cruise ship hits dock 2021

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Ruby Princess cruise ship damaged while docking in SF; passengers still waiting to depart

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- The Ruby Princess cruise ship hit Pier 27 in San Francisco while docking Thursday morning, the U.S. Coast Guard says.

The Coast Guard says there is damage to both the ship's hull and the dock.

In a statement, Princess Cruise described the collision as "unexpected contact" as they were docking just after 6 a.m.

VIDEO: Record-setting year for cruising out of San Francisco predicted

At 9:40 p.m., Ruby Princess told ABC7 News in a statement the departure time frame has not yet been determined, as the damage is still being assessed:

Princess Cruises is in continued discussions with the U.S. Coast Guard regarding clearance for Ruby Princess to depart San Francisco, but a departure timeframe has not yet been confirmed. The safety of our guests and crew remain our top priority, and Ruby Princess will depart once the ship is deemed by U.S. Coast as fit to sail. The cruise line's technical experts and shoreside team will remain working on this situation, and the ship will set sail from San Francisco should clearance to depart be received at any time tonight. Additional updates regarding the ship's status and revised itinerary will be provided in the morning. Princess will also be providing a goodwill gesture of compensation once the full effect of the necessary changes is known.

While that departure time is still being determined, Princess Cruises says passengers boarded at 11:30 a.m.

Thursday morning, the ship had 3,328 guests on board with 1,159 crew members and was completing a 10-day cruise to Alaska that left San Francisco on June 26.

"I noticed we were spinning pretty quick, to be that close to the dock, and I was mid-ship, portside, looked out the window and we smacked into the dock," Sacramento resident and passenger Paul Zasso told ABC7 News.

Passengers still on board and those on the ground were trying to get a glimpse of the damage.

"It was surreal and you could definitely feel it," Sacramento resident and passenger Jeremy Jordan told ABC7 News. "It wasn't like things falling off the shelves or anything like that, kind of like when you get the tugboats coming up against us. So yeah... it was different."

While on scene, ABC7 News watched as San Francisco police surveyed the ship.

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In a statement, Princess Cruises reported no injuries, adding, "At no time were any guests or crew in danger."

"It was so funny, because one of the dock guys, you can hear him yell out like 'whoa' and then you can kind of hear it just slowly going in... and when he came back out, I wasn't sure what to see," Jordan added.

The shouting from the dock worker is what woke up Jordan's wife. The couple, avid cruisegoers, said Thursday morning's experience is one he won't soon forget.

"It's ironic, because I think it was yesterday the captain was talking about how he goes into docks and how unpredictable the currents are," Jordan shared. "So yeah, it's a challenge for them to be able to do that."

Passengers still waiting to depart San Francisco

"I don't swim that good. I just think they patch it up," said Jim Simpson.

Simpson is onboard the ship with his family waiting to depart for their trip to Alaska.

After a little creative thinking, we got each other's attention while he was standing on the balcony of his room.

However, Simpson says he's not worried, and that the captain has kept everyone updated.

"It's a 10-day cruise, there's plenty of time, we can make up time moving and things like that. So I don't think it's going to be an issue truthfully," Simpson said.

VIDEO: Cruise ship hits iceberg in Alaska, returns to Seattle for repairs

Now the question is: when will the ship actually leave?

Experts say it really depends on the extent of the damage - which Princess has not elaborated on.

"It depends on where the damage is. Is it at the waterline? Is it above? Is it below the waterline? Is there an actual penetration in the hull?" said Steve Browne.

Browne is a dean at Cal State Maritime. He says if the ship is just dented, it's probably safe to set sail.

But if damage is more extensive, that could change things.

"If there's a hole in the hull, then no it would not be safe for them to go to sea until it's repaired," Browne said.

Despite the delay running into the night time hours, Simpson says the mood on the ship remains pretty happy.

He even tells us, his family doesn't mind a little extra time here in the Bay Area.

"We haven't been to San Francisco in a number of years. First time for the granddaughters so we're having fun just looking at the skyline." Simpson said.

Investigation into the bar pilot

We're learning more about the Ruby Princess pilot. In some ways, this is an elite group. There aren't many bar pilots, 52 at the moment with four trainees in the pipeline according to the Board of Pilot Commissioners Executive Director.

The investigation into what went wrong with the Ruby Princess during docking at San Francisco's Pier 27 Thursday morning is in the early fact finding phase.

"It appears the port quarter of the Ruby Princess made contact with Pier 27," said U.S. Coast Guard Lieutenant Commander William Williams.

The Coast Guard which is assisting in the investigation says the pilot is being drug and alcohol tested which is standard in a serious marine incident.

"The Coast Guard has sent two teams, an investigations team and an inspection port state control team to the vessel and will be conducting those inspections and investigations," said Williams.

The San Francisco Bar Pilots are responsible for safely navigating ships they board over the offshore sand bar to docks throughout the Bay Area.

A Spokesperson working with the San Francisco Bar Pilots tells ABC7 News, "We can confirm a pilot was involved in a hard landing at Pier 27 this morning. We are cooperating with all necessary agencies in looking into this matter and cannot comment further."

The Board of Pilot Commissioners tells ABC7 News the pilot is on the Pilot Evaluation Committee which is responsible for trainees and that anyone on that committee would have to be a pilot more than 10 years.

The investigation is now in the hands of the U.S. Coast Guard and other federal agencies who were notified about the early morning incident.

If you're on the ABC7 News app, click here to watch live

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NTSB says cruise ship navigational team to blame for $2 million docking mistake

Doug Parker

• June 15, 2023

We now know what caused a Royal Caribbean ship to hit an Alaska docking structure last summer.

An investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) concluded that the impact happened due to miscommunication among the ship’s crew, their failure to use all their navigational equipment and an outdated navigational chart.

On May 9, 2022, the pier in the Sitka Sound Cruise Terminal near Alaska sustained over $2 million in damages when Radiance of the Seas, a Royal Caribbean cruise ship, collided with one of its mooring dolphins.

Though no one was hurt, three of the mooring dolphin’s pilings were damaged, while the ship’s hull suffered a minor dent.

Dock changes weren’t communicated to NOAA

Over a year before the accident, the pier underwent renovations that entailed extending its length by 395 feet, the installation of two mooring dolphins, and the addition of a 410-foot floating dock.

After the improvements were made, the Sitka terminal failed to communicate the changes to the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the body responsible for keeping US nautical charts updated. 

After all, technology is only as good as the data programmed into it.

How the accident happened

When Radiance of the Seas tried to dock on the morning of May 9, the crew was unaware that its electronic nautical charts (ENCs) had yet to reflect the construction work in 2021, which included the new dolphins.

The crew began backing the ship into the berth for mooring, a joint effort between the staff captain, chief officer, pilot 1, bosun, and first officer, who each had different vantage points and navigation equipment.

As they carefully rotated the vessel, the first officer stopped calling out the vessel’s position relative to the mooring dolphin, leaving the captain to rely strictly on the electronic chart display and the bosun’s callouts regarding the ship’s distance from the pier. 

However, the captain misinterpreted the information. He ended up pivoting the ship too late, leaving no clearance between the ship and the dolphin.

The misinterpretation caused the ship to make a contract causing substantial underwater damage to the docking structure.

NTSB’s analysis: Reasons for th e collision

Based on the NTSB’s assessment , updating the navigational charts would have helped the ship avoid the accident.

But the crew also failed to rely on other navigational equipment such as radar which would have shown a discrepancy with the electronic charts. The report also noted that the weather was clear and there was good visibility which would have allowed the crew to spot the longer pier and the new dolphins.

Go Deeper: 25 Things to Do When Visiting Sitka, Alaska

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Windy Day in Ketchikan as Cruise Ship Crashes into Dock

No injuries reported as celebrity infinity crashes into dock..

Friday afternoon, as Celebrity Infinity slowly approached the dock in Ketchikan, a sudden gust of wind caught the ship’s starboard side and dramatically pushed the 91,000 ton ship right into the cement pylons and catwalk-style dock. Despite the ship’s side thrusters, the wind was a formidable opponent.

With wind gusts up to 45 mph, the Celebrity Infinity crashed into the dock at Berth 3 shortly after 2pm. As you can see from the video, the accident left a huge scape along the ship’s hull, above the water line. The ships crew worked to repair the damages which included a small hole in the hull.

Ketchikan harbor director, Steve Corporon, estimates between $2-$3 million in damages. Repairs will take from one to two months to complete. No injuries were reported.

Celebrity Infinity was moved to another berthing dock and all of the passengers were able to go ashore and enjoy a blustery day in Ketchikan. After all, it is Alaska, a not-to-be-missed cruise and land experience.

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Watch: Norwegian Epic Cruise Ship Crashes Into Dock In Puerto Rico

The cruise ship Norwegian Epic crashed into a dock in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The ship was being assisted by two tugs when it crashed into a dock because of strong winds.

The dramatic video shows the ship crushing two mooring points while carrying more than 4000 passengers.

According To Miami Herald, a Norwegian Cruise Line spokesperson said, “Prevailing winds caused the ship to veer towards the pier, damaging two mooring points at Pier 3 East.”

“No injuries have been reported and guests are currently disembarking the ship as previously scheduled. We are working closely with local authorities to assess the damage.”

Watch the video below:

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The article or images cannot be reproduced, copied, shared or used in any form without the permission of the author and Marine Insight. 

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Princess cruise ship hits dock in San Francisco

A Princess Cruises ship hit a dock at Pier 27 in San Francisco Thursday morning.

The line’s Ruby Princess vessel “made unexpected contact” with the dock at 6:05 a.m. local time on arrival at the Port of San Francisco, a Princess spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

“There were no injuries and at no time were any guests or crew in danger,” the spokesperson said. “The ship is safely alongside and disembarkation is complete.” The ship was returning from a round-trip sailing to Alaska that departed on June 26, according to CruiseMapper .

"I noticed we were spinning pretty quick, to be that close to the dock, and I was mid-ship, portside, looked out the window and we smacked into the dock," passenger Paul Zasso told the Bay Area’s ABC7 News .

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The Princess spokesperson said an assessment of the damage to the vessel and pier were underway. While the departure time of its next voyage “is still being determined,” embarkation began at 11:30 a.m. local time.

