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The Queen Elizabeth 2: plying the waters of time
From: DailyBreeze.com http://www.dailybreeze.com/news/columnists/bogert/articles/8153027.html?showAll=y&c=y
Originally published Sunday, June 24, 2007
Passenger ships and certain trains bring me back to those wondrous days of yesteryear.
By John Bogert
I bought a fake Istanbul University student ID for 100Turkish lira. The point of this minor dishonesty was cheaper museum entry. But it wasn't until I got to London in the autumn of 1973 that the card bearing a bearded, terrorist-like image of me would become a ticket to my life.
That ticket was on the Queen Elizabeth 2, a great ship sold on Monday to a Dubai investment firm for$100million - the oil-soaked equivalent of 100 Turkish lira.
But you have to figure that the liner is 40 years old and has more than 5 million miles on her. This after breaking down on its sea trials in 1968, after working as a troop carrier during the Falklands War, after piling up on rocks off Massachusetts in 1992 and after dividing the world into two types of people - those who love ocean liners and those who confuse this ship with the original Queen Elizabeth.
This is to be expected in a time when ocean liners have the same cachet as steam locomotives, in a time when there has long been but one ship making a regular trans-Atlantic passenger run. That was this ship, this throwback, the last of the great Cunard liners built before Cunard itself fell into Norwegian and then American hands.
Multitudes now cruise to nowhere in particular and usually in warm waters because the point of modern cruise ships is fun and funny hats. By comparison, navigating the great circle route from New York to Southhampton can be an ordeal.
In September 1995 QE2 ran afoul of Hurricane Luis in the mid-Atlantic. How the captain of crossing No. 1014 failed to note before departure a storm approaching with 130-mph winds and 40-foot seas is puzzling.
But one fact from that unhappy encounter stands out. At 2:05 a.m. on the 11th of that month, Queen Elizabeth 2 took a 90-foot wave bow-on. When asked how he could be so sure about the wave's height, the captain deadpanned, "Because the bridge is 90 feet above the waterline."
On April 24, 2004, QE2 departed New York alongside her successor, the newly commissioned monster-ship, Queen Mary 2. This was the first tandem crossing of liners in decades and probably the last because there just aren't enough people looking to spend five days on the grim North Atlantic.
That stately lack of speed was brought home to me on my first crossing back in 1973, when the Concord boomed past on its three-hour transit of that foggy sea. And it is often foggy, especially in summer, and rough. That and breathtakingly evocative of earlier eras and terrible hardships suffered in this watery expanse.
We can't sail the same sea twice. But it does indeed look the same in its wondrous changeability, with a great fluorescing green wake spreading astern and cocktails on the boat deck with a view like eternity on the horizon.
I met my wife-to-be on this ship, traveling on a $300 student ticket purchased with that fake ID. Twenty-three years later, we returned packing three children who stared impatiently at the place we met for a moment before running off to create their own memories - just as 2.5 million others have done on 800 crossings and numerous around-the-world cruises.
In between, I boarded QE2 on her yearly visits to San Pedro, where I'd talk to the ship's officers on a bridge that is more fishing-boat Formica than Queen Mary oak. I'd sometimes mention that my young daughters once sounded the noon horn at sea, but nobody who works the dream boat business is much interested in one more story of nautical romance and sea-borne offspring.
Once the ship magically and unexpectedly appeared at anchor outside the bedroom I occupied in my in-laws' house on Scotland's Firth of Forth, the great black, white and red bulk of her swinging with the tide like a long-following memory.
A year from November, her travels end when she becomes a dock-side attraction. Still, it's probably better that she lives in half-life than end in a breaking yard on the China coast, in one of those grim places where dreams finally die.
I want to hear your comments. Connect with me at [email protected], call 310-543-6681 or send a letter to Daily Breeze/John Bogert, 5215 Torrance Blvd., Torrance, CA 90503-4077.
Originally published Sunday, June 24, 2007
Passenger ships and certain trains bring me back to those wondrous days of yesteryear.
By John Bogert
I bought a fake Istanbul University student ID for 100Turkish lira. The point of this minor dishonesty was cheaper museum entry. But it wasn't until I got to London in the autumn of 1973 that the card bearing a bearded, terrorist-like image of me would become a ticket to my life.
That ticket was on the Queen Elizabeth 2, a great ship sold on Monday to a Dubai investment firm for$100million - the oil-soaked equivalent of 100 Turkish lira.
But you have to figure that the liner is 40 years old and has more than 5 million miles on her. This after breaking down on its sea trials in 1968, after working as a troop carrier during the Falklands War, after piling up on rocks off Massachusetts in 1992 and after dividing the world into two types of people - those who love ocean liners and those who confuse this ship with the original Queen Elizabeth.
This is to be expected in a time when ocean liners have the same cachet as steam locomotives, in a time when there has long been but one ship making a regular trans-Atlantic passenger run. That was this ship, this throwback, the last of the great Cunard liners built before Cunard itself fell into Norwegian and then American hands.
Multitudes now cruise to nowhere in particular and usually in warm waters because the point of modern cruise ships is fun and funny hats. By comparison, navigating the great circle route from New York to Southhampton can be an ordeal.
In September 1995 QE2 ran afoul of Hurricane Luis in the mid-Atlantic. How the captain of crossing No. 1014 failed to note before departure a storm approaching with 130-mph winds and 40-foot seas is puzzling.
But one fact from that unhappy encounter stands out. At 2:05 a.m. on the 11th of that month, Queen Elizabeth 2 took a 90-foot wave bow-on. When asked how he could be so sure about the wave's height, the captain deadpanned, "Because the bridge is 90 feet above the waterline."
On April 24, 2004, QE2 departed New York alongside her successor, the newly commissioned monster-ship, Queen Mary 2. This was the first tandem crossing of liners in decades and probably the last because there just aren't enough people looking to spend five days on the grim North Atlantic.
That stately lack of speed was brought home to me on my first crossing back in 1973, when the Concord boomed past on its three-hour transit of that foggy sea. And it is often foggy, especially in summer, and rough. That and breathtakingly evocative of earlier eras and terrible hardships suffered in this watery expanse.
We can't sail the same sea twice. But it does indeed look the same in its wondrous changeability, with a great fluorescing green wake spreading astern and cocktails on the boat deck with a view like eternity on the horizon.
I met my wife-to-be on this ship, traveling on a $300 student ticket purchased with that fake ID. Twenty-three years later, we returned packing three children who stared impatiently at the place we met for a moment before running off to create their own memories - just as 2.5 million others have done on 800 crossings and numerous around-the-world cruises.
In between, I boarded QE2 on her yearly visits to San Pedro, where I'd talk to the ship's officers on a bridge that is more fishing-boat Formica than Queen Mary oak. I'd sometimes mention that my young daughters once sounded the noon horn at sea, but nobody who works the dream boat business is much interested in one more story of nautical romance and sea-borne offspring.
Once the ship magically and unexpectedly appeared at anchor outside the bedroom I occupied in my in-laws' house on Scotland's Firth of Forth, the great black, white and red bulk of her swinging with the tide like a long-following memory.
A year from November, her travels end when she becomes a dock-side attraction. Still, it's probably better that she lives in half-life than end in a breaking yard on the China coast, in one of those grim places where dreams finally die.
I want to hear your comments. Connect with me at [email protected], call 310-543-6681 or send a letter to Daily Breeze/John Bogert, 5215 Torrance Blvd., Torrance, CA 90503-4077.