[birdiebill]

Originally Posted by Laker14

regarding the ships seeking to dock and disembark passengers in Florida:

there is a website that will tell you where every cruise ship is, and what the current itinerary is. It's called Cruisemapper.com. Check it out.

I thought this was interesting: One of the ships, the Regal Princess, started it's current trip on March 22...really, on March 22 people got on a cruise ship in Ft. Lauderdale, expecting to spend 14 days visiting a number of Caribbean tourist trap ports-of-call, and get back to Ft. Lauderdale, with no Coronavirus issues? And this was allowed by the Federal and State Governments?

But it gets better. Another ship, the Rotterdam, left Ft. Lauderdale on March 27, planning on visiting 5 ports-of-call...and guess what? They now have a problem. Who could have possibly seen that coming, all of 6 days ago?

The Regal Princess did not start a cruise with passengers on March 22. The Regal finished its last cruise on March 8; that cruise was actually curtailed but was not allowed to dock at Port Everglades until Sunday night, March 8. All passengers had to disembark including friends of ours who were scheduled to continue on on the Regal until March 15. All Princess Cruises that were to begin March 8 or later were cancelled and Princess shut down cruise operations on March 8 for at least 60 days.

The Regal still had crew onboard, but did not take on any new passengers. I know the Regal left Port Everglades and spent some time at its private beach in the Bahamas so crew members could "vacation" at the beach like their passengers usually do. It also had to take on provisions for the crew members staying onboard; so it may have returned to Port Everglades to do so and then left again for where ever it was going to sit out the 60 (or likely more) days. Some Princess ships were sent to Freeport Bahamas.