Far from the hot sun and warm waters of Florida and Mexico, M/V SCOTIA PRINCE, last year’s “Yucatan Express,” is hibernating in chilly Portland.
Scotia Prince Cruises’ car ferry/ cruise ship carried passengers and vehicles last winter between Tampa and two Yucatan Peninsula ports, Progreso and Morelos, until channel problems at Morelos forced suspension of the service.
Now, two dozen support and maintenance workers are keeping the vessel shipshape until regular Portland-to-Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, service begins April 1. The company is paying $2,500 a month to berth the ship at the Portland Ocean Terminal, plus utility costs necessary for heating living areas.
Despite the setback, Scotia Prince Cruises hopes to resume Yucatan Express service next winter if problems at Morelos can be fixed, said Mark Hudson, vice president for finance and communications of Scotia Prince Cruises and Yucatan Express.
The company launched service on Nov. 22, 2002, between Tampa and Progreso, serving the city of Merida on the Yucatan’s northeast coast, and Morelos, on the west, serving Cancun. Progreso is 585 nautical miles from Tampa; it’s 505 nautical miles from Tampa to Morelos.
The service began slowly but gradually improved. The St. Petersburg Times called it “a floating fiesta.” Frommer’s travel magazine said it was an excellent value and combined “a cruise ship passage chock full of amenities with a land destination.”
But, the company announced on Jan. 6 of last year that it was suspending Morelos service because of “navigational issues.” It said the Morelos channel was not deep enough or wide enough to deal with winter tides. To minimize SCOTIA PRINCE’s 18-foot draft, the amount of fuel on board was reduced and the ship trimmed to run level at low speeds. On one occasion, she had to divert to the port of Calica.
“The port committed to dredge to deepen the channel but still has not,” Hudson said in an e-mail Jan. 8 from his office in Hamilton, Ontario. “They said they could plot a second channel which would be deep enough. It turns out the port was wrong and the second channel was not deep enough.”
Although Scotia Prince Cruises had said it would continue service solely from Tampa to Progreso, it later decided to suspend Yucatan service completely. Hudson said it wasn’t financially feasible to operate the route to one port and have the ship sit idle for half a week.
The company said in a statement last year that the decision had been difficult but it was working very hard to resolve the Morelos dredging problem. It said it still believed in the Florida-Mexico market and hoped to begin accepting vacation reservations early in 2004 for resumption of the Yucatan Express in November of this year.
Serving Yucatan markets from Tampa was not the only international service the company envisioned to keep SCOTIA PRINCE busy last winter. It advertised service between Tampa and Matanzas, Cuba, but that didn’t work out.
Said Hudson: “We applied to the U.S. government to operate humanitarian aid cargo sailings but were not given a response until it was too late in the season to do anything about it, and then the response was negative. This happened even though it is legal to do so and there are many Americans visiting Cuba legally each year. Look at the many charter flights from New York and Miami.”
Scotia Prince Cruises, incorporated in Bermuda, has been operating cruise ferry services for 34 years. SCOTIA PRINCE was built in 1972 in Kraljevica, Croatia, rebuilt and lengthened in Germany in 1987 and completely refurbished recently.
The 11,968-gross-ton ship is 485 long with a 65-foot beam. Two 9,000hp engines can propel her at 18.5 knots. She can carry 1,054 passengers in 314 cabins and 1,052 berths, plus 200 vehicles. Before she became SCOTIA PRINCE she was named STENA OLYMPICA.
The line touts her “five-star dining,” Las Vegas-style gambling and entertainment plus extensive tax- and duty-free shopping and other amenities.