This was my thirteenth cruise and my second on NCL. My rating for this cruise is very low. There seemed to be no end of things to complain about.
Dawn is a beautiful ship, and appears well maintained inside and out, yet we missed one of our scheduled ports due to thrust bearing wear on on of the azipods. Repairs are scheduled for March 2005. All those sailing before then take note. A second problem surfaced before our scheduled first stop at St. Thomas, we were informed early Wednesday morning that due to an overheating problem with one of Dawn's four engines we could not make our scheduled port call at St. Thomas. Instead we were told that we would make a late afternoon call at St. Croix.
This port of call was a disaster, we arrived around 4:00 p.m. and found two 15-passenger vans on the pier. These were for the 2000 passengers on board. These two vans loaded up and left the pier, we never saw either of them or any other form of transportation after that. Most of the passengers walked the length of the pier into the village of Fredriksen and found it mostly closed for the night. Roughly half of us turned around and walked back to the ship. A few of the more hardy individuals walked down the main street in hopes of finding some open shops. I know of one person who managed to get to the main town of Christensen via public transportation.