Toasts and Keelhauls to the Past Year on the Seas

This year marks our 10th annual Champagne and Keelhaul Awards, a look back at the highs and lows in cruising in 1992, a year marked by deep discounts, 2-for-1 deals and lingering legislative looks at foreign-flag cruise companies.

For starters, a wicked Captain Bligh keelhaul to California’s legislators, who in their eagerness to ban day and overnight gambling cruises threw out the baby with the bath water. The law, which went into effect on Friday, forbids gambling on ships sailing between two California ports. It will affect foreign-flag cruise ships sailing in international waters as well as the so-called “cruises to nowhere” that it was designed to block.

The new law has caused at least one major cruise line to cancel some port calls in Catalina and San Diego. Beginning Monday, Royal Caribbean Cruise Line’s Viking Serenade will cease calling in San Diego on its four-night cruises and in Catalina on its three-night itineraries.

However, Norwegian Cruise Line’s Southward, which sails the same routes, says it will not cancel any scheduled California port calls. Had both lines done so, San Diego port officials say, it would have cost the state tourism industry an estimated $75 million. With NCL’s decision to keep all port calls, the state should lose only half that.

* A champagne toast to the Long Beach City Council, which elected to keep the historic Queen Mary in Long Beach. The possibility of an unnamed Hong Kong-based bidder for the ship raised the poignant specter of sister ship Queen Elizabeth, which sank in Hong Kong harbor in 1972 after a disastrous fire.

* And it’s keelhaul time for those cruise lines whose employees are still illegally dumping debris into the sea. While the splashiest exposes of this practice have been in passenger videotapes aired on TV, the most detailed is the recently published 1991 International Coastal Cleanup Overview from the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Marine Conservation. Some 145,000 volunteers in 35 U.S. states and territories and 12 foreign countries combed 4,000 miles of beaches during three separate forays and found identifiable non-biodegradable debris dumped from more than a dozen cruise lines.

Heading the list with 24 waste items was Royal Caribbean Cruise Line, followed by Carnival with 10, Princess Cruises with 9, and Norwegian Cruise Line with 4. The most common items to wash ashore are shampoo bottles, plastic cups, plastic bags and balloons. The most unusual was a set of baggage claim tickets from Royal Cruise Line. All of the items on the list would normally be found in wastebaskets in passenger and crew cabins.

* A big bottle of bubbly to Norwegian Cruise Line’s new ship Dreamward, which carried 50,000 toys from the U.S. Marines’ Toys for Tots program from cities in the Northeast to hurricane-damaged Miami in November.

* A keelhaul to Miami International Airport, the world’s busiest arrival and departure area for cruise passengers, for having extremely long concourses and no luggage carts available anywhere on the premises, even in the baggage area.

* And while we’re still in Florida, another keelhaul to the U.S. Customs officials of Miami and Ft. Lauderdale who demand a separate customs declaration from each arriving cruise passenger despite printed instructions at the top of the form that say “only one written declaration per family is required.”

* A bottle of vintage champagne to the classic sailing ships of the Maine Windjammer Assn. fleet, a dozen individually owned, two-masted sailing ships that ply the coastline of Maine between late May and mid-October. Many of these historic vessels were working schooners converted to the windjammer passenger trade and are skippered by their owners. The fares are affordable, the ambience casual and the fresh lobster fantastic.

* Keelhauls to Star Clipper, whose Mediterranean air package brought U.S. passengers over on a red-eye flight to Monte Carlo that arrived in the morning, but the line didn’t permit them to board the ship until 5 p.m. A courtesy hotel day room, even one room for the whole group, would have been considerate, but none was offered.