Titan Salvage, the American salvage company who are part of the large Crowley Group, will work in a joint partnership with Micoperi, an Italian marine contractor specializing in underwater construction and engineering.

The year long operation will be broken up into 4 sections.

1. After reinforcing the structure of the vessel, Micoperi will build an underwater platform for the ship to rest on. Titan will weld sponsons on the side of the ship to aid in buoyancy.
2. Cranes will be attached to the underwater platform and fixed to the ship.They will pivot the ship upright.
3. While resting on the subsea platform, sponsons will be fixed to the starboard side of the vessel (the side underwater.)
4. The sponsons will be then pumped full of air and the ship will be towed away. The subsea platform will also be removed.

Video after the jump:

Historically, there was no way to convert the 50 Hz utility power offered on the shores of some countries the 60 Hz usable by cruise ships.  The Cochran Marine Shore Power System converts the standard voltage of any cruise terminal worldwide to match that of the vessel. Sort of like a plug adapter that one might use to plug in U.S. devices in the U.K.

Through a process, it seamlessly transfers electrical power to the ship while it is docked.  By connecting to shore power, cruise ship operators can turn off diesel engines and run entirely on electrical power while in port, which reduces carbon emissions by approximately 87 tons per call.

 

But that still doesn’t fix the main problem of where is that electricity coming from in the first place. The powerplant that generated the shoreside power could be burning coal which would pollute just as much as the ship burining fuel oil.

Several Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have created the startup Blueseed. They plan on building a ship and having it anchor 12 miles off of California (which is pretty deep water BTW) and having internet start up, well, start up there. The reason is it would allow the “smartest and brightest minds” to come together in a closed environmental. The other reason they state is so that they are outose american laws as the vessel wile be in international waters.

Here’s how they describe themselves:

Imagine a community that gathered one thousand of the boldest, brightest, and most talented tech entrepreneurs from around the world. Now imagine that this community was a part of Silicon Valley, the best place to scale a high-tech company… Well, that dream is becoming a reality.

Now that may sound good and all, but I know most entrepreneurs that start up their own internet company may me mildly insane.  This idea may be the dumbest I’ve ever heard. Its almost like they NEVER consulted a single maritime expert to gauge the validity of the project.

Check out their concept vessels. They say they will start the project in 2014. Good luck trying to find a shipyard that has an empty orderbook!

via The Verge

Traditionally, during the ceremony, line officials will take the podium and at this event, they didn’t disappoint!

Costa’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Pier Luigi Foschi:

Booking volumes are back to the same levels recorded this time last year….Our share of the market in the main countries where we operate has not been affected.  We were, are, and remain number one in Europe

I would really like to see the actual figures for this. The Concordia disaster single hand-idly brought the industry to a standstill, especially the Costa brand.  Royal Caribbean executives are even warning investors of what could be a rocky Q2 and Q3 as only then will we know the fallout of the summer Med (its peak season).

From CNN Investigations:

On May 16 last year, a 22-year-old Austrian named Maqsood Lodin was being questioned by police in Berlin. He had recently returned from Pakistan via Budapest, Hungary, and then traveled overland to Germany. His interrogators were surprised to find that hidden in his underpants were a digital storage device and memory cards.

Buried inside them was a pornographic video called "Kick Ass" — and a file marked "S— Tanja."

Several weeks later, after laborious efforts to crack a password and software to make the file almost invisible, German investigators discovered encoded inside the actual video a treasure trove of intelligence — more than 100 al Qaeda documents that included an inside track on some of the terror group’s most audacious plots and a road map for future operations.

Future plots include the idea of seizing cruise ships and carrying out attacks in Europe similar to the gun attacks by Pakistani militants that paralyzed the Indian city of Mumbai in November 2008. Ten gunmen killed 164 people in that three-day rampage.

The 105 foot Safari Spirit caught fire early Friday morning while docked in Seattle. The ship is currently laid up while undergoing upgrades prior to commencing her Summer Alaskan deployment. There was only the vessel owner and the engineer onboard. Both were able to escape.

The pictures are pretty dramatic. She will be considered a Constructive Total Loss once surveyors have had the time to go through it.

All guests booked will have their bookings transferred to other sips in their fleet.

This is not the ships first incident. On May 8, 2003, she ran aground and had to be evacuated in Alaska.

Blame it on the terrible economy of Europe right now. Blame it on the Costa Concordia fallout. Either way Pier Luigi Foschi, Costa Cruises CEO has announced that he will retire effective July 1, 2012. The 65 year old Italian, will still remain with Carnival plc. as chairman and managing director of Costa. He also will stay on the Board of Directors of Carnival plc. 

Foschi’s replacement will be Michael Thamm. He currently serves as president of AIDA Cruises.

Louis Cruises have released the following statement following our news that their 15,179grt Cristal was sold:

while we are continuously approached by various parties interested in purchasing vessels, these approaches do not of course, constitute a sale.

Around a week ago, there was some talk that the deal was off and Viking was trying to get out of the contract.

It appears the talk finally came to fruition as the deal with STX appears to have fallen through. Italy’s Fincanteri has stepped in with a slightly larger design. Coming in at 45,000grt, she will host 998pax. Like the STX France deal, this MOU is still pending financing. When approved, the vessels would be completed in Fall 2014 &15.

Cruise Business Online is reporting that Johnny Sid is “close” to acquiring the 26,000grt Louis Cruise Lines ship, Cristal. Johnny plans on operating the ship back in its original home, the Baltic. The ship first sailed the Baltic when she was rebuilt our of the burned hulk of another vessel.

The ship will sail under an unannounced start-up line and sail on short, less than a week, voyages out of Turku or Helsinki. Destinations are plentiful as the region has a large ferry infrastructure.

The deal could be announced very soon as it is reported that the cruises will start “in the coming summer.”

Before sailing under Louis Cruise Lines, she sailed back in the Baltic as the SIlja Opera operating on almost identical routes as what the start-up has planned.