No cruisers Fla to Belize

[belizesailor]

You may not have seen cruisers, but cruise ships are quite visible in Belize...as is the environmental damage they have done...mostly my turning formerly beautiful locations into Disneyland-like experiences for their guests and then unleashing their clueless hoards to complete the destruction.

Please choose a more responsible way to visit.

[secrabtree]

Originally Posted by dwmCA

Six days on a cruise ship - Ft. Lauderdale, north of Cuba, Belize, and Cozumel - and I didn't see even one sailboat or fishing boat...

I assumed I'd see four, five, six, ten. Where did everybody go or are there fewer bodies (and boats) out there than I imagined?

A different ocean, but I sailed in the 1980 Singlehanded Transpac from San Francisco Bay to Hawaii in a fleet of 38 competitors. The same day another race to Hawaii started fron San Francisco Bay, a crewed race, with about the same number of competitors. With about 60 sailboats starting from the same place (San Francisco Bay) and going to the same place (the Hawaiian Islands). By the second day we were out of sight of the other boats almost all the time. (I actually saw only one other sailboat the entire race after 18 hours.) The Atlantic isn't quite as large as the Pacific, but either ocean is VERY large and boats can see each other only from pretty close distances apart.

[Matt Johnson]

We see them all the time on night sails. The Disney cruise ships are by far the prettiest at night with their mellow colored lights.

Also, a cruise ship's bridge is typically the easiest to get on the VHF of all the commercial vessels. We hit them up for weather info a few years ago when nastiness was on its way, and they were nothing but polite and helpful.

Matt

[chuckr]

I did forget the one time we saw a cruise ship in the daylight. we were sailing the south coast of the DR and had just started across the south side of the Mona -- we saw the cruise ship on AIS and it was going to be less than 1nm away so we gave them a shout and they responded - we had just come out of a small storm so had sails reefed and we knew from radar another one was in front of us - so we kept the sails reefed
the cruise ship called us again and asked our last port, then next port, then home port, then how many onboard, then our long term -- and said they would give us plenty of room but were about 1/2 off they passed
it suddenly hit us - we could only guess the announcement that went over the ship intercom - on our port side is a 40sailboat from ect ect ect - we called back and apologized for not having full sails for his passengers - and he responded with have a good sail