

Toward this end, a word to those that complain about ship food, simply get a life.  The MDR on Silversea, the upscale restaurants on Regent, Seabourn and other high end cruise lines are not, and, cannot, and never will be Michelin starred restaurants. They have to make do with small kitchens, limited equipment, and itinerant cooks.  If they are preparing let’s say, 200 filets in a 90 minute window, they are not going to get a perfect sear on the beef.  They don’t have a grill or broiler that large.   They have to make do with countless limitations.  Given this I think they do and exemplary job.  What is a problem is when a particular ingredient is off. This happened one night with a shrimp dish in a cognac sauce in which the shrimp was off and gummy.  That was a mistake.  But these mistakes are very much the exception and not the rule.  

 

On the negative side, I think the La Dame concept needs to be retired or redone.  The menu in La Dame is the same every night it didn’t change for 14 days.  Moreover, the menu seems to consist of the same dishes as in the MDR only in larger portions.  The only real difference was a soufflé available for desert.   The experience is not worth a $60 pp surcharge. 

 

Service-This I feel is one of Silversea’s strong suits and it probably the main reason for its brand loyalty and high percentage of repeat customers.  They just nail it form embarkation to disembarkation.  This trip the service in the MDR was the best I had experienced. This due to a new manager Sivi (?) sorry I forgot her last name, who ran a tighter operation than any other Silversea ship I have been on.   She is a star.

  

Another good thing to keep in mind on Silversea with food service and with everything else for that matter, is if you don’t ask you don’t get, if you ask, if possible, they will accommodate.  My wife asked for Almond Milk, it was there every morning.   A couple on my trivia team, in a larger suite, wanted to have a cocktail party for the team, no problem, it was served by a butler, upmarket champagne, caviar and other canapés.

So the bottom line, is simply, I found little to complain about concerning the ship’s condition, its service, food and nearly all else.  There are a few very minor things I would like to see Silversea change. 

Laundry-  Silversea’s policy is that passengers with more than 100 days at sea get free laundry. This should be changed to a lesser number say 50 days.  It seems ridiculous to have to spend over $100,000 to get your clothes washer. This is a simple fix.

Passenger Entitlement- This is guaranteed to make people angry.  I have had it with individuals who sign up for excursions that they have no business signing up for.  Silversea and other cruise lines try to rate the degree of difficultly and exertion of most excursions.  But people nearly always overestimate their fitness and ability.  This results in situations, lets say on a hike, where the whole group ends up waiting for some out of shape individual, who is lagging way behind the main group to catch up.  This is epidemic to the cruise industry and not just Silversea.  I know it is hard for the shore excursion staff to say no to a paying passenger, but enough is enough.  If a passenger, for whatever reason, such as being 200 pounds overweight, or being on crutches, signs up for a 5k hike, up the side of a mountain, they should be told by the shore staff, that they can’t do it.  This trip, there were several short hikes, of minimal difficultly, and there were 2 instances where I had to pick people up off the ground who had done a face plant.  This is a gross disservice to fellow passengers, who end up waiting 20 or more minutes while the rest of the group staggers to a gathering point.  I know this is politically incorrect but it somehow needs to be fixed.  Especially now that Silversea and other high end small ship cruise lines are expanding their expedition offerings. Granted there are exceptions to this.  I remember in the Galapagos there was one very frail elderly woman who looked like she was on here last legs who turned out to be a like a mountain goat and faster than nearly everyone else.

This practice affects nearly all passengers in unforeseen ways.  Ship captains are reluctant to run tender operations in rougher seas because of the number of passengers who can not jump into a tender in 2-4 four foot seas.  This is to say nothing of zodiacs.  Excursions get cancelled more than they should.  For reference, anyone who has been to Venice, when a huge cruise ship is passing down the Grand Canal, it kicks up 4-6 foot wakes, and elderly ladies with arms full of groceries are jumping into wildly undulating vaperettos (water taxis) with no problems.  Not so with cruise line passengers who are simply not used to this.

So more pre-screening needs to occur at the risk of making some passengers, who overestimate their fitness and ability, very angry.

In sum, this trip, as with the 6 other Silversea trips I have been on was nearly flawless.  There was one major glitch.  On the first day at anchor in Flam, the excursion staff miscalculated the time it took to tender passengers to the pier which resulted in 50% of the those who signed up for the Flam railway excursion to miss the train.  Granted the Silversea refunded the cost and issued all sorts of mea culpas but that was a big miss.  Another glitch, and Silversea could not do anything about this, was that every excursion that involved flying, whether by sea plane of helicopter, until the last day, was grounded because of bad weather or low visibility. All cruisers should be aware of this when traveling, especially in waters prone to fog, rain and other bad weather.  Cancellations are frequent.  The missed train ride was clearly unacceptable and the shore concierge heard about it the rest of the cruise which was understandable.  I imagine because of passenger safety concerns many excursions, on all cruise lines, get cancelled.  In the last few years this has become an epidemic.  Cruisers just have to get used to this and do better taking it in stride.  

The ship’s crew are absolute masters at getting passengers safely out of zodiacs and tenders.  They will do so if at a possible.  So please cut them some slack.

Entertaiment/Enrichment-This a again a case of unrealistic expectations.  Silversea ships are small.  The largest being the Muse class with 600 passengers.  You are not going to get a Broadway show or Taylor Swift playing the cocktail lounge.  Silversea has a small show everynight with a cast of 4-6 doing show tunes and the like. There are pianists and small combos in the lounges and bars.  This is what, realistically, is on offer.  