The incident is not the only one of its kind in recent years. MSC Cruises’ MSC Opera ship hit a dock and tourist river boat in Venice, Italy in 2019 and Norwegian Cruise Line’s Norwegian Epic crashed into a dock in San Juan, Puerto Rico earlier that year.

Nathan Diller is a consumer travel reporter for USA TODAY based in Nashville. You can reach him at [email protected].

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Footage emerges of whale-watching ship, the Adventure Hornblower, crashing into a pier in San Diego

TERRIFYING footage has emerged of a US cruise ship that suddenly careered out of control, forcing tourists at a pier to run for their lives.

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TERRIFYING footage has emerged of a cruise ship that suddenly careered out of control, forcing tourists at a pier to run for their lives.

Seven people were injured when a whale-watching ship known as the Adventure Hornblower slammed into a pier in San Diego.

The incident was caught on caught on camera by a tourist on the busy walkway. Tourists can be seen running from the pier as the ship came in at a fast pace, unable to stop.

The crew of the Adventure Hornblower blamed a mechanical malfunction for the crash, The San Diego Union-Tribune reported.

An investigation has been launched into what caused the crash, Fox 5 reports.

Passengers say the crew was yelling out “brace for cover!” as the ship hit the dock, causing damage to the bow of the vessel.

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More cruise ships are under CDC investigation following COVID-19 outbreaks on board

The Associated Press

Carnival Cruise Line's Carnival Horizon cruise ship is shown docked at PortMiami in April. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating more cruise ships due to new COVID-19 cases aboard. Wilfredo Lee/AP hide caption

Carnival Cruise Line's Carnival Horizon cruise ship is shown docked at PortMiami in April. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating more cruise ships due to new COVID-19 cases aboard.

MIAMI — The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating more cruise ships due to new cases of COVID-19 as the omicron variant drives extremely high infection levels in the industry hub of Florida.

The CDC said 88 vessels are now either under investigation or observation, but it did not specify how many COVID-19 cases have been reported. Four other vessels are also being monitored by the CDC as well.

Florida hit a new record for daily cases on Tuesday with 46,900 new cases in a day. Since Christmas, the state's 7-day average of daily cases has surpassed previous records set during last summer's surge, rising to 29,400 infections.

Coronavirus hospitalizations in the state have also risen from about 1,200 patients two weeks ago to about 3,400 on Wednesday. But that is still less than one-fifth the number of hospitalizations reported in late August due to the delta wave.

Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal is calling for the CDC and cruise lines to again halt cruise travel, six months after the industry mounted its comeback.

"Our warnings have proved sadly prescient and continuously compelling. Time for CDC and cruise lines to protect consumers, again pause — docking their ships," the Connecticut senator posted on Twitter.

Cruise lines have not announced any plans to halt cruising. And the CDC did not say it would adopt any changes, adding it still had plans to allow for the expiration of a set of rules that cruises must follow to sail during the pandemic. The regulation, called a conditional sailing order, is scheduled to expire on Jan. 15 to become a voluntary program.

Coronavirus Updates

Covid-19 outbreaks hit 3 cruise ships as florida breaks record for new cases.

"CDC acknowledges that it is not possible for cruising to be a zero-risk activity," CDC spokesperson Jasmine Reed said in an emailed statement.

Most lines require adult passengers to show proof of vaccination against COVID-19. Cruise ships are allowed to relax measures such as mask use if at least 95% of passengers and 95% of crew are fully vaccinated.

The federal agency recommends that people avoid cruise travel if they are at increased risk of severe illness, regardless of vaccination status.

None of the ships so far appear to have so many cases that they would overwhelm medical resources on board and require a return to port. But some have been denied entry at some foreign ports.

Several Florida-based ships have reported outbreaks. The Carnival Freedom was denied entry to Aruba and Bonaire after an undisclosed number of passengers and crew aboard caught the virus.

Some cruise ships have not been allowed to disembark in Mexican ports due to cases reported, bringing to memory the early days of the pandemic when cruise lines negotiated docking plans as ships were being turned away by officials worried about the virus's spread.

The Mexican government said Tuesday it would allow cruise ships with reported coronavirus cases to dock. The country's Health Department said passengers or crew who show no symptoms will be allowed to come ashore normally, while those with symptoms or a positive virus test will be quarantined or given medical care.

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Cruise Ship Accidents

Latest cruise ship accidents.

Which Cruise Ship Hit the Dock?

By Anna Duncan

On the 16th of August, 2018, a cruise ship called the MSC Opera struck the dock near San Basilio Pier in Venice, Italy. The ship had left from the port of Civitavecchia and was heading to Croatia when it hit the pier.

The accident was caused by a mechanical failure on board the vessel. A sudden gust of wind caused the ship to drift off course and collide with the pier. There were no reported injuries or fatalities onboard or on land, however several boats were damaged in the incident.

The incident sparked outrage among many locals in Venice who accused cruise ships of damaging their city’s environment and disrupting their daily lives. The Italian government has since put new regulations in place that limit the size of ships allowed to pass through certain areas of Venice, as well as increasing fines for those that do not comply with these restrictions.

The MSC Opera is owned by MSC Cruises and is a 4,363-passenger vessel that was built in 2004. It is one of the largest cruise ships ever built and features numerous amenities such as five swimming pools, 13 bars and lounges, an outdoor movie theater, a spa and fitness center, and multiple dining venues.

Conclusion:

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Jimmy Buffett fans, world's first 'Margaritaville' cruise to sail from Port of Palm Beach

When the Port of Palm Beach’s only cruise ship relaunches on April 30, it will be the world’s first Margaritaville-branded ship and the newest offering associated with Jimmy Buffett’s 1977 hit.

The Grand Classica will be renamed the Margaritaville Paradise and the company that owns it, Bahamas Paradise Cruise Line, will become Margaritaville at Sea.

The deal announced Wednesday at the port in Riviera Beach is a partnership between Bahamas Paradise Cruise Line and Margaritaville Enterprises LLC, Oneil Khosa, Bahamas Paradise Cruise Line CEO, said.

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Buffett, a singer, songwriter, author and businessman whose music portrays an “island escapism” lifestyle, said in a statement Wednesday, “To me the only thing better than being on a beach by the ocean, is to be on the ocean. Now you can follow in our wake.”

Margaritaville features more than 25 hotels and resorts andtwo gaming properties, as well as RV resorts, 60-plus food and beverage venues, real estate communities, vacation clubs and products from frozen shrimp to footwear. They’re all part of Margaritaville’s multi-billion-dollar global lifestyle brand. Terms of the agreement between the two privately held companies were not disclosed.

Khosa said the goal is to bring the laid-back tropical lifestyle and state of mind evoked in Buffet’s songs to the 1,680-passenger ship offering two-night cruises and the cruise terminals in Riviera Beach and Freeport, Grand Bahama.

“We are not seeing this as a rebranding of just a name, but a rebranding of the concept, basically redefining cruising with whatever Margaritaville has to offer,” said Khosa, who will serve as CEO of Margaritaville at Sea.

The family of former Norwegian Cruise Line president and CEO Kevin Sheehan will remain majority owners of the cruise line.

Orlando-based Margaritaville CEO John Cohlan and Khosa met about two years ago pre-COVID and agreed the idea to transform the ship into a Margaritaville experience made sense.

More: Margaritaville complex planned in Melbourne with hotel, restaurants, marina

“We went on the ship. He found the Grand Classica to be a beautiful ship. A vision was created right then that was the way to go for them,” Khosa said. “I have been working on it for some time. I am glad it has come to fruition now and we are actually embarking on a journey here.”

Cohlan said in a statement, “Margaritaville at Sea will be a new, exciting and fun way for guests to escape and vacation in Margaritaville. From oceans to lakes, Margaritaville has an organic tie to the water, and with Margaritaville at Sea, we’re able to put our iconic lifestyle, resort experiences and elevated service directly on the sea.”

Buffett toured the ship, which went into dry dock Wednesday, on Nov. 29, Khosa said.

“I was amazed at his level of enchantment with the ship from top to bottom. Believe it or not, he went to the engine room. He went to the places where a true sailor would want to go,” Khosa said. “He was excited to meet our crew and understand the nuances and very excited about our run to the Bahamas.  He is a big fan of the Bahamas himself.”

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Bahamas Paradise is spending “tens of millions” of dollars obtained through financing on redesigning, rebranding and reworking everything from the décor and color scheme throughout the ship including installing new carpet and furniture in the cabins, Khosa said. The predominant colors will be blues, turquoises and greens.

The audio-visual equipment and other electronics are being upgraded to be top of the line, and Buffet may perform on the ship at some point, Khosa said.

The ship’s bars will be rebranded to the Margaritaville bars, with its Rock bar becoming 5 o’Clock Somewhere Bar. Its main dining room, the Yellow Elder, named after a Bahamian flower, will become Fins, and its Admiral’s Steakhouse will be called JWB Prime Steak & Seafood. The sports bar will become LandShark Sports Bar.

A Fins Up! Fitness Center and a St. Somewhere Spa will also be included.

The cruise line plans to create a “beach experience” for its passengers in the Bahamas, such as an exclusive Margaritaville Beach Club, Khosa said.

After not sailing for 16 months, the Grand Classica began cruising again in July with precautions against COVID-19, including vaccination and testing requirements, in effect. It resumed its normal schedule of three round-trip sailings a week between the port and Freeport.

Passenger counts rose but dipped when the Delta variant occurred. Some cruises were 70% to 80% full and others were lower, Khosa said.

“We started strong, and then Delta spoiled the party,” Khosa said.

The company sold its other ship, the Grand Celebration, in March 2020 following the pandemic-induced shutdown of the cruise industry. The Grand Classica was placed in dry dock that same month.

Both ships began sailing from the port in 2018.

Reservations for the cruises slated to begin April 30 were expected to open Wednesday on the company’s website, margaritavilleatsea.com.

“Although cruising has been getting such a beating the last couple of years, for obvious reasons with COVID, this announcement will be positive for the industry. It reinforces the value of cruising and interest in the cruise industry,” Khosa said.

