Sure - but no one is taking that cruise to go to Vancouver (or Victoria, the other option). It’s just a stop to meet the requirements of the Passenger Vessel Services Act (the equivalent of the Jones act for passenger ships.) When I’ve been on Alaska cruises that stop in Victoria, they are only there for four hours.
This is also why there are no more “cruises to nowhere” leaving from the US - since they don’t stop in a foreign port, CBP considered them to have never left the US and stherefore they require an American flagged ship and American crew.
As mentioned, they are MUCH smaller, after the featured Pride of America at 2,186 passengers, the next biggest ocean going is American Constitution at 175
On the river side, the biggest WAS the American Queen (no longer active) at 436. The largest (by passenger count) active is Viking Mississippi at 386, less than 1/5 the size
Brian
Both the American Queen and Viking Mississippi have stopped in La Crosse. I used to work on the 3rd floor at a riverside office, it was interesting to see folks at the same level…
That reminds me of the Bayside Canadian Railway, a 200 foot long railroad that existed to move truckloads of fish a token distance by rail within Canada, which was intended to make the cargo exempt from the Jones Act (a federal court ultimately disagreed).
The closest thing is that there are some short cruises that head south from California and make a foreign stop in Ensenada, Mexico. It serves a similar purpose as Vancouver for ships going north. However, having been to both, Vancouver is much more interesting than Ensenada.
I just checked – when I did an Alaska cruise out of Seattle, we were in Victoria from 9 AM to 6 PM. Some of us walked to Craigdarroch Castle for the tour, had lunch at a pierogi place, and stopped at a board game café and and a book store on the way back.
I’m not quite sure what sort of “cruise to nowhere” you have in mind.
If you meant a large ship that leaves a port, drones around the ocean for several days while folks do what they do aboard ship, then returns to the same port, I agree that those are gone.
But smaller dayboats that load up a couple hundred pax, drive 3.5 miles offshore then open their casino for gambling, then return a few hours later to the same dock still exist. Essentially the salt water equivalent of the casino on a barge in a moat on a US midwestern river. But an actual boat with actual propulsion and (mild) seaworthiness.
I mean the large ships that go for a couple of days (2-3) I didn’t mean to say that even overnight cruises to nowhere are illegal - and I have to correct myself. They may not require an American flagged ship and an American crew. But foreign crew members require a different visa than the one needed for cruises that leave the US so NCL, Carnival, etc stopped offering them as the required visas are more expensive and difficult to get than the visa needed to cruise from NY to Bermuda and back.
And a lot of the ones you described no longer exist for other reasons - there used to be plenty of them leaving from NYC but it’s much easier to gamble on land than it was when Nevada and Atlantic City were the only options.
e.g Filipino wages are a tiny fraction of US union wages. Like a month versus a day.
Until we have worldwide standardized organized labor this is going to be a problem in every tradeable economic activity where the American can’t be more productive than the e.g. Filipino by a similar ratio.
Something people often don’t realize is that the cruise ships can pay people from other countries as little as they do because the low pay they get by US standards is middle class or upper-middle class in their home countries.
Pay isn’t the only issue - if the cruise lines are going to have to pay American wages, they will probably change their hiring requirements. Which means a lot of those people currently working on cruise ships will lose what they consider to be good jobs.
It can be good money, in part because the employees have no living expenses. But the workload is intense. The staff works seven days a week for four to five months at a time. Depending on the job, they may work a lot of split shifts -several hours in the morning, some time off in the middle of the day, more hours on later. Makes for very long days. And you don’t see your family for months on end. It’s one thing to live this life as a young single person but if you are, say, Filipino and sending your wages home to your wife, kids or parents, it’s a tough way to go.
A friend of mine spent two weeks on a luxury cruise ship as a consultant (the deployment of a Point of Sales system). It was a fun gig. One thing that she told me is that there were so many workers from the Philippines that one person was employed as a full time liaison to the Philippine workers.