chengkp75

Okay, perhaps I misunderstood that as a response to my post, and not their actual experience, and even if their toilet was out for 12 hours, were all the others out for that long? If you want the "flexibility" of a land hotel, then you need to book a land vacation, what most people don't want to accept is that a ship and a ship vacation is something totally different than on land. Do land hotels require a fire drill every time a new customer checks in? No, because a fire in a hotel is totally different than a fire on a ship. For 46 years, I was the guy that cleaned out the clogs and maintained the ship's sewage system. I have been a marine engineer for that long, and a Chief Engineer for over 40 years.

So, it is a systemic issue over multiple separate systems? If I had a nickel for every strange object we found in the ship's toilet system, I would have retired about 15 years early. Food bones, silverware, facial and or diaper wipes, in addition to clothing and other fabric items, and one time we found ammunition.

Where do you get this idea? While I know this is a common misconception here on CC, the port of SF, just like nearly every port in the world, charges dockage fees on a 24 hour basis. You pay the same amount for a 2 hour stay as a 24 hour stay. Sorry, Terry, didn't see your post before I did mine. About 220 of the 370 nm from Catalina to SF are required to be transited at 10 knots or less.

And, if you know anything about ships, you know that most of the accounts from that cruise are misleading at best, and mostly false. There was not sewage "running down the walls", as this is a physical impossibility, even if you were to continue to use a completely full toilet. The discolored water that was observed was from the high humidity within the ship when the AC wasn't working, and this humidity caused the dust and dirt that accumulates between the cabin ceiling and the deck above to become wet and run down the cracks in the cabin ceilings and walls. And, given that there are over 1600 passenger toilets, I doubt that anywhere near that total number were out at any one time, making a comparison to a total power outage useless.

If the problem, and the resultant time involved to clear the problem, is caused by inappropriate items being flushed down the toilet, what kind of "overhaul" would prevent this? Also, I don't recall seeing that the OP mentioned long periods of toilets being out, just repeated ones. I was the one who brought up the past instances of long outages caused by severe blockages, and the possibility that it could take hours. Most blockages are cleared in under an hour or two. And, as noted by other posters, other cruises on the Crown didn't seem to have toilet issues, so this does not point to a "systemic" or equipment problem, but a user problem, with the users changing each cruise.

This has always been a problem with US crew on the NCL Hawaii ships. They need to accomplish training, and the training requires minimum class sizes (it is third party, not NCL training), and documentation, and so potential crew have to commit to training and documentation without any guarantee that a position will be available to them when they get their training and documentation completed, and NCL, after paying for the training, is not going to pay wages for the crew to sit at home, so the crew are "let go" (to use a term that non-maritime hotel crew would think about) until someone on the ship goes on vacation. There is not a huge pool of potential crew standing by, without pay, waiting to take a job when it becomes available, unlike the international crew.

Not quite correct. The PVSA still specifically allows cruises to nowhere. What has stopped cruise lines from offering them is the requirement to have US work visas, not crew visas, for all foreign crew working a cruise to nowhere. It becomes a wage and cost issue, not one of a lack of foreign port call.

Peaks is a quaint island, within eyesight of Portland. It has some nice beaches, and some tourist shops. For more scenery and landscapes, you could try the "Mail Boat Run" of the Casco Bay Ferry (same line as the Peaks' ferry). This is about 1.5 hours, and tours, and stops at 5 islands, passes a few more. This is the boat that delivers supplies to the island residents (they shop for groceries on the mainland, and the groceries are delivered to the ferry for drop off at each island), mail, and in the afternoon acts as the school bus for the kids in middle and high school. They give a talk about the islands, island life, and great views out Casco Bay (from Cliff Island, the next land you'll see is Ireland. A walk on the Eastern Prom Trail, about 2 miles, starting almost at the cruise terminal gate, gives great views down Casco Bay towards the "Calendar Islands" (so named because there are supposed to be 365 islands). Portland Museum of Art is a mile walk away from the ship, and has a collection of Wyatt paintings. (Most things to see in Portland are a mile or less from the terminal).