“What is going to be extremely fascinating about this product is that the experience and music is going to be unparalleled. We are trying to continue Jimmy’s legacy here,” Khosa said. “We all believe in the potential of the brand and this product going forward.”

Margarita complex planned along Indian River Lagoon in Melbourne

Last week Florida Today announced that a Margaritaville complex  featuring a hotel, marina, restaurants and a 20,000-square-foot outdoor entertainment venue is planned along the Indian River Lagoon in Melbourne. Developers said they hope the hotel opens for guests by late 2024 as the sole Margaritaville-themed property in the Space Coast market.

The riverfront complex would feature a Compass by Margaritaville hotel with 145 rooms and suites and a rooftop Salty Rim Bar & Grill, a pool, a 227-slip marina with permanent and transient dockage, a 10,000-square-foot casual beach-style eatery, a 10,000-square-foot "polished casual" restaurant, a marina store and a parking garage.

 A 20,000-square-foot event lawn and stage would anchor the resort, hosting musical acts, simulcast Margaritaville concerts, art shows, food truck nights and other events.

Is Margaritaville Nassau Day Pass Worth the Hype? Find Out!

Looking for a fun day out near the Nassau cruise port? Look no further than the Margaritaville Nassau Day Pass!

Nassau is the capital of the Bahamas and is known for its beautiful beaches, clear waters, and vibrant nightlife.

Picture this: White sand beaches, palm trees, oceanfront pools, water slides, spectacular food, and turquoise water. Margaritaville Beach Resort Nassau has it all!

If you only have one day, that’s ok, a Margaritaville Nassau Day Pass gives you access to all of this and more.

This attraction is located within walking distance (just half a mile) from the cruise port. It’s located downtown, close to the straw market and the fish fry.

Why should you choose a Margaritaville Nassau Day Pass?

As the famous singer Jimmy Buffet says, its 5’oclock somewhere.

Visiting a Margaritaville property is the perfect way to relax and escape the everyday.

Here, you will be surrounded by upbeat music, delicious drinks, and fun-loving people, as well as beautiful beach and pool areas.

Margaritaville is known for its delicious cocktails, including the popular Margarita.

You can find Margaritaville in many locations including Grand Turk , and across the US and Caribbean.

The resort also has a great beach and pool area, perfect for relaxing in the sun.

In Nassau, you can spend your whole vacation at Margaritaville, or if you are on a cruise, you can choose the day pass option.

This property opened in 2021, and the grounds are clean and well-maintained.

The staff is friendly and welcoming.

In the water park area, called Fins Up, there is one pool on site, as well as a lazy river, a kid’s slide, three large slides, and one hot tub.

The flow rider is always a big hit with visitors, and there’s also a ledge 10 feet up that you can jump off into the pool below.

Be aware that the pools are not heated, though, so in the winter, the water might be a bit chilly. It’s still the Bahamas, so it feels nice compared to most places!

There is also a climbing wall on site, as well as plenty of lounge chairs and beach towels. You can rent lockers to store your belongings while you enjoy the attractions.

You are in the Bahamas , so there is a beautiful private beach on the property too.

What is Included with the Margaritaville Nassau Day Pass?

• Pool & Beach Access: 8AM – 6 PM
• Water park Hours: 10 AM – 5 PM
• Fins Up Water Park features water slides and a lazy river
• SurfStream®
• Climbing Wall
• Oceanfront Pool & a Hot Tub
• Lounge chairs, umbrellas & towels
• Complimentary Wi-Fi

What is not included in the Margarita Nassau Day Pass?

It is important to know that the Margarita Nassau day pass is not all-inclusive.

There are a few things that you will have to pay for separately, such as motorized sports, food, and drinks (although there are some available for purchase on-site), access to the upper-level adult only pool, and the fitness center.

Despite this, the Margarita Nassau day pass is still a great deal and provides access to many amenities that will make your experience enjoyable.

Say Goodbye to Winter Blues with a Bahamian Holiday Escape!

How to get to margaritaville nassau from the cruise port.

The Margaritaville Beach Resort Nassau is about a 15-minute walk from the cruise ship port . The walk is flat on sidewalks, so it is walkable for most people.

Exit the cruise dock and turn right. Follow the roadway until you reach Senor Frogs Restaurant. Then, continue past the entrance of The Point to Margaritaville on your right.

The price for two people in a cab is $12.00, and then an additional $3.00 per extra person. The taxi is 10 minutes away from the pier.

What else should you know about the Day Pass at Margaritaville Nassau?

Since the resort limits the number of passes that are allowed each day , and due to the large number of guests that can be in Nassau on any given day, it is a good idea to book your day pass ahead of time.

There is a generous cancellation policy, so if the weather is bad, or your ship is rerouted, you will be able to cancel without losing your investment.

When booking your resort day pass through my links, you will have peace of mind no matter what happens on your cruise. The change and cancellation policies are as follows:

Itinerary Changes: If your cruise changes itinerary once departed, we will advise our resort partners and your existing passes will still be valid on your new day in port!

Missed Port of Call: If your cruise ship is unable to dock at the planned port during the duration of your cruise, your purchase is fully refundable.

Canceled Sailings: Should your sailing be canceled in its entirety, your purchase is fully refundable.

The one downside of the Margaritaville Beach Resort in Nassau day pass option is the food is a bit pricey.

While this is true for a lot of resorts, and tourist areas, it is nice to know ahead of time so that you aren’t shocked.

If you really want to save money on food, you could walk back to the ship to eat, but I recommend just allowing a little extra money in your budget for the day for the convenience of eating on the property.

Conclusion: Should you use the Margaritaville Beach Resort Nassau Day Pass?

Overall, I would recommend the Margaritaville Beach Resort for those who don’t mind a lively atmosphere.

I love that it is nearby the cruise port, allowing you to really spend the most time having fun instead of being stuck in transportation.

I think if you are traveling with your family, this is a great option as it offers something for everyone.

However, if you are traveling as a couple, or solo and are looking for a quiet, laidback environment, there may be other resorts in Nassau that would be a better fit.

There are plenty of bars in Nassau that offer a fun atmosphere too if you aren’t looking for a full resort experience.

If you’re looking for a fun place to spend the day, Margaritaville Nassau is a great option. With a day pass, you’ll have access to all the fun activities the resort has to offer, from swimming and sunbathing to snorkeling and kayaking.

Plus, you can enjoy delicious food and drinks at on-site restaurants and bars.

So why wait? Get your day pass today!

10 Celebrity-Favorite Beaches to Make You Feel Like a Star!

Princess cruise ship hits port while docking

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For a Thrilling Cruise Experience, Book a Sailing Through This Underrated Canal in Greece

Added bonus: it offers a passage to harder-to-reach areas of greece from the mediterranean sea..

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The Corinth Canal is an engineering marvel that few cruise lines sail through.

Photo by Silversea/Unsplash

Some cruisers prefer a cabin high above the sea. I prefer being in the center of the ship, which tends to be less rocky and provides a unique perspective. Lucky me, my suite on Windstar Cruises’ 312-passenger Star Legend is on Deck 4, just high enough on the ship for the glass to present a feeling of being on the sea rather than above it. On the final morning of an eight-night cruise in early May from Istanbul to Athens , I wake up, pull open the blackout curtains, and stare at the ocean, which is practically at my eye level.

This will be a particularly exciting day.

I am perhaps even a little nervous for our voyage through the narrow Corinth Canal, which allows ships to pass between the Ionian and the Aegean Seas. Our yacht is about 63 feet wide and will squeeze through the world’s narrowest man-made canal. The Corinth Canal is about 69 feet wide at the sea floor and closer to 79 feet at sea level—tight, but doable for small ships.

The idea for a canal cutting through the narrow Isthmus of Corinth originated with the ancient Greeks and was later contemplated by the Romans. But it wasn’t until the 19th century when French engineers finally sliced through the limestone rock, after trial and error, completing the project in 1893. The canal shaves hundreds of miles off the route between the Aegean and the Ionian Seas, in our case making for a much quicker trip to Athens; the canal saves passengers 20 to 28 hours at sea.

Crossing the Corinth Canal is a rarified experience. Only a few small-ship cruise lines, including Windstar , Emerald Cruises , and French line Ponant operate a handful of cruises through the canal each year, mostly for repositioning purposes, such as when moving ships from the Mediterranean to the Greek Isles. What many travelers might not realize is that sailing the Corinth Canal offers the opportunity to experience an engineering marvel and a waterway that is narrower and arguably more thrilling than the more well-known Panama Canal or Suez Canal. It also allows for itineraries that include the less-visited port of Itea in Greece, with access to ancient Delphi, a UNESCO World Heritage site that dates back to the second millennium B.C.

The canal was closed for two years for repairs after a landslide in 2021. It reopened last year, then closed again for more repairs. I was on the first passenger cruise ship to go through in 2024.

Windstar hosts a private dinner in the ancient Turkish city of Ephesus.

Courtesy of Windstar

On our way here, our itinerary took us to Türkiye’s ancient Roman ruins at Ephesus, including for a complimentary Windstar-hosted, white-tablecloth dinner party among the ruins. We visited Mykonos and Santorini in Greece, Bodrum in Türkiye, and lovely, quiet Myrina on the Greek island of Lemnos, the kind of quaint place you dream about finding in Greece (when I posted a photo on social media, a Greek friend chastised me for spreading the word about his “secret” island).

In Greece’s ancient Delphi, I paused at the sanctuary of Apollo, hoping I’d be one of those people who feel a mysterious aura in a place where ancient Greeks sought guidance from oracles. I didn’t, so I instead enjoyed the gorgeous views of olive trees and countryside from Mount Parnassus.

The all-suite Star Legend helps to provide a sense of place on board by serving local dishes, such as moussaka and spicy baked feta, and by bringing on a belly dancer who wiggled through the audience in the ship’s theater one evening. The Star Legend is the kind of small ship where you make friends easily; the majority of passengers are couples in their forties and older. There’s a casual yachtlike atmosphere on board, with little dressing up for dinner. It’s easy to feel at home here and just be yourself. On canal day, I follow my daily routine, grabbing a nautical-blue couch in the Yacht Club at the bow and enjoying an excellent latte and perfectly crunchy almond croissant while looking through huge windows, with the same views as the officers on the bridge a deck below. My husband, David, heads to the aft of the ship to enjoy his eggs, which he eats outdoors, with views to the back of the ship, at the café. Then we meet up with new friends.

