Viking cruise ship can't finish voyage because Mississippi River is too low

[longterm]

Interesting vessel; it looks like a barge transformed into a cruise ship, but without the deep hull.

 

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/viking-cruise-low-water-mississippi-river/index.html

[Jim Avery]

Life on the Mississippi.  Low water is a recurring phenomenon.  Discussed by Mark Twain in a couple of his books.  I used to run an oil field supply vessel in the Lover Mississippi back in the '70s and can tell you the bottom changes daily.  The river level almost as much.  Sorry the passengers are stuck.

[duquephart]

Viking knew about that going in. I wonder if passengers were informed of the possibility.

[longterm]

5 minutes ago, duquephart said:

Viking knew about that going in. I wonder if passengers were informed of the possibility.

If their river cruises are any indication, I would say definitely not. 

 

When we booked our 2019 Grand European, there was (of course) no mention of the possibility of interrupted travel along the rivers. We got an email about a week before the cruise, telling us that the river levels were perilous; when we got on board, we were told that we'd know that night whether we could make it all the way from Amsterdam to Budapest without disembarking. Fortunately for our cruise, we were able to make the whole trip.

We're doing the same cruise again next October; I've already researched alternate cruises if it looks like we might have interrupted travel. Naturally, there has been no mention of river levels, even though there have been issues this season with water levels on the Rhine, Danube, and Main Rivers.

 

Unfortunately, there really is no way to know until the ship sails whether the rivers will be navigable. My plan is to try to make a decision by late June, for our sailing in early October--no way to know for sure, but we don't want an interrupted or shortened voyage.

Edited October 7, 2022 by longterm

[chengkp75]

While they may not announce these things, a look at the ticket contract for the Mississippi cruises (haven't compared to European contract) shows that they warn about just about everything that could happen before, during, and after the cruise.  They even include a clause that waives "in rem" torts against the ship (used to "arrest" the ship).  It's quite a document, and far wordier than the mainstream cruise lines' contracts.

 

https://docs.vikingcruises.com/pdf/3-210419_PassengerTicketContractMSP-US.pdf

[Azulann]

Currently there is an extreme drought in most of MN, the source of the Miss. Don't know about the rainfall in the other states along the river. Barges are stuck in many places  andArmy Corp of Engineers are dredging the channels to ge the barges moving. Meanwhile ,  lots of barges on the upper river are empty waiting too e filled with soybean harvest and some corn. Climate change comes in all forms ...

This was not the best year to start  the Viking Miss River for various reasons. But those who did make the voyage  loved it for the most part.  

Edited October 7, 2022 by Azulann

[chengkp75]

1 hour ago, Jim Avery said:

Life on the Mississippi.  Low water is a recurring phenomenon.  Discussed by Mark Twain in a couple of his books.  I used to run an oil field supply vessel in the Lover Mississippi back in the '70s and can tell you the bottom changes daily.  The river level almost as much.  Sorry the passengers are stuck.

Back in the '70's, I pushed barges up the Miss from NOLA to Cairo, Ill.  As you say, shifting sand bars moved all the time, and fall was always low water times.

[Jim Avery]

3 hours ago, Azulann said:

Currently there is an extreme drought in most of MN, the source of the Miss. Don't know about the rainfall in the other states along the river. Barges are stuck in many places  andArmy Corp of Engineers are dredging the channels to ge the barges moving. Meanwhile ,  lots of barges on the upper river are empty waiting too e filled with soybean harvest and some corn. Climate change comes in all forms ...

This was not the best year to start  the Viking Miss River for various reasons. But those who did make the voyage  loved it for the most part.  

Was it just last year or the year before we had flooding along the Mississippi ?  It seems to always be floods or low water.  Again read some of Mark Twain's reminiscences of the river.  Guess he had climate change too....

[steamboats]

Low and high water happens also on the Mississippi river system... And as I wrote before, it´s no just Viking not telling their customers in time when a cruise has to be altered. My last cruise ended up to be Cincinnati to St. Louis instead of St. Paul to St. Louis due to low water. And how did we learn about it... actually by an email of a friend who was in contact with the captain (a friend of both of us). We told the cruise line that our cruise will be changed (and we had to change our flights from Germany).

 

Anyway, although I haven´t found any reliable data it also looks like Viking did the same as they´ve done here in Europe. They didn´t listen to the experts and so the Viking Mississippi´s draft is a bit deeper than the draft of other river cruise ships. Viking also insisted on docking areas and many communities built them while the others did it the old style and used the ones which were there using a stage. Viking does not have a Mississippi river style stage / gangplank on their ship. They can´t "choke a stump" meaning tie up the boat to a tree somewhere and the passengers walk over the stage onto land. Also with high water they will have a problem.

 

steamboats