Day One
Dwarfed by Royal Caribbean’s 137,000-ton, balcony-lined metropolis, Enchantment of the Seas, docked ahead of it, the 180.45-meter-long Royal Princess, sporting only a tenth of the former ship’s gross weight at 30,200 tons, featured a 28.3-meter molded breadth, ten decks, and accommodated 710 passengers and 340 crew members. The relatively tiny vessel would serve as my floating home for the next two weeks and would connect, by sea, the North and South American continents.
Powered by four 13,500 kW diesel electric engines running at 720 rpms, it featured two four-bladed, 750 kW bow thrusters, two 19.4-square-meter semi-balanced rudders, two 9.9 square-meter stabilizers, and cruised between 18 and 20 knots.
Built by Chantiers de l’Atlantique in St. Nazaire, France, in 2000, it had been first delivered as the Minerva II the following year, but had been reconfigured and rechristened as the present Royal Princess in 2007 when Princess Cruise Lines had acquired it.
Tender embarkation and the Purser’s Desk had been located on Decks 3 and 4, respectively, but all of the public rooms had been on Decks 5, 9, and 10. On the former had been the Cabaret Lounge, the casino bar, the Photo Gallery, the shops, the fine art gallery, and the Club Restaurant and bar, while Deck 9 sported the spa, the styling salon, the fitness center, the card room, the pool bar, the pool itself, the barbecue grill, the pizzeria, and the Panorma Buffet. The Royal Lounge, directly above on Deck 10, had been followed by the internet café, the fitness track, the library, the Sterling Steakhouse, and Sabatini’s Trattoria.
Releasing its mooring lines at 1705, the 30,200-ton Royal Princess maneuvered from its port berth by means of its thrusters, following the wake of Enchantment of the Seas down the narrow, dark blue Intracoastal Waterway thresholding Port Everglades beneath powder blue skies, and then commenced a gradual, starboard arc behind the lumbering cruise liner at a four-knot speed.
Clearing the rocky, pencil-thin breakwater embankment at a 15-knot speed 30 minutes after engine start, the yacht-appearing ship disembarked its local pilot and assumed a 082-degree heading. Enchantment of the Seas itself had angled off the forward, starboard side to commence its Eastern Caribbean itinerary.
The indistinguishable silhouettes of Ft. Lauderdale, now six miles behind the stern and further inhibited by the blinding sun hovering behind them, receded in the distance, the last glimpse of North America.
The Club Restaurant, the Royal Princess’s main dining venue located on Deck 5, had been adorned with dark wood paneling and red suede upholstery and featured a bar, small round tables, and a simulated marble fireplace at its entrance, while the main dining salon itself sported multiple-story windows in the stern. The first dinner at sea had included Cabernet Sauvignon; a lobster and seafood terrine with dill-mustard emulsion; cheese tortellini and spinach soup; watercress, red radish, and iceberg lettuce smothered with homemade bleu cheese dressing; barramundi and pencil asparagus with hazelnut butter, lemon herbed Israeli couscous; a banana nut parfait with caramel sauce; and coffee.
The sun, an orange concentric circle, had inched toward the western horizon, from where it had dripped into tomorrow, rendering the sky a star-glowing black. Paralleled off the starboard side by the lighted silhouettes of two Port Everglades-originating megaliners, the Royal Princess, a kindred, although isolated spirit in the civilization-disconnected void of ocean, had begun to arc into a 109-degree, southeasterly heading off of Grand Bahama Island in the Northwest Providence Channel, now poised to pass Bimini and thread its way between Abaco and Eleuthera and out to the Atlantic Ocean. Maintaining a 19-knot steam speed, it had traversed 104 miles in the path between Fort Lauderdale and its current coordinate.
Balcony stateroom 6055, located on Deck 6, would serve as my temporary, two-week residence and had been appointed with twin beds covered floral spreads; ornate, bedroom-style lamps and wooden backboards; a two-person sofa and a round table; dark wood closets, cabinetry, and writing desk; blue, printed carpeting and drapery; a sliding glass door balcony; and a showered bathroom.