With no port stops today, David and I have agreed to teach our favorite card game, Up and Down the River. A competitive tournament ensues. One of the men we’ve tutored, a government contractor from Virginia, proves himself a champion.

Cutting through the Corinth Canal allows for easier access to the ancient Greek site of Delphi.

trabantos/Shutterstock

Windstar is the official cruise line of the James Beard Foundation, with cuisine to match. So far, I’ve guiltily managed to get through seven days without hitting the gym (I did, however, indulge in an excellent massage at the spa). Since I can’t walk on shore during this sea day, I hit the deck, walking around and around past some guests in the small pool and others reading in lounge chairs.

When we near the canal, there is a flurry of activity, with everyone trying to figure out the best place to watch the experience. We’re met by the tugboat that will tow us through the canal. Local pilots come aboard our ship (as required by local authorities due to the challenges of navigating the difficult passage), along with a local guide hired by Windstar, who provides historical commentary and context.

David and I head outside in front of the Yacht Club. Another prime viewing spot is one deck below, by the ship’s hot tub.

Our first view is such a narrow cut through land that our waterway looks like a small river, though barriers marking the entrance give a clue that this is not a trip into nature. The crew serves us snacks as we wait for clearance to proceed.

As we enter, the nearly four-mile-long canal seems quite manageable. But then it narrows and narrows until there are sheer sand-colored limestone walls mere feet from the sides of the ship. It narrows still, as the captain and the pilot position on the bridge wings (outdoor step-out areas used when docking) so they can get a better view and make sure we don’t scrape the solid rock on either side. I have a moment of trepidation when I realize that if they wanted, they could reach out and grab the branches of bushes growing on the limestone cliffs.

We pass under rail and road bridges. Tourists line the overpasses, some who have come by bus from Athens to watch ships pass through the canal. At the last bridge, which we reach in less than an hour after we entered the canal, bungee jumpers seek an adrenaline rush by bouncing right above us. I had a rush, too, and now breathe deeply after witnessing firsthand that we have successfully slipped through a true engineering feat.

Global cruise industry sees growing demand, wary of port protests

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AT&T February wireless outage blocked more than 92 million calls, agency says

A nationwide AT&T wireless outage in February that lasted over 12 hours blocked more than 92 million voice calls and prevented more than 25,000 attempts to reach 911, according to report released Monday and first reported by Reuters.

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A Cursed Ship and the Fate of Its Sunken Gold

Nothing made Gay Courter happier than being on a ship. She and her husband, Phil, had travelled the world by everything from hydroplane to hot-air balloon, but something about the sea air and the rocking motion of the water gave her an unparalleled feeling of well-being. In late January of 2020, the Courters embarked on their twentieth cruise together—a two-week tour of Southeast Asia aboard a ship called the Diamond Princess. They began their adventure in Tokyo, where they dined on fugu, the occasionally fatal puffer fish. Gay had a tradition of giving every trip a name. She was calling this one Seventy-five and Still Alive. They assumed that they’d already survived the most harrowing bit.

The Courters live by the water in Crystal River, Florida. They have three children and eight grandchildren. They are semi-retired and own a production company that makes documentary and educational films. Phil builds things and plays the banjo. Gay writes. She is the author of eleven books, ranging from “The Beansprout Book,” which, according to her Wikipedia page, “introduced beansprouts to American supermarkets and the general public,” to “The Midwife,” a best-seller in 1982. Her most recent novel, published in 2019, is set on a cruise ship. According to its promotional material, the book juxtaposes “the sumptuousness of a dream vacation with the horrors that lurk around the bend.”

The Courters have a story for everything. The time they first met, when Phil interviewed at the company where Gay worked. (“He moved in before he even began the job, and we’ve never had a date.”) The time they flew a small plane to their son’s graduation and crashed in a field, provoking an epiphany that led them to adopt their daughter at the age of twelve. The time they got invited to the White House. The time they vacationed with a future serial killer. Gay’s kids call her No-Filter Mom. Get her talking about her childhood—she lived in Japan when she was six, by the way—and she’ll mention that her father once bought an aircraft carrier. “Easy to find under ‘Leonard Weisman’ and ‘U.S.S. Attu,’ ” she told me. One of the first things that comes up when you Google these terms is an article identifying Weisman as a likely member of the Sonneborn Institute, a group of arms smugglers. If Forrest Gump, appearing on the margins of various historical events, were a family, he might be the Courters. Except that the Courters’ stories, however outlandish, tend to be true.

February 2, 2020, was supposed to be their second-to-last day aboard the Diamond Princess. At breakfast, Gay ordered the “famous James Beard French toast,” which she’d been looking forward to the entire vacation. Later, she crushed the trivia contest, leading her team to victory by answering that the largest Japanese population outside Japan can be found in Brazil. She hadn’t yet worked up the nerve to ask for a souvenir photo with Gennaro Arma, the ship’s “devilishly handsome” captain, not wanting to seem like “a dotty old lady.” Still, the couple deemed the trip a success before heading off to see “Bravo!,” widely agreed to be the best show on the cruise.

That evening, as the Courters were packing their suitcases, the ship’s intercom crackled on, filling their stateroom with Captain Arma’s voice. He announced that he had been notified by Hong Kong authorities that a passenger from the ship had tested positive for COVID -19. One of the Courters’ friends had been forwarding them articles about the strange new sickness, but this was the first hint that something was amiss aboard the Diamond Princess. Japanese authorities, Arma said, would be conducting a review of the vessel when it docked in Yokohama. “I will keep you updated with the information on the evolution of the evolving situation,” he promised, ominously.

The Diamond Princess was the site of a major early COVID outbreak and the first cruise ship to be quarantined during the pandemic. More than thirty-seven hundred passengers and crew members were stuck on board for two weeks as health authorities tried to figure out what to do. The Courters attempted to be cheerful. Gay got out her emergency snacks, including a tiny saltshaker that she carries everywhere, because you just never know. But things got scary fast. At one point, the World Health Organization announced that more than half of all confirmed COVID cases outside China were aboard the Diamond Princess.

As the virus swept through the decks, the Courters emerged as minor celebrities, lobbying for evacuation in newspaper editorials and on cable news. “I don’t think we’re safe on this ship,” Gay told ABC. “Frankly, it’s really creepy. It’s like prison camp.” Eventually, more than seven hundred passengers contracted the virus, and at least fourteen people died. The Courters finally flew home on a cargo plane chartered by the State Department and were obliged to quarantine on a military base for another fortnight. Home in Florida at last, Gay set to work on a quarantine memoir. She wrote of the shock of being “a carefree cruiser one moment, then held hostage by a foreign government.”

To compensate for the ordeal, Princess Cruises gave every passenger a credit to use for another trip. Some had had enough, and declined. But, two years later, in early June of 2022, the Courters flew to England, where they boarded the Island Princess for a two-week tour of Norway. It was a comparatively uneventful outing—glaciers, a fishing museum. Gay named the trip Pining for the Fjords, after a Monty Python sketch.

On June 29th, the Island Princess returned to port in England. That morning, the Courters told me, they received word that ship officials wanted to speak with them. They were asked to hand over their passports, and were escorted off the boat. On land, they were told that they were being arrested on European warrants, in connection with money laundering, organized crime, and the trafficking of cultural goods—gold bars from the Prince de Conty, a frigate that crashed off the coast of Brittany in 1746.

Gold is known as “the king of metals” for its scarcity, durability, and dazzling beauty. Even if it is no longer the most precious of native metals in purely financial terms (rhodium now takes that honor, thanks to the catalytic converter), gold retains its unparalleled primacy in the human psyche. Alchemists believed that they would unlock the secret to eternal life if they could turn lead into gold; imperialists slaughtered millions in pursuit of the substance. The golden calf, the golden fleece, the golden ratio, the golden hour, the golden goose—anything gold is profoundly desirable, sometimes driving its seekers to ruin or madness.

Freud thought that gold brought out something greedy in human nature, likening man’s fetish for it to that of a baby holding on to its shit. On digs and dives, a kind of gold fever can take hold. “Gold sends people spinning out of control,” one archeologist told me recently. The Prince de Conty wreck was perhaps especially susceptible to inspiring gold derangement: a persistent rumor holds that the ship and its treasure were cursed from the start. The legend’s power only deepened with the tribulations of a varied cast of sailors, speculators, divers, looters, and investigators who became obsessed with the ship’s treasure before the gold bars finally pulled the Courters into their thrall.

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The Prince de Conty first set sail from Lorient on April 2, 1745. Its owner was the French East India Company, established under Louis XIV. The ship was designed to carry six hundred tons of cargo while remaining quick and maneuverable. Its crew of two hundred and twenty-three men included fourteen carpenters, five pilots, a butcher, a baker, a sailmaker, a writer, and a chaplain. Many were teen-agers. The youngest among them was twelve. The chief surgeon carried a trepanation kit, in case he needed to drain blood from someone’s brain after a mid-voyage blow to the head.

From Lorient, the Prince travelled south along the western coast of Africa, passing between the Canary Islands and Cape Verde, then swung wide around the Cape of Good Hope before finally arriving, six months later, in the Chinese city of Canton, now called Guangzhou. Having set sail slightly too late in the season, the ship encountered monstrous storms, and lost several men. But a trade voyage was a long-term bet. A vessel like the Prince was the eighteenth-century equivalent of an Amazon truck, its delivery times calculated in years instead of days or hours. In Canton, stevedores loaded the boat with luxury goods: ivory fans, painted silks, wallpapers, porcelain, lacquerware, tea, rhubarb, sappanwood, and sarsaparilla root, prized for its efficacy in treating syphilis.

