Crown Princess Calls By On Way To Dover

Hantavirus Passengers Quarantine near Perth as Crown Princess visits. Jean Hudson reports.

Crown Princess arrived from Adelaide this morning at 6.50am just as dawn broke and then a rainbow.

The Princess is on a transit visit and a stop off on a 59-day, one-way cruise from Auckland, NZ to Dover, England that began on 6 May. She is a regular Fremantle visitor.

After Fremantle, her lucky passengers will visit an impressive string of destinations, including Port Louis, Cape Town, Walvis Bay, Mindelo, La Palma, Casablanca, A Coruna, Le Havre, Zeebrugge, Gdynia, Visby, Helsinki, Tallinn, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Amsterdam before reaching Dover.

Here’s more of the Princess’ arrival this morning.

Arriving on the Crown Princess this morning are 2,587 transit passengers and 1,111 crew. Passengers can join for short legs of the cruise. Fremantle’s turnaround passengers include: 149 disembarking and 160 embarking.

And this is the pink morning the Princess’ guests appreciated as they steamed into Fremantle’s inner harbour.

During winter, the cruise action is shifting elsewhere, and I get a break from early mornings at the port! The Kimberley region is coming into its own during the winter season, the waterfalls are flowing, and the expedition vessels are getting ready to explore the wild and remote Kimberley coastline.

Further afield, the Northern Hemisphere summer means Europe is in full swing, with rivers and fjords, and the Mediterranean ports drawing ships from all over the world.

Crown Princess herself returned to service earlier this year following a refurbishment in Singapore, with updates including the addition of O’Malley’s Irish Pub, a redesigned Gatsby’s Casino and a new EFFY Lounge.

As Crown Princess prepares to depart Fremantle, she sails into a world where cruise ships have once again become associated with disease at sea and pandemic fears. In April, an outbreak of Andes Hantavirus was identified aboard the small Dutch expedition cruise ship MV Hondius, which departed from Ushuaia, Argentina carrying 114 passengers and 61 crew.

A passenger died onboard after five days of illness; apparently no tests were conducted to determine his cause of death. By the time the ship anchored off Cape Verde, Africa in early May, eight cases of the virus had been confirmed, and three passengers had died. On 10 May, the Hondius docked in Tenerife, passengers were disembarked and then repatriated and quarantined across the world.

Five Australians and one New Zealander arrived in Perth on Friday from the Netherlands and will spend three weeks in quarantine at the Bullsbrook quarantine facility near RAAF Base Pearce, just north of Perth — the same facility built in 2022 during COVID-19.

This recent virus outbreak has again raised issues around infection control onboard cruise ships and why there was an apparent failure to test for the cause of the first death or alert health authorities until nearly a month later. Our thoughts are with the surviving passengers, whose trip of a lifetime has become another cruising nightmare.

As I write this article, catastrophe his struck another cruise ship. More that 1700 passengers are stranded onboard the British cruise ship Ambition, due to a gastro outbreak. The outbreak occurred midway through a 14-day cruise from Belfast to Liverpool, visiting ports in France and Spain. It’s a sharp lesson in just how quickly a cruise ship becomes a floating petri dish!

Meanwhile, as I say, Fremantle now goes quiet on the cruise front. The next cruise ship isn’t expected until 8 August, when Ponant’s Le Soleal departs on a 10-night voyage to Broome.

Crown Princess leaves at 5pm today, her next port of call is Mauritius. We wish her safe and disease-free travels.

*Words and photographs by Jean Hudson. Jean is our Shipping and Sailing Correspondent and also a regular feature writer, reviewer 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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