chengkp75

Not permanently, maybe just temporarily.

Typically, unless property is used as collateral, it cannot be seized if the owner is being sued for unpaid bills. Lawsuits against a person or corporation are known as "in personam" (against a person). However, in the maritime industry, there are "in rem" (against an object), so the shipyard can sue the ship for not paying for repairs, and can then seize the ships in payment for the debt, much as was done by a collection of creditors to Crystal Cruises ships a couple years ago. If a security guard is preventing the people from accessing the ship, this is the most likely scenario, an in rem seizure either by the shipyard, or a subcontractor, or materials supplier.

Sounds to me like there is a bailiff's warrant on the ship for unpaid bills.

One big problem is that the luggage you are trying to disembark with will not be going through Customs, as they are not set up for screening luggage in that port. So, the OP may find himself held up at Guest Services, being sent back there by the gangway security team, until Guest Services is notified that a Customs agent is present, and how much they are going to charge the OP for the Customs agent's cost. While they cannot detain someone onboard (unless a crime has been committed), they can place an "innkeeper's lien" on the person, and retain the luggage until all costs are covered.

Maritime pilots will be staging 2 day strikes each week in November. From 7:00 am on 6 November to 7:00 am on 8 November From 7:00 am on 14 November to 7:00 am on 16 November From 7:00 am on 22 November to 7:00 am on 24 November From 7:00 am on 29 November to 7:00 am on 30 November this applies to all ports in Portugal.

As part of the IMO's STCW (Standards of Training, Competency and Watchkeeping) convention, all deck and engine officers and any crew with responsibilities for the safety of passengers (so most of the crew) are required to have "Crisis Management and Human Behavior" training. Along with this, deck and engine officers and hotel supervisors are required to have "Crowd Management" training. Finally, in addition to the previous two courses, senior deck and engine officers, along with senior hotel supervisors are required to take "Crowd and Crisis Management" training. The first course is a 4 hour course, the second is 8 hours, and the third is 3 days.

Actually, Alaska has no state sales tax, that was a Juneau municipal tax. Several cities in Alaska, including cruise ports, have municipal sales taxes, but some decide to apply it to the ships and some don't.

I can speak from personal experience of being loaded into lifeboats, both hanging on the ship, and also being launched into the water, many times, and I will say that it is not a fun experience, but then again, its not supposed to be fun, it is a life and death scenario. Comfort is not a consideration. 150 people will fit into a lifeboat, but you are packed so tightly that there is almost no room to move. You basically have to have one person sitting upright, the next leaning forward, and the next sitting upright again, to fit people's shoulders in. Again, what a person has experienced in life as "crowded" has no meaning in a lifesaving situation. In your weather scenario, those who use canes, walkers, and scooters will abandon those devices at the muster station (which they will do even in fine weather), and will be assisted/lifted/carried into the boat by crew. The embarkation lighting at the boats is both emergency lighting and battery lighting, so it is the last power to go. The boats are bound tightly to the side of the ship when loading, and then these lines are let go to lower the boat, so there is no relative motion between the boat and ship, unlike when tendering. And, a Captain will take into account the weather when deciding when it is time to load the boats. Remember, the passenger muster alarm is not the abandon ship signal. Passenger muster is to provide accountability for all passengers and to have them in known and controlled locations, should the Captain subsequently decide to abandon ship.

This is what I've always feared when the move to the e-muster came, and it was justified a while back when NCL went back to traditional musters and chaos was reported from a few cruises, and then RCI had an actual emergency muster, and there was chaos because passengers could not remember what deck their muster station was on, let alone where it was, and the excuse posted was "well, it was 7 days ago that we went to the muster station". In the new muster drill, crew do not get experience in handling actual crowds, which is the main job of the crew assigned to passenger muster duties. You should always have been able to report your medical condition to Guest Services upon embarkation, and be assigned to a "special needs" muster station, typically, indoors, and with seating. My experience is different, I generally found that the crew were capable of handling the passenger muster, and loading the boats. With the new e-muster, I don't feel that at all. You will not be loaded into a random boat, they will load you by muster station, as this is the only way we have of ensuring accountability of who is on the ship, and who has evacuated. Most of what you describe as wasting time by the Captain, is actually the time to complete the balance of the muster drill, that passengers never see, because they are at their muster stations. This is the cabin and deck searching, the reporting of the status of the decks (whether anyone was found, or whether the decks are empty), and the collapsing of the deck teams down to the embarkation deck. Yes, the announcements are "filler", but that is just to keep the passengers' attention, while the rest of the drill completes. While I agree that the crew do get good training, as I note in my first comment in this post above, they do not get the training, experience, or expertise in handling large crowds, as they would in an emergency, and those crowds not being real cooperative, as they would in an actual emergency. I support doing the traditional muster every so often, but the fact that it is felt necessary to do so, indicates that the regulatory bodies recognize that the e-muster is deficient in realistic crew training.

