Thoughts About the Queen Mary 2
I recently completed a round trip voyage from New York City to the Southern Caribbean and Central America on the QE2. Unlike those slab-sided floating hotel barges called cruise ships, the QE2 is a real ship. She has a long knife-edge bow, which flares to the main deck and a rounded stern. Her bow slices through the sea rather than shouldering it aside as do the rounded bow ships. Thus she pierces waves rather than bouncing off them and shuddering to a stop. Her upper decks are built with step backs in wedding cake fashion thus decreasing weight overhanging the bow and stern and reducing pitching. Her flared bow and rounded stern limit the pitching and her beam and stabilizers limit the rolling. Despite 70 mile per hour headwinds while sailing the Atlantic back to New York, I never felt her roll more than 3 degrees. She was by far the most comfortable riding ship I have ever been aboard.
However, her great size is also one of her limitations. Because she has a beam of 148 feet and a draft of 33 feet, many ports cannot handle her. St. Thomas was created by and for the cruise industry; yet we had to anchor out and tender in, because the pier could not handle us. We were scheduled to dock in Port Moin in Costa Rica, but because there was a slight swell, we were at risk of hitting the channel bottom and thus could not dock. The swell also prevented our tendering and thus we had to skip our scheduled visit. Because no other port in the vicinity of our scheduled itinerary could accommodate the Queen, we basically had to spend an extra day at sea.