Information AboutOcean Breeze |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT OCEAN BREEZE | |
| cruise ships | |
| ocean breeze | |
| ocean liners | |
| belfast built ships | |
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Formerly used for many years as a high speed mail and Passenger Liner (no freight), the ''Southern Cross'' was built after World War II on the Keel of a Cruiser that was laid down in Scotland , but never built because of the war's end. The ''Ocean Breeze'' was about 650 feet long which is 200 feet shorter than the RMS ''Titanic'' . She was built in Belfast , Northern Ireland , by the firm of Harland & Wolff , which was the same company that had built the ''Titanic'' in 1909. She was long and racer-like, and very unusual because her Steam Turbine engines were placed to the rear - with the most aft of any smokestack of any liner ever built. This meant that she didn't rain Soot onto the passengers when moving and was very fast. She was christened by the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II . When Airliner s took away the mail in the 1970s , she was refitted as a luxury cruise liner and sailed for the same owners as the ''Calypso''. Later, she was laid up for some years, then repurchased by another company and cruised as the SS ''Azure Seas'' for at least ten years. She operated out of Los Angeles and did the 3- and 4-day cruises to Ensenada, Mexico and Catalina. She was a very popular ship and known as a favorite weekend getaway by the Southern Californian market. Passengers loved the ship as she still showed traces of her past elegance. (She was steam powered, so was never an 'MS'.) She started out, at 32,000 tonnes, as a large Cruise Ship , but by the 1990s , when the great floating hotels-on-a-barge came into vogue, she was considered a small liner. She carried 842 passengers. In the early 1990s , she was based in Aruba , and did a 7-day crusie from the Eastern Caribbean up through Barbados and then leewards to St. Thomas , alternating with one-week Panama Canal cruises with stops in Colombia and Costa Rica . The decks sloped gently down forward from the stern, then gracefully upward from amidships. The best cabins opened into a central inside corridor, and had windows - not portholes - that faced the Teak Promenade deck, which went all the way around the ship. Passengers considered the service and food on board to be excellent for the price. On more than one occasion, a passenger with special needs requested the ship's carpenter to custom modify a solid wooden deck-chair, which he completed in less than an hour. In the early 1990s, she was fully rebuilt for several million dollars and renamed ''Ocean Breeze''. She cruised only one year for a branch of the Royal Caribbean Lines , then was leased to Dolphin Cruise Lines until they went Bankrupt in about 2001. She then was leased by a short-haul line, Imperial Majesty Lines , running only from Port Everglades , Florida to the Bahamas , as a Gambling ship. Although she was still well maintained and looking good, she was suddenly sold for Scrap in 2003 , when the gambling-ship company got a cheaper lease on an old Holland-America ship that had been running as "the Big Red Boat". She was run aground at high tide in November 2003 on the coast of India , where old ships are pulled apart almost by hand by low paid, often barefoot Indian workers. EXTERNAL LINKS |
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