Saying that the trials were "successful" is the same as saying the ship "passed". There is no "passing with flying colors", there is just pass/fail. The CEO did note that there were a "couple" of what he calls "items" (which means they are "conditions of class") that still need to be finalized, I believe he mentioned crew training, so this may be things like fire drills or abandon ship drills, which need to be redone, to the surveyor's satisfaction, prior to the ship sailing.

While the presentation may be different between venues, I would wager that the basic soup is made in the main galley in the 35 gallon steam heated tilting kettles in the "soup station".

Those types of sea trials are typically for newbuild ships, where the handling characteristics are not known. This ship has a known handling characteristic, of speed, stopping, turning radius, etc, that is recorded on the "bridge card" of every ship so that the harbor pilot can know how the ship handles. Unless there are major modifications or changes to the ship's propulsion or steering, there is no need for the speed, crash stop, or steering tests. These were done for the Odyssey when she was lengthened, as this is a major modification, while not to propulsion or steering, to how those systems react to a new hull form. What has been done to Odyssey are major repairs, and as such while requiring testing to confirm that the repairs are correct, and the equipment functions correctly, it does not require maximum effort testing. With two engines on each propeller shaft, they could test the one engine that was repaired by operating it alone on that shaft, loading the engine to full load (so a maximum power test), but which would only have produced about 40% of the speed on that shaft. To keep the vessel tracking well, they would reduce power on the other shaft, so I would not expect more than 40% speed if they were to test the engine this way. Spent 46 years as a ship's engineer, mostly as Chief Engineer, so I know about shipyard repairs, class society surveys, and sea trials.

Most of what the CEO is saying is pure bollocks. The ship is not being held to the standards of a new ship, no ship is held to standards past after the ship was built. The ship is being held to the standard of a ship new to DNV registry. As for Fred Olsen not providing maintenance history documentation, that was up to Villa Vie to require, and obtain, at sale. They obviously didn't know about this, and now the ship is no longer of any concern to Fred Olsen, so they have no obligation to retain, let alone provide the maintenance records. When the ship went into long term layup, of course Fred Olsen let the certificates expire, otherwise they would have had to continue maintenance (most is time based, not running hour based) and pay for continued surveys by DNV. What Villa Vie should have required, as a condition of sale, was for Fred Olsen to provide up to date DNV certification. This is pretty standard, and in many cases a buyer will require a dry docking prior to sale, if one has been postponed by the seller, or one is due within months of sale, at the seller's cost. It appears that Villa Vie was so desperate for any ship to buy that they agreed to whatever Fred Olsen wanted. "Boy, have I learned a lot", is not something a CEO of a startup shipping company should be saying when it comes to the maintenance, condition, or survey status of their one and only ship.

Yes, they send it home in US dollars, and the family gets a good exchange rate for converting to local currency.

They will have to provision the ship, take on fresh water, and bunker fuel. As noted, there is a lot to "sign off on". From the DNV class database, there were 25 "conditions of class" (items that had to be repaired before certificates are issued), outside of any that were found while in Harland and Wolff. While it is not uncommon for all the reports to be filed at once, and for the online database to not be updated in timely manner, the fact that these conditions of class are not cleared may indicate some delay while things are finalized. Actually, the video I saw states that the sea trials were completed successfully (but that does not mean everything is fixed). But, dolphins and standing on a balcony have nothing to do with whether the ship meets class standards.

