Big ships may not be able to visit city
BY BECKY IANNOTTA
Citizen Staff
KEY
WEST — Cruise lines are moving to larger ships with technological
advancements that allow better maneuvering, but the width of the channel
leading into Key
West and turning
radius in the harbor will dictate whether the new ships can dock at
Key West's
three piers.
Earlier this month, Royal
Caribbean International announced it had ordered Project Genesis, a
6,400-passenger cruise ship that would weigh 220,000 tons — double the
weight and passenger load of the largest cruise ship to visit Key West.
Project Genesis would eclipse the world's largest cruise ship,
Carnival's Queen Mary 2 at 151,400 tons. Royal Caribbean is set to
launch its 4,370-passenger, 160,000-ton Freedom of the Seas in June.
Cruise industry officials
met in early February with the mayor, five of the six city commissioners
and other city officials to discuss the future of cruise ships in Key
West.
"The trend overall for
the cruise ship industry is to go larger," said Mayor Morgan McPherson.
"The question for us is do we want a larger ship, and can a larger ship
come into port here?"
McPherson said the city
is looking to beef up its partnership with the cruise lines by
establishing a guaranteed income for scheduled cruise ships that would
pay the city even if they are diverted by bad weather or other
circumstances, possibly using disembarkation fees for beach
renourishment, and helping with the sinking of the former military ship
USS Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg.
One million cruise ship
passengers arrived in Key West in the last fiscal year on 505 vessels.
Gross revenues from disembarkation fees and water sales totaled almost
$6 million, according to Dennis Grote, city budget analyst.
Larger cruise ships mean
fewer vessels stopping in Key West, said Bob Maguire, a Key West harbor
pilot who boards cruise ships one mile offshore and accompanies them in
and out of the harbor.
"The amount of ships has
decreased, but they're bringing in more passengers, so the passenger
levels are staying about the same," he said. "That's the upside of
having bigger ships."
At 952 feet long and with
the ability to carry 3,700 passengers, the Carnival Glory is the largest
cruise ship to pull into Key West's port. The vessel's width is 116 feet
and it has a 27-foot draft.
The privately owned Pier
B at the Hilton Resort and Marina and the Navy-owned Mole Pier on the
western tip of the island are used by the larger ships that dock in Key
West, while the city-owned Mallory Pier can handle smaller ships like
the 730-foot, 50,000-ton Celebration.
"Can Pier B and the Mole
Pier accommodate these larger ships? Maybe. But can they access the
harbor? The channel is a limiting factor for our port," said city Port
Director Raymond Archer.
The Key West Harbor
Pilots Association sets the guidelines for size and draft of vessels
that can dock in Key West. The harbor pilots are waiting for completion
of a $36 million Navy dredging project in the channel, which the city
piggybacked onto to save money for similar work near Mallory Pier. The
dredging will allow large military ships with up to a 34-foot draft to
pass through, but it will not widen the channel, Maguire said.
The city has hired the
same dredging company, Bean Stuyvesant, to extend the project to Mallory
Pier at a cost of $779,716. Working with the Navy contractor while it
was in the harbor saved the city an estimated $700,000 to $1.3 million,
according to a memo to the City Commission written by Assistant City
Manager John Jones.
Once the project is
completed, the harbor pilots will decide whether to revise the
guidelines and open the channel to larger cruise ships. There are no
plans to bring cruise ships larger than Carnival Glory into Key West,
said Maguire, although he has been told that the cruise industry is
looking at bringing in larger ships.
"We're exploring the
142,000-ton [Royal Caribbean] Voyager class, but we haven't done
anything with that yet," Maguire said. "No one is seriously talking
about bringing them in yet."
Some residents have
opposed the idea of more cruise ships or more passengers docking in Key
West. Members of a neighborhood group called Livable Old Town staged a
protest in March 2004, when five cruise ships were scheduled to be in
town in one day at the height of tourist season. Maguire said cruise
business peaked after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks but since
has leveled off.
"In reality, if you look
at the numbers they're pretty steady for the past four years. We don't
have anyone beating down the doors to come here," he said. "It's not
like Cozumel, where they're getting 17 ships in one day. We usually
don't even have a ship coming in on Saturdays." |