In the mid-eighteenth century, gold could be bought more cheaply in China than in Europe. Sailors were discouraged from doing side deals at foreign destinations, but the practice was widely tolerated, especially among the officer class, as a perk for having taken on a job that entailed mortal risk. “Everybody who set off on one of these boats did so with the goal of making a fortune,” Brigitte Nicolas, the director of the French East India Company Museum, near Lorient, told me. According to her, gold was “the secret merchandise” of the company’s missions to China, weighing heavily on minds and in pockets. For gentlemen smugglers, the most convenient format was the ingot. Some were shaped like shoes, others in rectangles that recall chocolate bars. Another type was known as “ pain ,” for its resemblance to a baguette. They were all small enough to fit in a palm, and heavy, weighing around thirteen ounces, a little more than a can of soup. One expert estimates that around a hundred ingots were aboard the Prince de Conty as it embarked on its return trip to France.

The homeward voyage was catastrophic. Scurvy set in; English pirates attacked; the ship’s captain, Charles Bréart de Boisanger, was gravely injured in combat. By the time they got close to France, they were “very, very banged-up people,” Nicolas said. On December 2, 1746, after twenty months at sea, the Prince and its crew were several nautical miles off the coast of Brittany, only hours away from completing their mission and returning to land.

Then, in the middle of the night, the wind picked up. Fog rolled in and the sea rose, tossing the Prince violently as rain lashed its threadbare sails. At around 4 A . M ., the ship crashed into the rocky coast of Belle-Île-en-Mer, an island in Brittany. The impact was so great that the hull of the boat split in half. “It was a night in Hell,” Nicolas said. Fewer than seventy of the hundred and ninety men who had made it that far survived the wreck.

The French East India Company scrambled to recoup its losses, sending in a salvage team. “We’re pulling out wood and collecting it at the top of the cliff, but this wood is so broken that the majority of it will only serve as kindling,” an architect named Guillois, charged with leading the effort, wrote to the company. Villagers gathered flotsam, laying drenched silks out to dry on the rocks. Guillois warned that locals, “accustomed to pillage,” might “descend during the night without being spotted,” so the company installed guards in a cliffside cabin to watch over the wreck day and night.

Officials brought in a boat to dredge the area, but the operation yielded little. Undeterred, they ordered a diving bell, the latest technology from Paris. Divers retrieved some copper pots, among other items, but the most valuable cargo remained elusive, save for what seems to have been a small stash of gold found by a twelve-year-old boy, which soon vanished from the site.

During a sea voyage, gold—even if it was illicit—was typically stored in crates like any other commodity. But Captain de Boisanger, exploiting a maritime custom that exempted officers from bodily searches, had decided to carry his ingots on his person, fashioning them into a kind of belt. Other officers presumably did likewise, complicating both their own escapes from the wreck and the company’s search effort. “The total quantity of gold that was on this vessel gives one occasion to think that, even if we don’t find it all, we should at least hope to recover some part,” Guillois wrote. So where, then, was it all? Had it sunk to the bottom of the ocean with the corpses of de Boisanger and his men, or had someone quietly made off with it in the aftermath of the wreck?

In the spring of 1974, Patrick Lizé’s tooth hurt. He went to see a dentist not far from the small Norman village where he lived. While being poked and prodded, Lizé, a swimming teacher, went on about his passion for marine archeology, particularly eighteenth-century shipwrecks. The dentist said that he ought to talk to his neighbor, who had just been diving in the Mediterranean for Greek and Roman relics.

The neighbor was an architect named Jean-Claude Lescure, and the two men bonded over their shared interest. Lizé mentioned that he’d been rummaging through dusty files in the National Archives, scoping out possible shipwrecks. He’d homed in on a promising candidate: the Prince de Conty, which, if he was right, was lying, forgotten and untouched for two centuries, off the coast of Belle-Île. Lizé had unearthed the Guillois report, which inventoried the Prince’s bounty. He also had a plan of the site—“a veritable treasure map, in short,” he later wrote, in a memoir. He and Lescure decided that they and their families would spend their holidays on Belle-Île that summer.

As its name suggests, Belle-Île is beautiful and isolated. The largest of Brittany’s islands, it is only about ten miles long and five miles wide. The weather there, in Breton fashion, is infinitely changeable, the emerald seas and sapphire skies of one minute giving way, the next, to a horizonless gray murk. The island is said to have “two faces”—a northern coast with sandy beaches and a far more rugged southern one, with sheer cliffs and a wild, churning sea. The wind has whittled the island’s rocks into surrealistic forms. Even in summer, it can blow hard enough that foam sprays over the clifftops, making it look like it’s snowing. Claude Monet was so enchanted by Belle-Île that he painted some forty pictures there. He wrote that he felt “powerless to render the intensity” of the ocean.

Lizé and Lescure arrived on the island in August and travelled to the area indicated by the archival documents, a discreet cove known as Port Lost-Kah. (The name means “cat’s tail” in Breton.) “We threw on our wetsuits with indescribable impatience, donned our equipment, and jumped into the history-charged water,” Lizé later wrote. They dove for twenty-eight days and found nothing of interest. But Lizé was determined, searching, he wrote, “every hole, every fault, every crevice, every crack, lifting every stone.” Finally, after nearly a month of failure, they cleared some algae and felt a bulge on the ocean floor: a cannonball! The discovery of some sappanwood and shards of porcelain confirmed that they were hot on the trail of the Prince.

Back home, they plotted a return to the island, this time with heavy machinery. Over a poolside dinner, they pitched the plan to Guy Lépinay, a local notary, who agreed to handle the logistics. “At the beginning, it was just for a laugh,” Lépinay recalled, in his own book. “But I thought, Why not?” They pledged to split any eventual spoils three ways. “A desire for adventure was floating in the air,” Lépinay wrote.

The group returned to Belle-Île with thermic compressors and a suction dredge. One afternoon, just as Lizé was approaching shore to quit for the day, he spotted a U-shaped metallic object on the ocean floor. It was encased in a hard black crust, but on one extremity he noticed “a little golden collar, neither the presence nor the nature of which I could explain.” He took out his knife and shaved off a sliver. On land, he showed it to Lescure. They agreed: solid gold. The men bought a canvas suitcase at the port, shoved the object inside, and hauled it back to Normandy.

French law requires anyone who discovers “any deposit, wreck, remnant, or item possessing prehistoric, archeological, or historical interest” in French waters to declare it to authorities within forty-eight hours. The rule is meant to insure that cultural property remains intact and accessible, rather than being hoarded away or sold off by profiteers. As Olivia Hulot, an official at France’s Department of Subaquatic and Submarine Archeological Research ( DRASSM ), recently explained, “You can’t just walk into the Louvre and take a painting off the wall because you like it.”

The encrusted object clearly qualified as cultural property, even more so when the treasure hunters cleaned it up, revealing that the shining chunk was actually an ingot stamped with Chinese ideograms. Later, Lizé and Lescure would say that they declared the Prince wreck to a local fisherman, who claimed to represent the maritime authority in Belle-Île. Lépinay says that his partners promised they’d taken care of the formalities, and he took them at their word. Whatever the case, no member of the group notified the relevant officials at DRASSM until more than two months later. The men dispute who was in favor of declaring all along and who resisted the idea; in fact, they disagree on almost everything about the whole affair. Lépinay told me that Lizé was “a perfect liar and crook.” Lizé insisted that he was the one who had been cheated, and said that he saw Lescure stuffing ingots into his wetsuit on one dive. “He was very, very naïve,” Lizé’s daughter, Emmanuelle, told me. “It’s a world of sharks—and my father didn’t protect himself.”

When Lizé finally did declare the Prince—behind the backs of his partners—he didn’t let on that he’d found gold, mentioning only “five entirely corroded cannons.” DRASSM granted him permission to bring up the cannons, and, in the summer of 1975, he returned to Belle-Île with a new team. According to witnesses, the site quickly degenerated into chaos. People came and went like wired kids at the end of a birthday party, swarming the innards of a piñata. One diver, recalling a “louche” atmosphere, said that he’d seen Lizé come out of the water with ingots on an earlier dive. The journalist Nicolas Jacquard wrote recently, in Le Parisien , that Lizé and his associates “skin[ned] the remains of the Conty like a band of piranhas would clean a carcass.”

In the meantime, the Lescure family, also on holiday in Belle-Île, was keeping an eye on what Lizé and his new team were up to. Acting on a tip from Lescure, DRASSM raided the site and shut down the dive. Lescure’s son Francois, fifteen at the time, was looking on through binoculars from a clifftop as the authorities approached. “They had four black Zodiacs,” he recalled. “It was like a James Bond film.” As he stood there watching, he felt a hand on his back. “Suddenly, this thug arrived behind us,” he said. “He took me by the shoulders, and he said, ‘I’d like to throw you off this cliff.’ ”

Obsequious correspondence flew around the country as the opposing sides tried to persuade the authorities that they were law-abiding citizens who had been caught up in another’s shady scheme. “I now find myself in the position of a villain, when those who point the finger are incapable of raising the same finger to furnish proof with a similar vigor,” Lizé wrote in a pleading missive to the French President’s wife, Madame Giscard d’Estaing. He eventually became a renowned treasure hunter, discovering dozens more wrecks, but a shadow hovered over his reputation. “You understand that this situation is intolerable for the marine archeology devotee that I am,” he wrote to one official. “Who hasn’t committed an error in his life?”

The disputes revived the old notion that the Prince might be cursed. Connoisseurs of nautical arcana knew that, before the frigate that crashed into the rocks at Belle-Île, the French East India Company had owned another ship of the same name, lost off the coast of Louisiana, and that, in 1753, the firm had launched a third Prince, which fell into the hands of English pirates. Proponents of the curse theory pointed to centuries of death, injury, ruination, quarrels, and dreams dashed upon the rocks. Lépinay, reflecting on his own dramas involving the ship, wondered whether it “suffered from a macabre predestiny.” When Lescure died, in a car accident, in 1980, some people in his circle insisted that his proximity to the Prince was somehow to blame.

As rumors circulated—gold stuffed into briefcases, gold stashed in attics and car trunks, gold entrusted to elderly mothers—French prosecutors launched an investigation. They confiscated all manner of booty from the three partners and their various associates in a series of searches, but they were only ever able to recover two ingots. Dozens of names came up in the inquiry, but ultimately the authorities brought charges against just five people, including Lizé and Lépinay. After a trial, in 1983, Lizé was ordered to pay a fine of forty thousand francs for possession of stolen goods, while Lépinay and the others received lesser penalties.