Yes, the desirability of $2 notes is an urban myth. Heck, even stores in the US sometimes balk at taking them.

At one time, NCL owned the SSUS. It's going to cost $8 million to tow, clean up, and prepare the ship for sinking. That county in Florida is the only one that has come up with a bid to buy the ship, and the cash to pay for the reefing. No one else has come up with a viable plan for anything for the ship, nor with any money. It is not so much that NCL neglected the ship, but that the combination of the money hemorrhaging that NCL Hawaii was experiencing and the projected cost to bring the ship back to current SOLAS requirements (which KT Lim, the owner of Genting, which owned NCL at the time, investigated again when he owned Crystal cruises), which would have been about $700 million, that precluded NCL from advancing with the project. The real reason that NCL bought the SSUS was to prevent any competitor from getting a US "bottom" that would meet the PVSA requirements for a domestic US flag ship.

The ships work in US dollars, the crew salary is in US dollars, the crew accounts are in US dollars, the money sent home by crew is in US dollars. Seeing the trend? And, if you give Euros in cash, when the crew turn it in to the Purser for addition to their account, they will get charged a transaction fee.

You are making the mistake that most CC posters make, conflating "refurbishment" with "dry dock". A refurbishment means maintenance/repair/redesign of hotel areas. Mostly, this work can be done without a dry docking, but is done during a dry docking since the ship is out of service anyway. A dry docking is statutory in nature, and deals with the ship's hull and machinery. Close, but no cigar. All ships must be inspected below the waterline "twice in 5 years" as the regulations are written. Therefore, it is essentially every 2.5 years, but the "mid-period" survey can be any time from 2 to 3 years from the main survey, but the main survey must be every 5 years. Yes, this is the "renewal" survey (when all class certificates are renewed), but both dry docks, the "mid-period" and the "renewal" are essentially the same inspection (probably 10-15% more at "renewal") Refurbishment can be done at either dry docking, depending on what is wanted, and what is financially acceptable. The timeline at dry docks is mainly driven by the statutory dry dock survey time required, and they fit in "refurbishment" of the hotel to accomplish whatever is able to be done in that set timeline. Sometimes a major refurbishment, like adding new cabins, will extend a shipyard period, but these are not very common.

That is another area of problem, but caused by the same symptom. On land, the grid is so large that noise caused by users are spread so thin that they don't affect electronics like GFCI or "digital motors" that use electronics for fan speed control and heat control. However, on a ship, the noise is caused by the power converters for the propulsion system and AC chillers, and these can draw many times the power supplied to the hotel services, so the noise is way more apparent. Of course, the floating ground system is another source of noise. Basically, we don't use GFCI on ships due to the "dirty" power curves.

Most newbuilds have multi-day sea trials, and if this ship has had 3 months worth of work done on her, it would not be unusual to take more than a day to test everything. Would not be surprised to see another couple of days at dock after trials.

I've commented on this in virtually every forum here on CC. As noted in the linked thread, it will be hit or miss as to whether it works or not. This is due to the dryer using electronics, and not liking the "noise" (fluctuations in the power wave) that is generated on ships by the propulsion system. Completely out of your control, and fairly random, even on one given ship. Take an older, cheaper, dryer that just has a switch and a heating element and a fan.

The engines get overhauled (complete teardown and renewal of major parts) every 12,000 running hours, or about every 2.5-3 years, so they are essentially new every 3 years. So, the engine condition should be okay. However, with the 4 main diesel engines geared directly to the propellers (not diesel electric like modern cruise ships), any time they take a main diesel out of service for overhaul (which takes about 4 weeks minimum), that will directly affect speed. And, given that she was lengthened by 100 feet, without increasing the propulsion power, she is underpowered (her sister ship, that wasn't lengthened is rated 2 knots faster). Plus, they expect the ship to last another 15 years. Gonna be a lot of "additional maintenance fees" for this condo!

Absolutely. Just did the kitchen, plumbing and electrical run under the floor in a "crawl space" that was 8-9" from the dirt to the bottom of the joists. Had to pull the entire floor (4 layers) out. Worked on a few older ships as well, and its the same problem.

Owned our 200 year old house for 43 years.