19 Oct. 2016; Charleston, South Carolina, USA.

Charleston is a port that captains really like; main reason the cruise ship terminal is very close to open sea so you do not have to get out of bed so early. Get to the bridge by 07.00 hrs. and you are docked at 07.45 hrs. Charleston is a port which the crew likes very much as you almost dock into downtown. Once you have walked past the Customs house you are there. I think a lot of captains in the past must have liked Charleston because looking at the size of the Customs house there must have been a lot of trade here.  And thus a lot of import fees and it looks like that a Customs officer in the mists of time invested some of those fees in a Tax – Temple which would have made the old Greeks very jealous.

Now this is a Customs house to make any bank manager really jealous.

I know Charleston fairly well as I once spent 8 weeks here  with the Nieuw Amsterdam in lay-up. In 2000 we sold the Nieuw Amsterdam (III) to the freshly resurrected United States Lines and it became the Patriot. The ship was meant for Hawaii cruises and was to serve as the “training & test ship” for two new builds which were under construction at Pascagoula. Normally this would not have been possible as the American law requires for coastal trade ships built in the USA, but an exemption was given as there were no home-built modern cruise ships available, and this was the way to kick start an American Flag cruise ship company.  We handed the ship over in autumn 2000 and I stayed for a while to train the American Officers who had no experience with the modern technique of a cruise ship. After six weeks my little team of Deck, Engine and Hotel went home and the Patriot started cruising around the Hawaiian Islands.

This is what happens after 9 months of un-attended teak wood decks.

After nine months I was sent back to the ship as the company had gone bankrupt. I think that the management of the USL had not correctly calculated how difficult it would be to start a modern cruise venture from nothing.   It is not so easy to run a cruise company and it is even more complicated if it is with a new concept and with several new builds on the way at the same time. So the Nieuw Amsterdam came back from Hawaii and ended up in Charleston. While the office was thinking about what to do with the ship, I had a group of about 80 crew to keep the ship going, try to get it back to working order again and spruce it up. A few months in layup in a humid climate without air-conditioning are not good for a ship.

A nice organisational muddle. Dutch name, Nassau Flag and the American eagle still on the funnel.

As a captain you do not have much to do when a ship does not sail, when it has no guests, when it really is not a ship as such. Our official safety routine was…………. “Run off the ship” if something goes wrong, as we did not have enough manpower to raise complete fire teams. We were only a skeleton crew and the ship was considered to be in unmanned lay-up. So my volunteered job was to drive the shuttle bus. Going shopping for the Bo ‘sun and Carpenters (The manager of Home Depot declared me a Saint after a few visits at $ 1000 a call) take crew to hospital and do all sorts of other things needed to keep our little enterprise going. Plan A was to get docking rights in Hamilton Bermuda and start New York, Bermuda cruises. That was a good idea as the N ships of 1983/84 had especially been designed for that purpose but never used as such because Alaska cruising really took off around that time.

Then came the option to charter (and later sell) the ship off to a Greek company who sub- chartered the ship out to Thomson Cruises which is a package holiday operator in England. They must have liked what they got as later the Noordam and the Westerdam went that way as well (Thomson Spirit, Thomson Celebration and Thomson Dream).

Today was the first time that I have been back to Charleston since 2001 and luckily it was not as warm as 15 years ago when it was the deep of summer. Today the guests had a beautiful day and it looks for tomorrow, a sea day, our luck will be holding as well.