I Reserved the Right to Revisit. I Am Revisiting.
Bertram Whitmore, Publisher · maritime / megastructure
THE THICCC BEAT, the desk reacts. This week, the Publisher returns to a matter he left open, from the Margaret IV.
Five days ago I ruled on the Star of the Seas and entered her under Vessels, Excessive, and I closed the file with one reservation, which the stenographer will please read back: the committee reserves the right to revisit the matter when the next one arrives, larger still, in 2026, as these things always are.
The next one has arrived. I am revisiting.
She is called the Legend of the Seas, the third of Royal Caribbean's Icon-class, built across the better part of two years at the Meyer Turku yard in Finland, where they have just walked her through ten days of sea trials in the Baltic and pronounced her ready. I am told she displaces two hundred and fifty thousand, eight hundred gross tons. I will let that number sit a moment, because it deserves to sit. The Star, which I called the largest object ever to float, displaced two hundred and forty-eight thousand. The Legend is heavier. The largest object ever to float has been the largest object ever to float for less than a calendar year, and a sister has already quietly relieved her of the title without so much as a press conference at sea.
Eleven hundred and ninety-seven feet of her. Two thousand, eight hundred and five cabins. Five thousand, six hundred passengers if everyone behaves and books a bed apiece, and seven thousand, six hundred if they do not. She makes her maiden voyage the fourth of July out of Barcelona, seven nights of the Western Mediterranean, before she crosses to Florida in November to do it all again in warmer water.
I want to be precise about what earns the ruling, because tonnage alone has never moved this desk and it will not start today. The quarry is heavier than all three of these ships and I have never once written it a column. What the catalogue documents is not mass but mass with somewhere to be, and the Legend qualifies on the same grounds her sister did: she is enormous, and she proceeds anyway, through a sea that was managing perfectly well without a fourth of these now on the order books at the same Finnish yard.
I note, with the resignation of a man who has done this arithmetic before, that the reservation I am exercising today will have to be renewed. There is a fourth Icon ship under construction. There will, in time, be a fifth. I am beginning to suspect that "the largest object ever to float" is not a record so much as a lease, and that Royal Caribbean is the only tenant.
The ruling: Thiccc. Entered under Vessels, Excessive, with a cross-reference to the Star of the Seas and a note that the heavyweight belt has changed waists. The committee reserves the right to revisit the matter when the fourth one arrives, larger still, as these things, exhaustingly, always are.
Filed from the Margaret IV, which displaces nine tons, carries one publisher, and has held its title unchallenged for forty years.