Majestic Alaska 5/5/23 itinerary change

[cruisingrob21]

4 hours ago, Coral said:

This is not correct.

Yes, Grand class ships take the inner passage - a real treat on the SB journey:

[Coral]

1 minute ago, cruisingrob21 said:

Yes, Grand class ships take the inner passage - a real treat on the SB journey:

I completely agree! I have a RT out of Vancouver in May and looking forward to it.

[martincath]

13 hours ago, ldtr said:

Have done 4 Alaska cruises out of Vancouver on Grand class ships.  None of the 4 went inside of Vancouver Island on the way out or the way back.

 

The question is how many actually do the route especially with the speed restrictions for whals that were put on at the end of last year.  ... While that route is shorter it is considerably slower than going around.

While I feel for you - going four for four on the inferior, unplanned outside route - your luck may be terrible but your experiences are not the norm. Such things do of course happen, Captains have discretion, contracts are written to allow for changes, but the events triggering them tend to be specific rather than general - if they were the norm, it absolutely would have been noticed and called out just like it was with Royal when Princess first deployed her and lied about her route (the first published maps I can forgive, as of course the marketing bumph was prepped a couple of years before Royal ever came here - it was the continued lies to each new set of pax blaming tide times rather than admitting the truth that rankled me).

 

I too have sailed Grand class out of Vancouver; at least one other person in this thread now likewise; we both went Inside the Island. Everyone I know who has cruised these waters on Princess, NCL, heck on any line at all has gone up the inside of the Island . This 100% IS the normal case - believe me, I've been flamed because I called out Princess for being weasels on their first Royal class deployments when they lied about inside routing, I'm no cheerleader for them or any line... and if any line were regularly pretending to route inside but actually sailing outside, I'd be spreading the word. Even folks with no local familiarity can tell the difference between 'land close on both sides' to 'barely able to even see land to the east of you and open ocean to the west' so there would be a lot of folks complaining!

 

Right now there's a very active thread over on NCL board about whether or not they are deliberately changing routes post Final Payment - CC may only represent a very small % of cruisers, but it's the most vocal ones. People care about routing, this very thread proves that the first big chunk of the BC Inside Passage is a big deal so if skipped when scheduled word would spread - that's exactly how I became aware of the issues with Royal class, I've never sailed them myself and certainly never will here in this part of the world where the scenery IS the reason to cruise!

 

If you want to stick to your guns and continue with your claims about what the majority of ships & lines do that flies in the face of conventional wisdom, well, kudos for your self-belief and I'll point you to a resource that should enable easily proving or disproving your theory: there are plenty of vessel trackers out there to use, but I like this one because it has a set of filters right above the map that mean you can click once to see only ships of a a specific cruise line - given how busy local waters are, it makes it trivial to separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff. Historic data means paying, but if you just wait until we start seeing this season's ships arrive it should become patently obvious which are going the long way around and which are not.

 

Lastly, your point about relative speed of inside vs outside is simply incorrect - look at the route of shipping at any point in time to prove that to yourself. Anything heading north out of (or southbound into) Vancouver - even some ships that come up from Seattle - go inside when speed is of the essence in their schedule, because it's faster (and for big ships, potentially also cheaper with the saved fuel offsetting the additional pilotage costs). Canada did not go to the massive expense of destroying the peak of Ripple Rock in the Narrows for fun, or to help speed up traffic to the handful of tiny towns & villages actually inside the Island where moving goods and people in through these waters is the only option - the route inside is an important trade link, not just scenic cruising, and even when it had a dirty big rock in it that made passage extremely dangerous most ships still went that way, before the cruise industry even existed. The passage then was much more cramped than now, with safety dubious even at slack tide, so overall speed traversing it was even lower then - if going outside was even close to as fast, who in their right mind would use such dangerous waters when they did not absolutely have to?

[VibeGuy]

Princess traded reliability for manoeuvrability by avoiding azimuthing pod propulsion, which seemed like a missed opportunity on the later Grand class vessels and hopelessly Luddite at the time of the planning of the Royal class, and now with the benefit of hindsight, looks like one of the smarter ship design decisions they made. We’re talking about the line that was operating an actual steamship as recently as 2000!  Trading a suboptimal route for five vessels and one homeport vs more frequent dry dock and loads more unplanned propulsion deficiencies is a solid deal.  Sun Princess will hopefully be the beneficiary of the last 30 years of podded propulsion “learning experiences”, but I digress. 

A sailaway at 10:45 in early May should be absolutely delightful, and Martincath is, as usual, completely correct that it makes crossing under the bridge even better. 

 

[rj59]

I went on Royal last Fall to SF, and we also left at that time, because of tides. The good news is there still be a sailaway party, more fun at night I'd say, and the bridge is lit at night so the view is fine--I remember being alarmed by how little clearance there seemed to be. The other odd thing is they don't start the party and movie screen narration until far clear of shore, no doubt to avoid evening noise complaints.  The good part of leaving that late is that when I went outside at 7 am, we were just passing into the Pacific, where I always see humpback whales, and I saw one breach multiple times.

 

I actually just booked Majestic going from LA to Vancouver, and one of the reasons (besides $114 for 5 nights and $300 obc) was because it arrives in Vancouver at 1 pm on the 5th, so I and my steward can sleep in and I'll get the daytime sailing under the bridge (as well as in SF). 

 

If you want the full Canadian inside passage experience r/t, Crown does several ones, Sapphire/Grand do one before starting a N/S route, but I'm going with HAL Volendam in June, since it only has a max of 1400 pax and so should be nimble for the inside passage and Glacier Bay, and fewer pax means less crowded outdoor spaces for viewing. Unlike the Royal class ships of Princess, it also has a full promenade outside, which is ideal for viewing seals, porpoises, brilliant blue ice chunks, whales, and eagles. After sailing a full Discovery last June and getting Covid in the packed theater, I'm also looking for smaller ships for Alaska. 

[cruisingrob21]

And the Royal arriving into YVR on the 3rd will be at 1:45am, and departing on a short coastal voyage to Victoria and Seattle will leave at 5:30p now instead of 4:30p.