Someone better hurry, build that port!

Terry C

Well Known Member
Just in from Hermosillo, Sonora Mexico. Sonoran State Governor Claudia Pavlovich announced in a meeting with tourist and cruise line officials that Puerto Peñasco will see it’s first cruise ship depart on December 7th, 2019.
Vice President of the British based Cruise Maritime Voyages, John Dennis, confirmed that “From the beginning when we started discussions, the governor and the State have been incredibly supportive.”
The ship that will inaugurate service out of Rocky Point is named the Astoria (details about the ship are on this page ( https://www.cruiseandmaritime.com/our-ships/astoria ). The Astoria can accommodate 550 passengers.
Among those on hand for todays announcement were Oscar Palacio from Puerto Peñasco, representing the Office of Conventions and Visitors.
Initially, there will be 6 trips lasting 11 days each between December 7th and February 11th, 2020. The entire Sea of Cortez will be included in the cruise itinerary. After leaving Rocky Point, Ports of Call visited will include Mazatlan, Cabo San Lucas, La Paz, Loreto, and more.
Much coordination has been going on between the Governors of Sonora, as well as Arizona in order to attract a cruise in to Rocky Point. Within the last year, agreements were made to assist in the supply of cruise ships through the international border.
 

wendell

Active Member
Just in from Hermosillo, Sonora Mexico. Sonoran State Governor Claudia Pavlovich announced in a meeting with tourist and cruise line officials that Puerto Peñasco will see it’s first cruise ship depart on December 7th, 2019.
Vice President of the British based Cruise Maritime Voyages, John Dennis, confirmed that “From the beginning when we started discussions, the governor and the State have been incredibly supportive.”
The ship that will inaugurate service out of Rocky Point is named the Astoria (details about the ship are on this page ( https://www.cruiseandmaritime.com/our-ships/astoria ). The Astoria can accommodate 550 passengers.
Among those on hand for todays announcement were Oscar Palacio from Puerto Peñasco, representing the Office of Conventions and Visitors.
Initially, there will be 6 trips lasting 11 days each between December 7th and February 11th, 2020. The entire Sea of Cortez will be included in the cruise itinerary. After leaving Rocky Point, Ports of Call visited will include Mazatlan, Cabo San Lucas, La Paz, Loreto, and more.
Much coordination has been going on between the Governors of Sonora, as well as Arizona in order to attract a cruise in to Rocky Point. Within the last year, agreements were made to assist in the supply of cruise ships through the international border.
I will bet you this never happens. just name the amount you want to lose
 

Terry C

Well Known Member
What is funny is it never made mention of finishing the port................ attention please,,,, exit safety off the port side by jumping into the water and swim ashore. Good luck,
your captain.
 

Stuart

Aye carumba!!!
Staff member
Well... I was thinking they might be able to squeeze it into the main harbor. Maybe, just maybe, on a full moon high tide. Good luck getting it out of there!
:laugh2:
 

wendell

Active Member
Stuart-- if you still had your boat--you could become a tender captain and make just all kinds of money. Just don't quit your day job yet
 

Landshark

Well Known Member
Don’t forget to pack your personal floatation devices!!!

“MV Astoria is a former ocean liner now operated as a cruise ship by Cruise & Maritime Voyages. She was ordered in 1944, and launched 9 September 1946, as Stockholm by Götaverken in Gothenburg for the Swedish America Line. She made her Maiden voyage in 1948.”

“Booked this cruise European Canals, Rivers and Cities, then looked at reviews just prior to sailing and found the Astoria was the oldest cruise ship in the world, plus some reviews were a bit worrying, especially about the cabins and crew.”
 

Terry C

Well Known Member
On time out Jerry had this to say on a RP FB page
The boat was built in 1948 and was the one that sank the Andrea Doria in 1955 in a collision the North Sea but didn't sink also.
 

Kenny

Well Known Member
On time out Jerry had this to say on a RP FB page
The boat was built in 1948 and was the one that sank the Andrea Doria in 1955 in a collision the North Sea but didn't sink also.
Good find Jerry and a very colorful story. From ‘Death Ship’ to Cruise Ship
By ALAN FEUER – New York Times – September 23, 2006

Among its oceangoing sisters, the S.S. Stockholm has always been infamous as the ill-fated vessel that struck and sank the Italian liner Andrea Doria in dense fog off Nantucket 50 years ago. The collision — on July 25, 1956 — resulted not only in 51 deaths and the daring rescue of hundreds from the swells of the Atlantic; it also assured a name for the Stockholm as “the death ship” of the high seas.

Nonetheless, on Wednesday morning, there it was: sailing through the narrows, up the Hudson and docking at a West Side pier. Yesterday it sat with anchors at Pier 90 — albeit with a new hull, new innards and a new name.

The famed ship, rechristened Athena last year, had arrived in New York at the end of a trans-Atlantic cruise with a manifest of Britons, many of whom were aware — and apparently unfazed — by its macabre past.

