The Guardian:
She is very beautiful - and now almost alone in her beauty among sea-going ships - but this quality comes from the old conventions of naval architecture rather than the fashions of the 1960s. The QE2 was built to cross the rough winter seas of the North Atlantic at speeds approaching 30 knots, at a shipyard with a long history of the art. She has a curved bow and a round stern, a long empty foredeck between the bow and the navigating bridge, a sheer (or curvature) on the hull that has been enhanced by clever paintwork. The funnel is centred, more or less, and her hull is grey verging on black with upperworks plain white. Why this should constitute “beauty” is as tricky as all aesthetic questions but it conforms to the popular idea of “a proper ship”. Why can more ships not be built like this? Or to put it another way, why are ships now so tall, so square, so ugly? The answer is simple enough - that if form follows function, then function follows economics - but in the cruise ship business where decks are sometimes stacked 12 high it can have brutal results: suddenly in Venice, for example, a large block of flats is towering over the Piazza San Marco, moving slowly upstream to discharge its 3,500 inhabitants and have its sewage pumped.
Photo by horitzons inesperats
We weren’t cruise blogging yet or we would have announced it sooner, but last month, the city of Dubai announced it purchased the Queen Elizabeth 2, “one of the world’s most majestic cruise liners,” to convert into a luxury hotel. The QE2 will be completely renovated and parked at the world’s largest man-made island, Palm Jumeirah.
Have you sailed on the QE2? What do you think of it becoming a parked, luxury hotel in the middle east?
Via Gadling. Photo by ccgd.
According to the Associated Press, an analyst has upgraded shares of cruise operators Carnival Corp. and Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. on Friday, saying that bad news is already reflected in their stock prices.
JPMorgan upgraded both companies to “Overweight” from “Neutral,” saying the shares already assume certain elements of bad news, such as higher fuel costs and weak pricing in the vital Caribbean market.
Shares of Royal Caribbean have declined 6 percent so far this month, while Carnival’s stock has shed nearly 4 percent.
Don’t worry — though stories like this always make the news, they are incredibly rare.
TVNZ:
It has been a holiday from hell for many Kiwis sailing around the Pacific.
The Pacific Star encountered horrendous conditions after leaving from Auckland on Tuesday afternoon with close to 1,000 New Zealanders onboard.
Continue reading ‘Cruise a holiday from hell’