How many people can you use to operate a roto-rooter? How many would be just standing around, since you can only have one person driving the machine, and one helper handling the snake. Whether the clog has affected 1 cabin or 30 cabins, only the same number of people will be able to clear it, since it is just one clog. Sorry, there are a lot of things in life that throwing more people at will not change physical laws. Based on my years of experience with cruise ship toilet systems, I can say that when you have more than one or two clogs a week, you are going to have lots of them, and all over the ship. And, if they are not flushing incorrect items down toilets all over the ship, how do you explain that redundant systems are failing? What is causing the failures, if not clogs in the lines? There are quite a few cleanout positions, but they are not necessarily in the right locations, depending on what caused the clog. A vacuum toilet system is the most efficient means of dealing with the quantity of black water that is produced. Yes, more piping would require taking more space from passenger areas to put the pipes in, and more systems would mean more cost. But, even with 20 systems, if someone at a toilet that is at the "downstream" end of the piping causes a clog, then all the cabins "upstream" will still be affected, whether it is 30 cabins for a 20 system ship, or 30 cabins for a 3 system ship. Without getting too crude, bigger pipes don't work in vacuum systems, regardless of suction power. In order to work, the "product" needs to hold together in a "plug" that is pulled down the vacuum line, and so the size piping that vacuum systems use has been shown to be the optimum for retaining this "plug" all the way down. It has been shown, and is designed into the systems, that if the piping run is too long, that there needs to be "vacuum boosting stations" that "re-form" the "plug" to get it moving down the pipe. The big drawback to gravity sanitary systems (and really, the "gray water" from sinks, showers, galley, laundry, etc, flows quite nicely in ship's systems by gravity) (unlike shore systems, the "black water" from toilets is in a separate system from the "gray water"), is that a gravity system requires larger and larger pipes as the number of inlets grows (gets further down your house or down the ship), and this takes up space. For "black water" systems, the "non-uniform" constitution of the "product" does not lend itself to slowly moving drain pipes that may or may not be sloped downwards due to vessel motion. This may deposit portions of the "product" in horizontal runs, that will tend to build up over time, contributing to the clogging problem.

First off, I was speaking of my personal experience in clearing clogs on ships, not on Princess ships, and not in the cases you mention. Let's say that you report a toilet being out of service, and the maintenance people get there within 15 minutes, yet it requires several hours to clear the clog. Is this "not prompt enough", or is this the physical limitations of clearing a clog. If your sewer clogs up at home, and the roto-rooter guy takes several hours to clear it, is this "not prompt" service? What do you do for a toilet in this case? This could affect all the drains in your house, do you have a neighbor you can go to to uses the bathroom? As for the time involved, the incident I mentioned was to grind through an entire bath towel that had been flushed, this is not a quick and easy job to do, and you may well ask why someone would flush a bath towel down the toilet, but that does not change the time involved to get things cleared. As I noted above, there are completely separate systems for the toilets around the ship, so having toilets go down "all over the ship" does not indicate a "systemic failure", but does indicate that many people are flushing things down the hopper that they shouldn't. I don't know what the level of noro you had on this cruise, but I have certainly found over the years, that the incidence of toilet clogs goes way up during times of noro illness (to put it bluntly, people mess their underwear and then flush it down the toilet rather than deal with it themselves).

By the physical limitations of vacuum toilet systems, the larger the ship gets, the more systems they have. Even a "small" ship of about 2400 capacity will have 3 completely separate toilet systems, and larger ships will have more, each system handling a "zone" of the ship (forward, midships, aft, for the three system ship), to prevent one clog from disabling the entire ship's toilets, though a clog in any one system can take down the entire zone (perhaps 1/3 of the ship). Each of these systems has redundant pumps to prevent a pump failure from taking down the system. The problem is that all of the toilets combine into common piping (just like the sanitary lines in your house, not every drain is separate all the way to the sewer), and a clog in the piping will affect every toilet "upstream" of the clog, just like a clog in the sanitary lines in your house can affect toilets, sinks, and showers "upstream" of the clog. Not certain what other kinds of "redundancy" you think would help, unless you have every toilet have its own piping all the way to the engine room.

98% of all toilet issues are caused by people flushing things down the toilet that don't belong. Who does it can be learned from where the problem happens. Crew don't have toilets up where passenger areas are, so if they cause a problem, an entire section of the ship loses toilets. Clogs don't always happen directly where the item was flushed, but may travel down the piping for a ways until it finds a particular elbow or junction where it hangs up. It requires maintenance to check pipes to find the exact location of the clog, and then it can be extremely difficult to roto-root out some clogs, particularly when people flush things like underwear, swimwear, dinner napkins, towels, face cloths, and other fabrics down the toilet (over the years that I worked cruise ships, this was far more common than most passengers will believe). I've seen it where it took my men, working round the clock, several days to roto-root out a towel that was causing loss of 20 or so cabin toilets, so to say that the crew are not responding "promptly" enough is disingenuous.

Well, records have to be kept, and the USPH looks at the records and the tubs themselves when they do inspections. Several layers of supervision would have to cover up any lack of compliance.

USPH VSP requires that in cabin whirlpool tubs be disinfected either between occupancies or weekly, whichever is less, by a 10ppm chlorine solution for 60 minutes.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of methanol produced these days is made from fossil fuels (natural gas or coal), and so the "well to engine" carbon footprint is worse than conventional fossil fuels. Until large quantity production of "green" methanol (made from biomass) comes online, this step will not help the environment all that much, and the production of green methanol is quite a bit (up to 15 times) the cost of conventional fuels.

