Welcome, Westerdam!

The elegant MS Westerdam cruise ship arrived in Fremantle just after 7 am on this beautiful 30C Freo day. It’s her maiden voyage to Freo. Welcome, Westerdam!

MS Westerdam, Fremantle, 8 December 2024. Credit Fremantle Shipping News

She’s on a transit visit which means Fremantle is a day stop. She’s literally here today, gone tomorrow.

Westerdam has 1457 passengers onboard; 313 are disembarking at Fremantle today and 350 are joining the cruise. Expect a busy day in Freo with over 1,120 passengers visiting the port city. Not to mention her 767 crew! 335 passengers are booked on pre-booked tours to the Swan Valley, Perth and Rottnest.

MS Westerdam, Fremantle, 8 December 2024. Credit Fremantle Shipping News

In Fremantle, our cruise ship visitors will be invited to Walyalup Koort today at 10.30 am to receive a special cultural welcome including didgeridoo music, smoking ceremony and dance performance. The Freo community is also welcome to attend.

The City of Fremantle will run free shuttle buses from the Fremantle Passenger Terminal into Walyalup Koort from 08:00 – 16:00 today, and from 09:00 – 12:00 on Monday, bringing passengers into the city centre and returning them to the ship.

Yesterday Westerdam visited Geraldton also for the first time. To mark this inaugural occasion, the City of Geraldton set up a vibrant Welcome Hub. Sadly, Westerdam is the final cruise ship to visit Geraldton for the season. 12 large-scale ships have axed their visits to the Midwest town for 2025 and 2026. The city of Greater Geraldton data shows nearly 9,000 people came ashore in the 2023/24 cruise season, boosting the local economy by $4 million.

Westerdam is a Vista-class cruise ship owned by Holland America Line. Built in 2004, she is 285 metres long and 32 wide. She is the third ship of the class to be operated by the line, as well as being the fourth ship whose beginning name represents one of the four directions of the compass in Dutch – in this case the West.

Her sister ships are Oosterdam, Zuiderdam and Noordam – East, South and North. We’ve featured all four in the Fremantle Shipping News in the past two years: MS Oosterdam on 8 October 2024, when she visited Croatia; MS Zuiderdam on 22 February 2023 when she visited Fremantle; and finally MS Noordam on 2 December 2022, when she also visited Fremantle.

MS Westerdam will depart Fremantle at 1 pm tomorrow, bound for Albany.

* Story by Jean Hudson @jeansodyssey. Jean is our Shipping Correspondent and also a regular feature writer and photographer here on the Shipping News. You may also like to follow up her informative Places I Love stories, as well as other feature stories and Freo Today photographs, right here.

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