CRUISE VIGNETTES 02

THE JONES ACT
The Jones Act, and related statutes, require that vessels used to transport cargo and passengers between U.S. ports be owned by U.S. citizens, built in U.S. shipyards, and manned by U.S. citizen crews. The more famous cruise ships are all registered in other countries. That way they do not have to pay US wages, and abide by US rules and regulations. As you may expect, the US health and safety regulations are more strict than those of most countries, wages and corporate tax are much less, elsewhere.

That law might have been a good idea a hundred years ago, but these days Seattle and other West Coast cities (and cities up and down the East Coast), lose a ton of money each year, because of that law. For example, the dozens of cruise ships taking tens of thousands of Americans to Alaska, must stop in Vancouver, British Columbia, rather than in San Francisco or Seattle. Don’t you think there would be a lot of passengers who would like to sail from Boston, to New York City, then to Florida, and maybe on to New Orleans and Houston? I would think a lot of people would like to sail between San Diego and Seattle, with stops in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Portland. I have read that someone is trying to change that law, so we will see what happens.

We did sail on a re-positioning cruise one year. That is, a ship that sailed from Los Angeles to Mexico in the winter, was scheduled to sail from Vancouver to Alaska in the summer. We sailed on the ship as it changed positions from the port in Los Angeles to Vancouver, when the seasons changed.

One year we sailed on a ship that was registered in the African city of Monrovia, Liberia, the location of a very bloody civil war in the 1990s. If the ship was still sailing, do you want to bet that government wasn’t paying much attention to health and safety conditions of “wealthy” passengers on a cruise ship, half-way around the world.

THE FATE OF PASSENGER FREIGHTERS
As fate would have it, in the 1970s, before we had the money and time to sail on a Matson freighter, Matson ended its passenger service and sold all remaining passenger ships. Freight containers and “ro-ro” (roll on, roll off) ships had become a fact of life. The freight containers are stacked so high on the deck, there was little or no deck space, and no way passengers could see the view. Rather than dock in port-cities for several days while cargo on the ship was unloaded, then the ship was re-loaded again, with the containers and “ro-ro,” that whole operation would take hours, rather than days. That gave the passenger little time to enjoy the sights of the city, so passenger service was stopped.

Well, in 1980 we did sail on a freighter that also carried 70 passengers, as told in our story about the Enna G.