Thursday, September 27 and our first port of call, Los Angeles. More precisely, the World Cruise Centre in San Pedro. Although there are several berths here we were the only vessel in port today except for the battleship USS Iowa which is permanently mothballed here as a floating museum. Although Gail and I have been in LA numerous times and boarded ships at this same terminal we have never toured the Iowa nor the Queen Mary in Long Beach near by. Since the Queen Mary brought Dave, as a one year old, and his mother to Canada we decided to visit the aging Queen.
The Queen Mary is a very large ship for her era and proved to be very fast. She held the two way Atlantic crossing speed records on several occasions at around 30 knots. Modern cruise ships place common rooms for dining and entertainment at lower levels and place passenger staterooms higher up. The Queen Mary’s configuration was exactly the opposite, giving her a sleek appearance. Never-the-less, Queen Mary and her namesake Queen Mary 2 are of similar size. Overall length: QM 1,019.4 ft (310.7 m), QM2 1,132 ft (345.03 m) and, for comparison, the US Navy carrier Midway 1,001 ft (305 m). Their displacements are also similar: QM 81,961 tons, QM2 79,287 tons and Midway 64,000 tons. Cruise ships today boast their size using a figure called gross tonnage which actually has little to do with weight. The QM2 is specified at about 150,000 GT while the largest cruise ships now sailing come in at about 230,000 GT. The Emerald Princess, our current ship, is listed as having a length of 951 ft (290 m) and 113,000 GT. She carries approximately 3100 passengers, the QM2 carries about 2600 and QM is listed at about 2100 but carried nearly 16,000 when operating as a WW II troop carrier.
We enjoyed our time on Queen Mary then took a free shuttle bus to Long Beach where we found lunch and took a walk along the beach before taking our second taxi ride back to the ship in San Pedro.
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