One complaint on this front is that they start some of the shows/discos much to late, frequently at 10:00 pm.  I am a semi-old guy and this is past my bed time.  Earlier please, say 9:00 pm.  This was a frequently heard complaint.  

Another concerns enrichment lectures.  On this cruise there were two.  On Corey Sandler did a daily talk on the ports we would be visiting.  The other, General Joe Shaefer, did a variety of lectures all on world affairs. This doesn’t work.  The lectures need to be more cruise/destination focus. A Silversea example is their Galapagos trips where every night we hear from their array of botanists, zoologists and other experts on the flora and fauna we would be seeing.  General Shaefer is a smart man, but I would rather be hearing about polar bears.

Last a couple of miscellaneous points.  I will talk about Norway more in my actual review because I am better able to talk about specific ports and sights.  Suffice to say Norway is magnificent and should be on everyone’s bucket list.  My usual prime directive-is to take only small ships.  Two mega ships-4000+ passengers were docked in Bergen when we were there and they discharged so many passengers into a small town it was worse than Times Square on New Years Eve.  Most ports in Norway are just too small to handle these hoards of people.  

Lastly, and totally irrelevant (I just want to see if they are reading this)  a big shout out to my trivia team-Jolly Jones, the Aussies Karen, Robyn, Tony and Rob, and Mindi and Rick.  For many Sivlersea regulars, the 5 o’clock trivia games a big deal.  Colin, our cruise director for the first week, kept admonishing us that its just a game.  Wrong Colin.  It’s a blood sport.  I went so far this time, and I will do it again, to recruit my triva team in advance through these columns.  This yielded me Jolly Jones who was the best trivia player I have ever played with. We killed, with 8 firsts and 2 seconds. 

There will be more coming from me on Norway, and the trend toward either larger ships or smaller expedition ships, as well as my 2 cents on Silversea matters in general.  I hope I am not wasting your time.

 

Cheers

chris

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited August 2, 2019 by chrism23

[jpalbny]

Great review! We love Cloud and Wind, and happy to hear that you did too. In fact, we fly to Reykjavik tomorrow night to meet the Cloud on Monday.

 

Agree wholeheartedly with your take on ship restaurants vs. land-based restaurants. SS does a great job considering the resources that they have in a ship galley. I have never left a SS ship hungry, or without some "excess baggage" which takes some time to shed.

 

Really glad to hear that the local offerings are taking off. Excited to see if they have any local stuff on our Iceland trip. Hopefully some nice fish and lamb, though I will pass on the rotten shark!

 

Thanks again for posting. It was nice to read.

[nfcu]

Chris,

 

We were recently on the Wind also, and agree with your observations on the ship.  It is in good shape with a good crew and good food and service.

 

You are spot on about people taking excursions they have no business being on.  Every one I have taken, and I've taken a lot, that involves any sort of serious walking or hiking, was always negatively affected by someone who should not be there.  Enough already!

 

Free laundry is a perk that can not be offered to more guests because the laundry facilities on board these  ships have very limited capacity.  There is just not enough machines, space, or personnel to accommodate an additional workload.

 

 Finally,  we go to dinner between 8pm and 830pm and are rarely finished before 930pm.  So we are quite happy to have the evening shows start at 10pm.

 

Thanks.

[Tothesunset]

Glad you mentioned Sivi (who is Norwegian, by the way) as we think she us the epitome of what a restaurant manager should be. My OH was in the industry and thought Sivi just wonderful. It's also clear that she commands the respect of the staff. SS need more like her. 

[Silver Spectre]

1 minute ago, nfcu said:

Chris,

 

We were recently on the Wind also, and agree with your observations on the ship.  It is in good shape with a good crew and good food and service.

 

You are spot on about people taking excursions they have no business being on.  Every one I have taken, and I've taken a lot, that involves any sort of serious walking or hiking, was always negatively affected by someone who should not be there.  Enough already!

 

Free laundry is a perk that can not be offered to more guests because the laundry facilities on board these  ships have very limited capacity.  There is just not enough machines, space, or personnel to accommodate an additional workload.

 

 Finally,  we go to dinner between 8pm and 830pm and are rarely finished before 930pm.  So we are quite happy to have the evening shows start at 10pm.

 

Thanks.

Cheers NFCU, you beat me to the two points I was going to make, and which I second, other than that a well constructed review by the OP.

[jollyjones]

Of course I'm reading this Chris - thanks for the mention, maybe we'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when, but I cruise frequently enough so it could happen.

 

And that's a pretty fair summation of the cruise, shame the weather gods weren't kinder to us. I take very few excursions because I'm waaaay too impatient with their pace, prefer to go striding off on my own, so I totally agree with that comment.

 

Shows ... I really don't care, I seldom go to them, music does nothing much for me, I prefer a good book with my feet up in bed.

Edited August 2, 2019 by jollyjones

[brimary]

Thanks for the excellent review of your cruise which followed our three back to back cruises in May/June.Agree with most of your report and confirm that Sivi is the most competent Restaurant Manager we have come across in twenty one years sailing with Silversea.We are due back on theWind in ten days for a complementary cruise so would not be keen on Silversea reducing or doing away with Loyalty awards earned over long periods of travel.We are disappointed Sivi will have departed the Wind but fingers crossed her replacement will match up.We are pleased that our favourite SS waiter Catherine who on our last voyage was Simply the Best in all our SS cruises will still be on board with our favourite bottles of Red and White on our table a week on Sunday.Can’t wait and once again thanks for your detailed and most helpful report.

[Solo mi!]

Excellent critique!  Thank you and agree wholeheartedly.

[spinnaker2]

Thanks for the comprehensive review!