Lizé was devastated by the judgment and its implication that he was a petty thief, rather than a brilliant scholar. “He was humiliated for a little administrative fault,” his daughter said. Lépinay, on the other hand, hardly gave the affair a second thought, considering it “ pipi de sansonnet ”—“starling pee,” or small beans. Both men assumed that the matter was effectively closed.

In the beginning of 1981, excitement swept into western Florida. “French Sailing Family Visits Crystal River,” the Suncoast Sentinel announced, introducing Gérard and Annette Pesty and their children, Sylviane (four) and Eric (eight months). They had just arrived on their fifty-five-foot trimaran, the Architeuthis. Gérard was a pharmacist by training, and Annette a laboratory research assistant. The couple had decided to “cut loose,” the article explained, sailing around the world and recording their experience in books and documentaries. They were now touring North America, having come down to Florida from Canada, via the Mississippi, “to see the manatees—which they pronounce ‘man-atty.’ ”

Gay recalled, “Once we saw the story about this French couple with similar interests and kids roughly the ages of our kids, we thought, Well, we ought to go meet these people.” One day, the Courters got in their motorboat and zipped out to the middle of the bay, where the Architeuthis was anchored. There they were: Annette with the baby on her back, lifting the anchor; Sylviane doing gymnastics on the rigging; Gérard, streaked with oil and grease, fiddling with the engine compartment. The family struck the Courters as embodying the kind of life they were striving to create—rich in experiences and self-sufficient, but open to the world. “Annette washed diapers, and they were strung on a line,” Gay said. “I was in awe.”

The friendship quickly deepened. By 1984, the families were vacationing together near Great Inagua, an island in the Bahamas known for its flamingos. The Pestys spent summers in France, running their pharmacy, so that they could travel the rest of the year. They often left the Architeuthis in Crystal River, where the Courters took care of the boat and handled various practical matters on their behalf. “It was all very loose and based on trust,” Gay told me.

The Courters speak fondly of this era of “young families doing pretty crazy things”—swimming with humpback whales, flying single-engine planes, “sharing our dreams, problems, children.” One picture from the time shows two sun-kissed, bare-chested kids perched on the crosstrees of a towering mast, with another little boy scrambling to the peak. When the Courters’ cat had kittens, they gave one to the Pestys. “We became their American family, and vice versa,” Gay said. “The connection was deeper than Phil or I have with even our siblings.”

One day in 1986, Gérard Pesty made an impromptu appearance in Crystal River. “He walks in and pops open this briefcase full of gold, and we’re, like, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” Phil remembered. According to the Courters, Pesty had around twenty ingots. He said that they had come from a French shipwreck and, later, that his sister and brother-in-law, Brigitte and Yves Gladu, a renowned underwater photographer, had found them while diving in Brittany. Pesty’s story was a little vague, but Gay and Phil were more amused than anything. “Gérard was a crazy guy with so many irons in the fire,” Gay said. Pesty took the ingots out of the briefcase and showed them to the kids. “They were playing with them like Legos,” Gay told me. “Honestly, we thought it was cool.”

It was an opportune moment to unload a cache of gold. Several months earlier, Christie’s had auctioned off treasure salvaged from the Geldermalsen, a Dutch ship that wrecked off the coast of Indonesia in 1752. The so-called Nanking Cargo fetched record prices—nearly forty-three thousand dollars for a “fish dish,” eighty thousand for the kind of rare, shoe-shaped ingot that sank with the Prince. Pesty told the Courters that the sale’s success had motivated the Gladus to sell their gold. He’d been in Miami, he said, to meet with a rare-coin dealer; before that, he’d visited London, where he had sold three ingots to the British Museum. He asked the Courters if they’d be willing to hold on to the gold while he was in France, since he was hoping to find an American buyer.

If this wasn’t a typical day in the Courter household, neither was it totally anomalous. (Ashley Rhodes-Courter, the Courters’ adopted daughter, recalls spending her first holiday with the family in the company of a dozen Chinese railroad engineers whom Phil and Gay had invited over for Thanksgiving.) “We did ask a few questions,” Phil said. The Courters talked to a customs agent, who confirmed that the antique gold wasn’t subject to import duties. On a trip to New York to meet with her literary agent, Gay stuffed an ingot in her purse and went to see an expert at the American Numismatic Society, who vouched for its authenticity. “Our thinking was, Jeez, the British Museum’s buying it, so it must be legit,” Phil said.

The Courters unscrewed a light fixture and, for a while, hid the ingots in their ceiling. Eventually, they moved them to a safe-deposit box. When Gérard Pesty and Yves Gladu opened American bank accounts, Phil served as a signatory. Every year, he says, he made sure that his friends filled out their tax forms and filed them with the I.R.S.

In 1997, the Courters’ younger son joined the Pestys on a trip to Île-à-Vache, an island off the coast of Haiti. Toward the end of the trip, Gérard suddenly became very sick. He was at an airport, trying to catch a flight to somewhere with a better medical facility, when he collapsed into his son’s lap and died. Annette had a high fever, and her skin was turning yellow. Someone called the Courters and told them what was happening.

“ Falciparum malaria!” Gay exclaimed—the deadliest form of the parasite in humans. The Courters managed to have Annette airlifted to Gainesville. “By the time we arrived at the hospital, I was obsessed, hysterical, and screaming, but they listened,” Gay said. After Gérard’s death, the families remained close. The Courters travelled all over the world with Annette and the Gladus, who now had a big boat of their own. Annette started telling people that she was alive only because of the Courters.

By the time Michel L’Hour laid eyes on the Prince de Conty, he had been thinking about the ship for several years. In 1983, as a new recruit at DRASSM , he had testified at Lizé and Lépinay’s trial, trying to explain that shipwrecks were “essential witnesses to the story of humanity, pages of our collective history that deserve to be studied.” The experience left him frustrated. “The trial was very bizarre,” he recalled. “Nobody seemed to give a damn.” Then, in the summer of 1985, L’Hour was tasked with leading one of his first major dives, at the site of the Prince.

At the time, DRASSM was a young organization with scant resources. L’Hour and a colleague camped out on the side of the Lost-Kah cliff, sharing a tent. They didn’t have the budget for heavy machinery, but L’Hour was so determined to succeed that he invited Lizé to the dive, figuring that, despite his conviction, “at the end of the day, he knew the site best.” (Emmanuelle Lizé calls L’Hour a “venal and pretentious” hypocrite, who treated her father as a criminal while capitalizing on his work.) For two weeks, it rained every day. The wind whipped the water so relentlessly that L’Hour’s team might as well have been diving inside a washing machine. It was impossible to anchor a boat, so when their scuba tanks ran out of air they hiked up the slippery cliff in their dive boots, refilled the tanks, and hiked back down.

The site had already been explored—by Guillois, in the seventeen-forties, and by Lizé, in the nineteen-seventies—but L’Hour and his team managed to salvage some historically valuable items. He was particularly moved by a modest crucifix, which, he wrote, “can only recall to what extent maritime voyages were exposed to dangers that many could confront only by faith.” The team found three ingots—not nothing, but not the breakthrough they had dreamed of. For all his distaste for the “frenetic quest for gold,” even L’Hour, taking the ingots into his hands for the first time, felt a certain magic. He recalled, “It’s crazy, you feel like nothing happened, like no time elapsed, between the guy who touched them in Canton in 1745 and me, holding them now.” In the third week, a major storm hit, sending the team’s Zodiac into the rocks and breaking its propeller, which put an end to the operation.

L’Hour was already one of the world’s leading experts on the Prince, but now the ship became a personal obsession. He nurtured contacts in the treasure-hunting community, developing a reputation as someone who could be trusted with sensitive information. Born in Tunisia, where his father built roads for the French colonial government, he’d been a brainy, taciturn child. “You’re a chatterbox and a lockbox at the same time,” his mother sometimes said. L’Hour leveraged this dual nature in service of the Prince, transforming himself into “a sort of computer,” eliciting bits of gossip and speculation in a seemingly casual manner and then filing them away without a word. “I always had the Prince in mind, but I didn’t talk about it, even if I went back from time to time to dive there, to keep an eye on things,” L’Hour told me. He followed every lead, no matter how far-fetched.

At one point, he received an anonymous phone call asking for a meeting in Paris. L’Hour arrived at a grand café at the appointed hour, where he was greeted by a man who claimed to possess a number of gold ingots purchased from someone who had pillaged the Prince. L’Hour considered himself a pragmatist and hoped that he might broker some kind of deal. But when he reported the availability of the gold to his superiors they told him that a negotiation for the ingots was out of the question. “O.K., we don’t negotiate with terrorists, but the hostage is dead,” L’Hour said recently, still annoyed at the “egghead Parisian” brass. The man walked out of the café, and L’Hour never saw him again.

One day, a source gave L’Hour an intriguing photograph. It showed roughly twenty gold bars strewn across the ocean floor, a few of them nestled between the legs of rust-colored starfish. “That photo gave me proof of something that I’d known for a long time, which was that at least one person who’d pillaged the site in the seventies hadn’t got caught with his hand in the bag,” L’Hour recalled. For the moment, he couldn’t use the photograph without exposing his source. “But I knew it would come in handy someday,” he said. He put it away in a safe, taking care to lock his office door every day when he went to lunch.

In the course of his forty-year career, L’Hour became a storied figure in marine archeology—“Indiana Jones in a wetsuit,” per one sobriquet. In 2006, he became the director of DRASSM . He travelled the planet, excavating wrecks from Gabon to the Philippines, but he never stopped following the Prince. One day in 2017, he received an e-mail from an old contact containing a link to the site of a California auction house called Stephen Album Rare Coins. Alongside Transylvanian ducats and Tibetan srangs, the house was offering five gold ingots—four baguettes and one chocolate bar, estimated to sell for between twenty-two and thirty thousand dollars each. “Nearly identical to the bars from the wrecks of the French East India Company vessel Prince de Conty, and to the Dutch East-Indiaman Geldermalsen,” the catalogue copy read.