Day Two
Maintaining a 121-degree heading and a 19.3-knot steam speed at 1200, the Royal Princess, gliding through small wavelets east of Cat Island, the Bahamas, had covered 340 nautical miles since its departure from Ft. Lauderdale, having reached a 24-degree, 25’ north latitude and 74-degree, 92’ west longitude position. The warm, 24-degree Celsius temperature, had been tempered by a 19-mph wind out of the southeast.
The Panorama Buffet, located in the stern on Deck 9, with both outdoor and indoor seating, featured an American-themed lunch buffet of southern fried chicken, Texas chili, corn-on-the-cob, rice pilaf, onion rings, and a salad of diced carrots, sprouts, seeds, nuts, and green goddess dressing.
Pitching on its lateral axis, the Royal Princess assumed a rhythmic, bow-to-stern rock, the ship momentarily biting into the ocean and unleashing a fury of white, avalanche-like reactions of froth into the water at 45-degree angles from its hull. To the west, but invisible to the eye, lay Rum Cay.
Cacooned in the ship-wide, wood-paneled, green-marbled, book-lined library located on Deck 10, which overlooked the sea on either of its sides and the pool ahead of it, I wrote, periodic, suspended-moment contributions added to my ever-lengthening Cruise Log.
Bombarded by the billowing, hot Caribbean wind, the 700-passenger ship plied the sea which, after some six months of having been supported by it and having sailed 50,000 miles through it, seemed a multiple-personality “human” to me. At times smooth and calm like glass, it could equally spit furious, frothy-white anger at you. The expanse out the starboard library windows, a reflection of the collected cloud islands, appeared a blinding silver glass surface, yet the view from the port windows, below an unmarred sky, had been one of deep-blue velvet. Sea and soul both seemed reflections, and hence, manifestations, which temporarily, and somewhat rapidly, changed their states. Of what the soul’s reflection had been, however, had not been so easily identifiable, at least not when it had been rendered a tumultuous one.
Princess’s signature Sailaway Dinner, served in the Club Restaurant, included Pinot noir wine; a blue crab claw quiche with dry roasted chili salsa; butter lettuce, curly endive, radicchio, and arugula with Russian dressing; twin beef filet mignons with madeira truffle demi-glaze and almond-potato croquettes; a pear in puff pasty topped with sauce anglaise and nutella ice cream; and coffee.
Maintaining a 119-degree heading and an 18-knot steam speed east of Mayaguana in the Puerto Rico Trench at 2215, the Royal Princess, now 526 miles from its Florida origin, had been crowned by an intensely-black velvet sky in which the Big Dipper had burned its almost-glowing imprint. Each bite of the ocean with the ship’s bow produced a violent explosion of blurry, white, snow-like condensation which the wind carried the length of the hull, saturating its temporary deck- and balcony-denizens. So poised, it would pitch over the nocturnal bridge to tomorrow.
Day Three
Propelled by its engines, which transformed the dark blue of the ocean into a turquoise and frothy white wake, the Royal Princess had maintained its southeasterly course on the eastern fringes of the Atlantic throughout the night, paralleling the Turks and Caicos Islands and moving toward the Sombrero Passage. Dawn refused to fully open its drapes, leaving the sky a light-devoid opaque and the sea a navy gray.
The Panorama Buffet lunch included chicken satay with peanut sauce, Cantonese shrimp-fried rice, fried pot stickers, vegetable tempura, wasabi, and Asian rice pudding with dates and raisins.
The tip of the bow, as evidenced by the forward, ship-side windows of the Royal Lounge on Deck 10, revealed but an arm’s length point, which continually bit into the deep blue at 1600, yet paradoxically stretched back toward, and widened into, a full-sized, 30,000-ton, balcony-lined vessel which supported the lives of well over a thousand souls and presently bridged two continents. The sky, mostly filled with billowing white and dirty-white cumulous formations, appeared a series of tropopause-stretching mountains.
The bow, like much of life, proved a tiny point, but it had been from all these tiny points from which all things had always seemed to grow, a theme somehow supported, if correctly interpreted, by the bow pointing toward what appeared, from my vantage point, of infinity. It had not seemed to matter how many waves, large or small, the ocean could bowl toward the ship, they had always stretched, without perceptible end, toward the sea-and-sky horizon line. For it seemed that it had been from this infinity, that the starting point—the ideas—had come, the very origin of the souls who had been endowed with the