The only morning northbound train from Portland is at 11:25, getting into Freeport at 11:55. Then the southbound trains leave Freeport at 1:08pm or 5:58pm, getting into Portland at 1:43pm or 6:33pm. The train station is about 3.2 miles from the cruise terminal, or about a 10 minute cab ride. About an hour walk each way. I don't know your port schedule, but it looks like you would be spending an hour on the train (30 minutes each way), for an hour's stay in Freeport. Unless you absolutely gotta get to Bean's for some quick shopping, I wouldn't do it.

But, the pilot is not on duty while the ship is outside of Vancouver Island, or in many areas of Alaska waters that are not restricted waterways. That is a transportation cost with the pilots, since there are no acceptable pilot stations in the southern panhandle of Alaska. There are different payment schedules for simple transportation of the pilot and for his "bridge watch" hours. Going inside Vancouver Island would also require the Alaska pilot to be transported from Vancouver (based out of Port Angeles), but would also require the Canadian pilot to remain onboard, and on duty for the entire transit inside, up to the north end of Vancouver Island.

To the best of my knowledge, no necropsy has ever been performed on a whale/ship strike victim to determine whether there is an underlying cause for the whale to get in the way of a ship. Yes, the ship strike may have killed the whale, but was it terminally ill already?

So, you think that stabilizers were to blame for this? You do know that stabilizers do not stop rolling, nor even reduce the amount of rolling much, they merely slow the rolling motion down to a more comfortable level. And, what were the relative weather conditions in your two case points, including sea direction and wind direction relative to ship's course, along with current direction and strength, and water depth? This is not uncommon when propellers or thrusters are being used in the shallow waters at docking, especially when they are being used hard to counter the environmental factors of currents and wind. What were the environmental differences between the previous ship's docking and yours? Was the other ship on the other side of the dock from the Magic? Which direction was the wind, relative to the direction of the dock? This makes a huge difference in how the ship handles, whether the ship is being pushed away from the dock by the wind, or being pushed into the dock. Was the Magic on the "inside" of the "L" of the dock, or outside? All of these factors play far more into whether the ship could dock, than a propulsion problem. Did any of these "seasoned cruisers" have any maritime background? Otherwise, I'd discount whatever they said about "sounds" as worthless. Sorry, I don't have a dog in the fight, as I've never sailed on Carnival, but none of your claims make much sense from a "mechanical issue" standpoint, and sound far more like what Carnival said, it was weather.

So, if a $100 GMRS radio works so well, why is it that the cruise line invests in $700+ UHF radios and repeaters on their ships?

The ships definitely go outside the 12 nm limit when sailing between islands (the distances are so short, that it is easy to get outside 12 nm and still make the morning arrival). Federal law prohibits any vessel that starts and ends its voyage in Hawaii from having any gambling. Since the foreign flag ships don't make closed loop cruises in Hawaii, they can have an open casino. Prior to NCL having the US flag ships in Hawaii, the Norwegian Star was doing closed loop cruises, with a port call at Fanning Island, Republic of Kuribati, and had the casino onboard permanently sealed and shut.

But, of course there are, but the radio has to be set to the proper frequency to access the repeater. This is how the crew get their radios to work. And, yes, anything over 5 watts has to be listed on the ship's Radiotelephony Certificate, so approval from the Master would be required.

There will be several hundred sub-contractors who will live on the ship, so crew will be needed to clean the cabins, make and serve the meals, and clean the laundry for these folks. Other crew will be used as "clean up" gangs to allow the sub-contractors to concentrate on their jobs, and not need to waste time on daily clean up, debris removal, or furniture replacement. Finally, some crew will be assigned as "fire watch", assigned to various locations around the ship where the shipyard workers are performing "hot work" (oxy-acetylene cutting and welding), where the crew standby at the work site, and all adjacent spaces, checking that no sparks or heat catch anything on fire, and extinguishing any that happen.

The first two reports (the mandatory clearance report, and the 2% report) are not made public, but the 3% report is published as an "update" report. The 2% report has to list the remediation methods the ship is using, and the 3% report has to list changes to the methods since the infection rate is still increasing, and triggers a review by the USPH of the remediation methods, and possibly the dispatch of a team to inspect remediation procedures. They are still reported on the CDC website. Many folks thought the only time noro was reported was at the 3% level, but this is not correct. I can't remember a single cruise of the roughly 140 week long cruises I worked, where there wasn't a single case of GI illness that was reported. The two RCI ships reporting "updates" in 2023 have just over 3% cases reported, and are in the "monitoring" status, while Ruby Princess, at 6% has had a team dispatched to investigate.

A major reason for excluding the southern Inside Passage (Vancouver Island) is the pilotage fee, which generally runs around $10k+ for a cruise ship.