L’Hour could not believe what he was seeing. “It was kind of a Christmas present,” he said. The listing even included a link to a 1999 episode of “Antiques Roadshow,” featuring an elegant woman in a gold-buttoned cardigan. She had come with some old porcelain and a pair of gold bars, which she claimed to have found near the Cape Verde Islands, some hundred feet underwater. The program had been shot in Florida. L’Hour detected an accent. “She spoke very good English, but I said to myself, ‘She’s French,’ ” he told me. The woman seemed slightly ill at ease, tossing her head as she spoke, but it was impossible to tell whether her awkwardness stemmed from anxiety at appearing on television, or from speaking in a second language, or from something more profound.

The woman had a photograph to illustrate her presentation. There it sat, propped on a little easel: a print featuring roughly twenty gold bars and a rust-colored starfish, identical to the photograph that L’Hour had stashed in a safe years before. “I was, like, Putain , there it is!” L’Hour recalled. He had a strong hunch that the woman was lying about the provenance of the gold, so he decided to see if a biologist could identify the starfish. The word came back: the species could be found in shallow waters, such as those at the Prince de Conty site, but not in waters as deep as those the woman had described.

L’Hour was sure that the ingots had been obtained illegally, but he didn’t recognize the woman. He began going through his old lists of suspects. During the investigation in the nineteen-eighties, police had seized a number of items, including photographs, from Yves Gladu. He had joined Lizé’s dive team as an underwater photographer, and his name had come up repeatedly in L’Hour’s inquiries over the years, but no one had ever been able to connect him definitively with the plunder of the Prince. L’Hour pulled up the Gladu family’s Facebook profiles and discovered that the woman in the television clip was Annette Pesty—the widow of Brigitte Gladu’s brother, and the Courters’ dear friend.

By now, L’Hour had been tracking the ingots for thirty-five years. A kind of Javert of the Prince de Conty, he had dedicated a lifetime to retrieving the gold bars from oblivion and to protecting the wreck. As late as 2009, he had warned an admiral that the site, “again the victim of systematic pillages,” was being seriously harmed “by clandestine acts that seem to me never to have ceased.” This was the break he’d been waiting for. He dialled a colleague at the Ministry of Culture and urged him to alert the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Following their arrest in England, the Courters were taken to London for a preliminary hearing. Asked if they would accept extradition to France, they refused. They were granted bail of a thousand pounds each, but they didn’t have the cash on hand, nor were they allowed to visit an A.T.M., so they were sent to prison—Gay to Bronzefield and Phil to Wandsworth. Gay, a diabetic, went for hours without food or her medication. Phil was strip-searched.

In their cells, they tried to grasp the contours of their predicament. They had known that French law enforcement was investigating the provenance of the gold bars, and they had received questions from French authorities via a U.S. Attorney. But they had been assured by their longtime lawyers that they had done nothing illegal. They were advised to only answer questions in exchange for immunity, since the gold wasn’t theirs and there was little France could do about it, anyway. They were unaware that a French judge had issued warrants for their arrest and extradition in connection with the trafficking of “national treasure belonging to France.” Gay’s warrant identified her as the “owner of a King Charles Spaniel” and, rather cruelly, described her as of “great corpulence.”

Gay had volunteered as a guardian ad litem in the Florida courts for twenty-five years, and she was terrified by the prospect of extradition to France, fearing that she and Phil would never be able to defend themselves in an unfamiliar legal system in a language they don’t speak. “I decided that suicide was the best option if it came to that,” she told me. “I think that’s the only secret I ever kept from Phil.” When their bail came through, they were released from prison, and took an Uber to Cambridge.

The Courters arrived at a house owned by Suzanne and John Curran. “We’d met twenty years earlier on a home exchange,” Suzanne recalled. “Then we sort of kept in vague touch on and off, like you do—Christmas cards and things.” Before their Norwegian cruise, the Courters had stopped by Cambridge for afternoon tea with the Currans. Suzanne said, “We waved them off, and, personally, I thought it was probably the last time we’d see them.” Now the Courters, “completely and utterly shell-shocked,” had become their involuntary house guests for the indefinite future.

For months, the Courters remained in limbo. They accumulated lawyers, eventually racking up more than six hundred thousand dollars in legal fees and living costs, even though they had yet to be charged with any crime. “The injustices of the European warrant system are notorious,” the extradition lawyer Edward Fitzgerald, who represents Julian Assange and briefly worked on the Courters’ case, told me, explaining that France is not required to show evidence in order to request extradition from the U.K., and that a mere accusation of criminal activity can suffice. “The French judge’s decision to issue a warrant was particularly unfair in their case,” he added. (French authorities declined to comment on the case.) The Courters depleted their savings and had to borrow money from friends. That August, they missed the birth of their newest grandson. By October, they had been stuck in England for nearly a hundred days. “They were hollow shells of the people I knew,” their daughter told me.

One day, looking for distraction, Gay and Phil visited the Fitzwilliam Museum. Practically the first thing they saw when they walked into the gallery was Monet’s 1886 painting of a lion-shaped rock on Belle-Île. The Courters had never even been to the island, but now it seemed inescapable. It was as if the curse of the Prince de Conty were taunting them from a gilded frame. They wondered whether Monet had ever felt the ship’s intense aura. “We like to think of the gold under the sea while Monet painted without knowing about the wreck . . . or maybe he did,” Gay wrote to me one day.

In the spring of 2021, French police raided the homes of Annette Pesty and Brigitte and Yves Gladu. According to reporting by Le Parisien , when the police entered, Brigitte stepped aside and placed a call to Annette. “They found some grist for the mill,” she whispered, unaware that the authorities had been wiretapping her phone. The searches yielded a wealth of evidence: photographs, bank statements, letters from the Courters detailing the sale of ingots. The authorities later confiscated the Gladus’ forty-three-foot catamaran, purchased, in 2010, for a hundred and eighty-five thousand euros.

At a hearing, Yves Gladu admitted to having made some forty dives at the Prince de Conty site in the nineteen-seventies and as late as 1999. He and his wife kept their ingots in a blue metal box in their attic—a kind of clandestine savings account that they were able to draw on throughout their lives, magicking up money from under the sea. L’Hour told me that he was always suspicious of the way that Gladu, whom he knew fairly well after years of working in the same milieu, clammed up whenever the subject of the Prince arose. L’Hour has said that he believes that Gladu “got his hands on the ship’s hold,” which he called “the ‘Mona Lisa’ of underwater archeology.”

Gladu confessed to selling around twenty bars in Switzerland. “They were burning my fingers,” he told the court. Brigitte added that finding the gold “was unexpected, fabulous.” Yet they denied any connection to the hoard that the Pestys entrusted to the Courters. (Through their lawyers, the Gladus declined to comment; Annette Pesty’s lawyer did not respond to a request.) A trial is expected in 2025.

Since their arrest, the Courters had been trying to get a French lawyer. Finally, three months into their detainment, Grégory Lévy and Aurélie Boulbin joined their team. The new lawyers were able to explain some key differences between the American legal system and the French one—the former, for instance, operates on an accusatory model, whereas the latter uses an investigatory one, giving judges wider powers in the evidence-gathering phase. “They had no information,” Lévy said, of the Courters. Furthermore, it seemed that their arrest could have been avoided entirely—it turned out that the French judge had only issued warrants after an offer of immunity, mislaid or misunderstood by the Courters’ Florida lawyers, yielded no response. (The firm did not respond to a request for comment.) The Courters say that they did not know about the offer of immunity until after they hired the French lawyers. Lévy and Boulbin immediately contacted the judge, who agreed to depose the Courters over Zoom. She formally charged them with concealment of stolen goods and money laundering, but retracted the request for extradition. Gay and Phil got their passports back, and, a few days later, flew home.

The Courters, who are now attached to the case as coöperating parties, acknowledge that they failed to ask some pertinent questions about the gold. “Now, looking back, it’s, like, what were we thinking?” Phil said. Gay takes responsibility for what she calls the “ ‘Antiques Roadshow’ fiasco,” having encouraged Annette to come along to the show after a call from a producer friend. “We had some valuable netsukes, and two matching ivory fans that had been a gift to my father from Madame Chiang Kai-shek,” she recalled. “Annette was staying with us at the time, and I mentioned the gold.” After the program aired, Gay sold three ingots on eBay. “We were getting older and winding down our office,” she told me. “We didn’t want to have to deal with it anymore.”

The Courters say that they have always been truthful about the provenance of the gold, though the head of the California auction house told authorities that Gay “stated that she has been in possession of these bars for approximately 15 years and that they originally were found in the Cape Verde Islands.” The auction catalogue didn’t mention Cape Verde, but made much of the ingots’ likeness to those from the Geldermalsen and the Prince de Conty, without stating directly that they came from the latter wreck. When I asked Gay about this, she said that the auction house had “fudged” the catalogue listing. The Courters’ French lawyers are emphasizing the couple’s guilelessness. “We will try to demonstrate that there was no criminal intention,” Lévy told me. “They sold on eBay. When you want to traffic something, you don’t go on eBay, right?”

The Department of Homeland Security determined that the auction-house ingots rightfully belonged to France, notwithstanding a competing claim from the Chinese government. (David Keller, an agent with Homeland Security, told me that the case almost gave him “an aneurysm.”) At a “repatriation ceremony” held at the French Embassy in 2022, a Homeland Security official said that the department was “proud to have played a role in insuring these artifacts continue to be a part of France’s history for future generations to enjoy.” Yet the British government has remained silent on the three gold bars that remain in the British Museum’s collection. This is despite the fact that, according to the museum’s own Web site, they were acquired from “G Pesty” and came from the Prince de Conty wreck. (“P Courter” also appears on two listings, but the Courters say that this is an error stemming from Phil’s status as a signatory on Pesty’s bank account.) A spokesperson for the museum declined to answer questions about the ingots, saying only that the museum “is actively seeking a resolution to this matter, and has worked cooperatively with the relevant authorities.”