“That was years ago — what’s the bother now?” asked Norman Marsh, a burly town councilor from Eastbourne, a resort town on England’s southern coast. “We were on the Van Gogh once — hit an oil tanker out of Gibraltar. Now that was something else.”

The ship’s return to New York City may have a close approximation, in human terms, to the convict sentenced to 50 years for murder who completes his sentence and revisits the scene of the crime. It was the vessel’s second journey to New York in recent years and its maiden trip to the city as Athena, sailing for the British outfit Classic International Cruises.

Steaming out of Falmouth last week, the 16,000 tonner built by Swedes in Gothenburg in 1948, lived up to its past, encountering weather that the British aboard described by turns as “frightful,” “a spot rough,” “very heavy” and “bloody terrifyingly bad.”

“Everybody was buffeted around,” said Katharyn Anderson, a homemaker from Devon traveling with her brother, Brian Thomson. “Plates were flying, cups, glasses, everything. They had to take the glass tables down and lay them on the floor.”

Ms. Anderson and other passengers said the 40-foot swells and gale force winds were in fact so strong that an unfortunate 70-year-old doctor was knocked to the floor on Tuesday night and died. His body was disembarked in Halifax, they said. Representatives from Classic International Cruises, based in Southampton, England, did not respond to phone messages seeking comment.

“You get about with all these old people, you’ll have fatalities,” Mr. Marsh observed. “It’s a law of averages, isn’t it?”

By far, the ship’s most famous fatalities were the five members of its crew who perished in the collision 50 years ago, which reads in accounts of the day like a particularly well-designed disaster movie.

Aboard the Andrea Doria: Hungarian ballet dancers rushed the promenade deck in their underthings; a Hollywood actress ran from the smoke-filled Belvedere Room to rouse her sleeping 3-year-old; a Canadian nun hurriedly donned a life-preserver; and a group of oil executives had both their cocktails and their bridge table knocked from beneath them by the force of the blow.

The Stockholm had been steaming east toward Scandinavia when its ice-breaking prow rammed the starboard side of the Andrea Doria, which had been due to arrive at Manhattan’s 44th Street Pier from Genoa. The Ile de France, sent to rescue the Andrea Doria’s 1,134 passengers, circled the capsized vessel, which sank 11 hours after its hull was torn apart.

Meanwhile, the Stockholm, with 550 passengers of its own, limped back to New York where it docked at Pier 97, only blocks from where it rested yesterday.

“It looked like someone took a bite out of the front of it,” said an old-timer, who gave his name as Paddy the Longshoreman. Paddy, who said he was there that day (as he has been nearly every day since 1953), described not only the huge chunk missing from the Stockholm’s bow, but also the faces of those at the rails of the returning Ile de France, which looked, he said, “like they were stunned, like, ‘Am I back?’ ”

It was Paddy who pointed out Athena’s riveted hull, angled prow and small size: all signs of an older ship. Then he drifted off on a memory of just how glad he was that Ruth Roman, the actress with the 3-year-old, had survived.

The question was whether a salt like him considered Athena irrevocably tainted by the past.

“It just happened,” he said with a shrug. “A lot of bad things happen on the sea.”
 
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Kenny

Well Known Member
My favorite quotes from the story, “You get about with all these old people, you’ll have fatalities,” Mr. Marsh observed. “It’s a law of averages, isn’t it?”, and “bloody terrifyingly bad.”
 

brokenwave

Well Known Member
Pretty expensive For an ocean view, Jr suite is $4300 per person. Std twin room is almost $2k, Old ship with small rooms.
I like the idea of using small capacity ships. Good luck to them.
 

JoseAz

Well Known Member
If true, I will jump at the chance to Cruise the Sea of Cortez. What a natural wonder and awesome people places and things to see.........
 

Stuart

Aye carumba!!!
Staff member
Stuart-- if you still had your boat--you could become a tender captain and make just all kinds of money. Just don't quit your day job yet
That's actually not a bad idea. I can't imagine how they will tender right now and the article stated that's what they intend to do. Beat up, wet, fishy pangas?

Maybe the ship has its own tenders? Hard to know at this point.
 

sheep3mom

Well Known Member
That's actually not a bad idea. I can't imagine how they will tender right now and the article stated that's what they intend to do. Beat up, wet, fishy pangas?

Maybe the ship has its own tenders? Hard to know at this point.
They use the lifeboats in my experience.
 

AzDave

Junior Member
From the AZ Central article, "Although the details aren't set, Dennis said the company is considering ferrying passengers from the marina, near the city's downtown, to the cruise ship, which would be docked about 20 minutes offshore in the bay."

Where are they going to anchor?

Hey, there are plenty of panga's up for this task!
 

brokenwave

Well Known Member
I wonder where all the passengers who drive down will park their cars during the 11 days they're at sea.
Parking space is pretty limited around the marina.
 
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