The Lease Has Been Renewed
Bertram Whitmore, Publisher · maritime / megastructure
THE THICCC BEAT, the desk reacts. This week, the Publisher collects on a debt he wrote to himself three months ago.
On the fourteenth of June I entered a reservation into this column, regarding the Legend of the Seas, to the effect that a fourth Icon-class hull was already under construction at the same Finnish yard, and that I fully expected to be back. I do not enjoy being right about paperwork. I enjoy it exactly as much as everyone else does, which is to say entirely, and I will not pretend otherwise for the sake of false modesty.
On the fourth of September, at the Meyer Turku yard, they flooded the dry dock and let the fourth one up off the blocks. She is called the Hero of the Seas, and I want to be careful about what has actually occurred, because a float-out is not a launch and it is certainly not a maiden voyage. A float-out is the moment a hull stops being a rumor supported by scaffolding and starts being a displacement figure that the North Sea itself is obligated to respect. Nothing about her is finished. Her cabins are unplumbed, her theater is unwired, her waterslides do not yet slide. What she has done, and the only thing she has done, is float, at somewhere near three hundred and sixty-five meters, with a gross tonnage provisionally filed in the same neighborhood as her three sisters, near a quarter of a million tons. That is the entire submission. I find it sufficient.
The berth count, once she is finished lying empty in a Finnish basin and starts lying full in the Caribbean, comes to roughly five thousand six hundred passengers at a civilized double occupancy, or up to seven thousand six hundred if the operator abandons civility entirely, which the operator has shown every sign of planning to do. She is slated to enter service next August, sailing out of Miami on seven-night rotations to the line's own private beach, which I am told has a name now, as though it needed one to be sat upon.
I ruled on this yard's second ship in June and its third ship the same month, and I said then that "the largest object ever to float" was not a record so much as a lease, and that Royal Caribbean was the only tenant. I did not expect the lease to renew itself again before the summer was out. It has. There is, I am reliably informed, a fifth hull already keel-laid. I am no longer going to pretend to be surprised by these memos. I am simply going to keep filing them.
The ruling: Thiccc. Entered under Vessels, Excessive, on the strength of displacement alone, with the committee's standing reservation renewed in full: we will be back for the fifth.
Filed from the Margaret IV, which displaces nine tons, carries one publisher, and has never once needed a dry dock to prove it was real.