L’Hour continues to track the ship’s treasure, and, in retirement, has become an outspoken advocate for the prosecution of the “morbidly avaricious crooks” who plundered the Prince. He is the author of a new essay on the ship’s “broken destiny,” recently published to accompany an exhibit at the French East India Company Museum. “At Port Lost-Kah a frozen world demands to be brought back to life to better recount the story of this humanity,” he writes, urging French authorities to fund a new expedition. For him, the Prince was “first a maritime tragedy and then a cultural one,” brought on by “pathological greed.”

Whatever the reason—gold lust, bad luck, a malediction—the Prince de Conty continues to bring ill fortune upon those in its ambit, even two hundred and seventy-eight years after its demise. The Courters have paid a heavy price for what initially seemed to be a casual obligation. They are unlikely to set foot in Europe again—in fact, they have stopped travelling almost entirely.

Phil finds it difficult to talk about what happened. Gay talks about it all the time, spending hours on the Internet, trawling blogs about the intricacies of extradition law. “Was our situation typical or unusual?” she asked recently. “How many people without our privileges or resources are being detained in foreign countries without charges?” Both are dealing with physical and mental-health issues brought on by the ordeal. “It is not an exaggeration to say that nothing in my life prepared me for this, and I am no longer the same person I was,” Gay told me. Because of pending legal issues, the Courters haven’t spoken to Annette Pesty or the Gladus in several years. The Courters consider the loss of their old friends to be as consequential as the blows to their reputations, well-being, and finances. Gay said, “The gold was a tiny fragment of our lives together—meaningless, until it wasn’t.” ♦

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Thinking About a Mississippi River Cruise? There’s One Big ‘If.’

Though operators are building ships, and towns are investing in landings and other infrastructure, fluctuations in the river’s flow, exacerbated by climate change, are hampering sailings.

By Rowan Moore Gerety

Rowan Moore Gerety spoke to civic leaders, cruise passengers and several cruise-industry businesses focused on the Mississippi River.

Tom Trovato and his wife, Trish, paid more than $20,000 and waited two years to experience Viking’s inaugural cruise up the Mississippi River. Leaving in September 2022, it was supposed be a two-week excursion from New Orleans to St. Paul, Minn., a trip of some 1,800 miles.

They never got past Memphis.

Low water levels, caused by drought, narrowed the river’s main shipping channel to allow only one-way traffic, first stalling their boat, the Viking Mississippi, and then ultimately aborting the trip.

Though they got a full refund, the Trovatos, who live in Surprise, Ariz., have no plans to try again.

“If I live to be 125, it might be on my bucket list,” said Mr. Trovato, 79.

The Mississippi River is central to American identity, with all the contradictions that entails. It’s an artery that sustained Indigenous cultures for thousands of years — “Mississippi” derives from the Ojibwe for “great river” — and it marked the frontier from which Lewis and Clark set out to find a route to the Pacific. The river’s alluvial deposits and deep waters formed the basis of prosperity for generations of farmers, and brought perdition to vast numbers of enslaved people who toiled along its banks and feared little more than being “sold down the river.”

For many people, particularly baby boomers reaching their retirement years, a cruise along the Mississippi River is a dream trip. But it’s becoming harder to make it come true. Though operators are building new ships, and towns and cities are investing in infrastructure to welcome boat traffic, cruises on the Mississippi face mounting challenges from an increasing number of droughts and floods.

Decades of forest and wetland destruction, dam construction and dredging have added to natural fluctuations in the Mississippi’s flow. Now climate change has only heightened the river’s tendency for dramatic seasonal shifts in water levels, frequently rerouting ships and causing delays.

Just late last month, in St. Paul — the final port for the Trovatos’ original itinerary — rising Mississippi River levels forced the closure of shoreline roads , bridges and parks . The river rose 20.17 feet above its banks before cresting, the seventh major flood in St. Paul since 2010, according to the National Water Prediction Service, and the eighth highest crest recorded.

Farther south, Memphis had made its $40 million Beale Street Landing the centerpiece of a larger redevelopment of parks and trails snaking along six miles of Mississippi shoreline. Last year, more than half of the 128 scheduled cruise ship landings there were canceled, mostly because of low water levels that made it impossible for the boats to reach the dock.

In July 2021, an overnight passenger riverboat visited Kimmswick, Mo., for the first time in 125 years, when the 341-foot American Duchess docked at its new landing. The town was expecting the cruise industry to boost tourism in the area. But the American Duchess was also the last cruise to dock there. There hasn’t been enough water for boats to come back until recently: The Viking Mississippi was finally scheduled to land in Kimmswick on Monday, but this time, the water was too high.

“We’re just seeing climate impacts stack up,” said Colin Wellenkamp, the executive director of the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative , a coalition of local governments along the river. “We used to see them every 10 to 15 years, now we’re seeing them where they just don’t quit.”

‘Demand’s not going anywhere but up’

Despite the pandemic, when most travel worldwide was at a costly standstill, bookings on river cruises in the United States rose 25 percent from 2019 to 2022, according to data from AAA, the automobile owners’ group that also tracks air and cruise travel. An analysis by the market research firm Grandview Research in 2022 projected continued growth of more than 20 percent a year for U.S. river cruising through 2030, largely on the strength of the Mississippi River cruises.

River cruising “took off first in the European rivers, but it’s always been really built on American travelers,” said Charlie Robertson, an owner and chief executive of American Cruise Lines , the dominant operator on the Mississippi. Both American and Viking , a major player in Europe and Asia, are already booking Mississippi cruises into 2025, and building new ships to serve this market. Though the parent company of the third Mississippi cruise operator, American Queen Voyages, declared bankruptcy earlier this year, citing difficulties recovering from the effects of the pandemic, American Cruise Lines purchased all four paddle wheelers in its fleet.

“Demand’s not going anywhere but up,” Mr. Wellenkamp said. “Everybody wants to see the historic Main Street, and everybody wants to see this ecological icon Mark Twain wrote about.”

In Kimmswick, the new landing had local leaders dreaming of a return to the town’s roots as a key stop for Mississippi steamboats. After years spent building sandbag levees to protect Kimmswick — three major floods threatened the downtown since 2015 — and building a landing to accommodate 40-foot swings in the river’s flow, drought severe enough to threaten the town’s economic prospects seemed unthinkable.

“​​How can you be a river-facing city if you don’t have any riverboats?” said Phil Stang, Kimmswick’s mayor.

Powerfully unpredictable

The Mississippi basin extends to 32 states and two Canadian provinces, moving a staggering 600,000 cubic feet of water a second into the Gulf of Mexico. Even in its historic state, it could be powerfully unpredictable, with flows that oscillated by as much as 60 feet in the space of a season. T.S. Eliot called the river “a strong brown god — sullen, untamed and intractable.”

Today, much of the river has been remade as a maritime highway, with locks, levees and revetments designed to control its flow and stop floodwaters.

“When the river wasn’t leveed, it would flood 100 miles back into farmland,” said Lee Hendrix, who got his start as a deckhand on a towboat in 1972 and has spent the last 50 years working on the river . “Now, the levees don’t allow that.” As a result, the river’s swings are growing more intense. “It’s undeniable that it’s more volatile in terms of how rapidly it can rise and fall,” Mr. Hendrix said.

He spent last summer sharing Mississippi lore and trivia with passengers as the American Queen’s onboard “Riverlorian.” As the boat sailed past sandbars that went on for miles, he found himself grateful to be in a position with no responsibility for logistics. “There were a lot of docks we couldn’t get to,” he said.

Planning can blunt the impact of these disruptions — American Cruise Lines doesn’t schedule its tallest boats to sail the upper Mississippi, where sailing under some bridges during high water is impossible. The boats themselves are changing, too, to designs that can slip beneath low bridges, motor upstream against strong currents and get to shore in shallower waters. “Our basic design parameter is that if the tow boats can go, we can go,” said Mr. Robertson, the chief executive. “Because the Army Corps will move heaven and earth to allow the towing industry to keep moving.”

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers runs patrol teams and a dredging operation to maintain a navigable channel at least 300 feet wide and 9 feet deep. In recent years, the Corps has added more structures along the riverbanks called “chevrons” that allow high water to better flush out sediment that blocks the channel. Nevertheless, drought conditions have extended seasons when dredging is required.

“While we’re dredging less, our crews are out there on the river for a longer time,” said Shawn Sullivan, the strategic planning coordinator for the Corps’ St. Louis district. “I don’t know what normal is anymore.”

Carefully timed trips

Carol Coletta leads Memphis River Parks Partnership , the nonprofit that manages Beale Street Landing. The group anticipates a $700,000 revenue shortfall from landings this fiscal year, and is looking for ways to modify a second landing that can welcome boats even when the river is at its lowest. “We have to anticipate that this could persist,” Ms. Coletta said, “and if it does persist, then we cannot count on boat dockings for revenue.”

For cities smaller than Memphis, the hit can be much deeper. “If you’re a town of 800 people and a boat of 250 shows up, you’re going to feel that in your economy,” said Mr. Wellenkamp, of the Cities and Towns Initiative. “We have cities that 20 percent of their economy is captured from the riverboats stopping in, and we have cities where 60 percent of the economy is captured from riverboats stopping in.”

Cindy Anderson, who owns the travel agency USA River Cruises, says she’s gotten more careful in advising customers when to visit the region. “We have people ask us, and I say, ‘Springtime is fabulous,’” she said. Vendors have shifted their offering, too. The whole Mississippi, from St. Paul to New Orleans, was a popular itinerary Ms. Anderson used to sell year round; now it’s only available for a few months in the summer.

“That’s a very long and expensive cruise to book if you have to cancel it,” she said.

Even as cruise traffic on the Mississippi has grown, Ms. Anderson says much of her business has shifted to the Columbia River, in the Pacific Northwest, where large dams and meltwater from high peaks modulate seasonal changes in flow.

“We don’t have any water issues on the Columbia River — it never closes down, it never floods,” she said.

Ms. Anderson compared the unpredictability of Mississippi River itineraries to European rivers, many of them crisscrossed by historic bridges that offer little clearance for cruises to pass when waters are high. There, operators often ferry passengers between segments of a trip on chartered buses. But, Ms. Anderson said, most guests will expect refunds for an itinerary full of transfers by what cruise operators often call “motor coach.”

“Because they didn’t really get a cruise, they got a bus trip,” she said.

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