Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
About the ship. The S.S. Universe Explorer was launched in 1957, is 617 feet, 6 inches
long, 84 feet wide, 130 feet from water line to mast top and has a 27-foot, 3-inch draft.
She carries more than 750 passengers and a crew of 350. She has a cruising speed of 17
knots and sails smartly in crisp, white paint with dark blue racing stripes. She might be the
only ship afloat that suffers from multiple-personality disorder. In one persona, she is a
passenger liner carrying summer tourists up the Inside Passage and winter tourists through
the Panama Canal. In her other persona, she serves as the floating classroom for the Insti-
tute for Shipboard Education, also known as Semester at Sea. The spring and fall
semesters are spent in 100-day cruises around the world, which explains the full-service
library instead of a casino forward of the Mid-Ocean Lounge. Cautiously, I think that this
might be my kind of cruise.
Day 2: May 15 th , at sea
There's something about an archipelago that lures the romantic in us all. Rolling,
thickly forested hills give way to distant vistas of towering, white-clad mountains. One
massive peak is cloven into bear's claws, looking fresh out from under the glacier at its
feet. A perfect little horseshoe-shaped cove opens up to reveal a sprawl of falling-down
buildings and a dock with a sailboat, two trollers and a luxury cruiser moored to it. Trails
of avalanches line snow-filled basins. Humpback whales show off their flukes and Dall's
porpoises their dorsal fins while eagles soar overhead. The vista changes to higher, steeper
islands, some snowcapped, revealing sheer, granite faces and tumbling waterfalls and tiny
coves and bights tucked into every bend. Our wake is the merest ripple on the water's sur-
face, and the islands fold in on themselves behind us like the petals of a flower after the
sun has set.
And 15 minutes later all this would vanish, to be replaced with new wonders.
Everyone is on deck, watching the scenery, trying to spot that first eagle or bear or
whale through binoculars, posing for pictures, comparing the information showing on
their respective GPS units. I tear myself away to attend a lecture by historian Anne-Marie
Nakhla: "The Heroes and Villains of the Alaskan Gold Rush." Anne-Marie runs the gamut
of Juneau to the Klondike to Nome and all the usual suspects were present—Skookum
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