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Queen Mary 2 Luxury Cruises
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Queen Mary 2 NEWS Laden with opulence, the Cunard Line's newest and largest ship was nearly on schedule after making up time lost to bad weather during the first 48 hours of its inaugural Atlantic crossing. The Queen Mary 2 paid a previous visit to U.S. shores last January, ending a 14-day cruise through the Azores and Caribbean at Fort Lauderdale The ship goes into regular transatlantic service with 12 crossings scheduled this year and 26 next year. The ship arrived under the extra-tight security that has been in effect for all major events in New York since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It was escorted by a fleet of tugboats, police vessels and Coast Guard boats as it passed the Statue of Liberty on its way toward the Hudson River terminal. The early morning arrival was marked by the customary Gotham greeting — fireboats spouting red, white and blue water. The QM2's arrival in New York was "a very big moment" for a company that has sailed the Atlantic for 158 years, said Pamela Conover, Cunard's president and chief operating officer. "This is the arrival of our new flagship in its U.S. home port," she said. Nearly four football fields long at 1,132 feet and 21 stories tall, the massive, black-hulled vessel left Southampton, England last Friday for the six days and nights of luxury living and sumptuous dining for its 2,600 passengers, attended by a crew of 1,250. Though Commodore Ronald Warwick followed the same northerly track known as the Great Circle Route, the Queen Mary 2 was never imperiled by icebergs such as that which sank the RMS Titanic with 1,503 dead in modern history's worst maritime disaster on April 15, 1912.
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But the rough weather — with 30-foot seas and force 10 gales gusting to 63 miles an hour — gave the passengers some nights to remember. According to accounts published by reporters on board, many passengers stayed in their quarters rather than go to the dining rooms. After three days in port on Manhattan's west side, the Queen Mary 2 will depart on Sunday night, rendezvousing near the Statue of Liberty with the Queen Elizabeth 2, outbound on its own last transatlantic run. The two Queens, old and new, will travel home in tandem — the first time two Cunarders sailed the Atlantic together instead of passing each other in midocean, officials said. In the realm of seagoing behemoths, the QM2 is the world's biggest cruise ship in every way, its closest rival being the 142,000-ton Voyager Of The Seas, in service since 1999 with Royal Caribbean Cruises. But it's a virtual rowboat next to the largest of all ships — a 564,700-ton supertanker built in 1979 as the Seawise Giant, and now called Jahre Viking. The first pure ocean liner built in 35 years, the QM2 is three times the size of Titanic, which at 46,300 tons and 800 feet was called the "largest movable object built by man" when launched in 1911.
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