PAPENBURG, Germany -- When Jewel of the Seas prepared for its inaugural paddle to the sea last spring, whistles blew, dock lines slackened, thousands of cameras flashed from ashore, and the ship went nowhere.
For more than an hour, the behemoth just sat there in the comfy embrace of the Meyer Werft docks, coddled by a pair of tugboats in the late night rain of northern Germany.
Timing was critical. The Meyer Werft yard in Papenburg is 40 miles up the tidal Ems River from the North Sea. Only the peak high tides of the full or new moon allow enough water to spring free a 15-story ship that, put on end, would spire five floors higher than the John Hancock Tower.
Big boat, small river, and just 19 inches of clearance under the propellers in the best of circumstances. As one shipyard employee succinctly put it in German, ''This will be no time to hear 'oops' on the bridge."
On board were a handful of reporters, perhaps 200 Meyer Werft employees, and a skeletal crew from Royal Caribbean International, which was about to be the cruise ship's new owner. Few of them realized that the wiggle room in a river just a few feet wider than the vessel was about to grow more precarious as crosswind gusts built to near-hurricane strength.
The forecast had not escaped notice by Thomas Teitge, captain of the yard. ''We go slow," said Teitge, a man disinclined to ramble on. And so the festive farewell began more like a fitful creep than a leap to freedom.
No one ever said leaving home was easy.
Jewel of the Seas made its US debut last weekend in Portland, Maine, a layer cake of glass and mahogany that then sailed into Boston on Sept. 11 to begin an autumn schedule of port calls in the Canadian Maritimes. Passengers stepping aboard at the Black Falcon Terminal no doubt marveled at the ship's oil-rubbed wooden interiors, the rotating bar, the glass exterior walls, and perhaps the pool tables equipped with gyroscopes to level the play in rolling seas.
But what the cruising passenger seldom if ever gets to appreciate are not only the logistics that get a $320 million ship built, provisioned, and on its way, but also the planning that keeps these floating cities humming for weeks at a time. The maiden voyage of Royal Caribbean's newest provided such a glimpse as Jewel ceremoniously left home for good -- going backward. For reasons of draft, not nostalgia, Jewel would spend most of the 18-hour transit reversing down the Ems.
Jewel is one of 14 cruise ships launched in the last 12 months in an industry that financial analysts expect will gross $17 billion this year. There are now almost 150 ships sailing the seas with 8 million passengers a year; two decades ago, fewer than 1.5 million passengers booked cruises annually.
''Cruising used to be seen as something catering to the newly-wed, over-fed, or almost-dead crowd," said Brian Major, a spokesman for Cruise Lines International Association, a New York-based group whose members represent more than 97 percent of the North American market. ''Today, cruising has become a vacation option for all ages and all walks of life."
These vessels are basically plush space capsules that make their own drinking water, process their own waste, and throw nothing overboard (or at least they are not supposed to). Jewel takes 3,400 passengers and crew to sea each week, feeds them 49,680 eggs, 1,990 pounds of beef tenderloin, 850 pounds of lobster, 12,360 cans of soda, 13,488 bottles of beer, 1,440 bottles of champagne, and 1,656 gallons of milk, to name just a few items. The ship returns with one dumpster of trash. Some 80,000 bananas get eaten, the last one on Day 7 as ripe as the first one on Day 1.
As Harri Kulovaara, the Finland-born senior vice president of Royal Caribbean's fleet operations, put it, ''A cruise ship essentially is part power station, part four-star hotel, and part airplane, all run by a staff from 100 nationalities. Sending it to sea is an incredibly complex operation."
Passengers never see about one-third of the ship, not that bottle crushers and recycling bins are about to compete with a theater where each seat comes with a teak holder for long-stemmed champagne glasses. Some logistical performances take place out of sight. For example:
Jewel of the Seas so efficiently incinerates waste that the refuse not slated for hazardous handling ashore computes after one week to 7.78 pounds per person. (According to trash industry statistics, the average Dorchester resident, after recycling, throws away 29 pounds of trash weekly.)
Almost all the 1,000 tons of drinking water consumed daily aboard Jewel are evaporated from seawater using the heat generated as a byproduct by the ship's two gas turbine engines (the same models used in DC-10 jets, modified for marine use). The turbines also heat the water that comes out of the tap. Even the water dripping from cabin air conditioners finds second use when the ship's exterior gets washed.
Cruise ships keep meticulous logs on eating patterns so that shopping lists can be fine-tuned continually. For example, steak is to Americans what sauces are to the British, lutefisk (dried cod treated with lye) is to Norwegians, bratwurst is to Germans, and tapas are to South Americans. The longer the voyage, the older the passengers are likely to be -- and the fewer calories they will consume. What the guests don't eat goes to the crew. What the crew doesn't eat is wrung dry in a centrifuge, then incinerated.
''Practice combined with past consumption patterns on hand give us an efficient way to anticipate the numbers," said Robert Tavadia, Royal Caribbean's director of guest services. For every plate or towel the guest sees, a second is being washed and a third is in storage in the event of a mishap. Royal Caribbean has determined there are 200 ''touch points" where crew members daily interact with guests -- and therefore should be on best behavior. A touch point includes any encounter within 10 feet.
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Jewel took two years to build at Meyer Werft, where, as one shipyard executive put it, ''everyone is related to a computer." Computers helped humans visualize the vessel, then dissected the design into all the needed pieces of steel to make it real. Computers maximized how many morsels could be cut efficiently from 11-by-33-foot steel sheets. (A huge hull plate from ''A" deck, for example, might find its neighbor a tiny railing strut from the bridge.) Then, computers tracked all 150,000 cutouts, first into storage, then out again as the cyber-controlled construction sequence called for them.
One feature Royal Caribbean likes to tout aboard its Radiance-class ships (Jewel is the last of four) is the exterior window wall amidship. The location is a seemingly precarious place to put glass for a structure typically stressed by waves at either end.
''Not until recently did we have computer models powerful enough to ensure that the ship's structural integrity [of the steel backbone and decks] was strong enough to handle all the glass," Kulovaara said.
The ship actually took shape as 66 huge, independently constructed segments (think salmon steaks), each a cross section of the entire ship from the keel to the highest deck. Then those segments were welded together, buffed, painted, detailed, furnished, and the package was plopped into the water with a big splash. Actually, this is an oversimplification. The process was so complex that the ship's scheduled April 3 departure from the yard was a big news event in the lowlands of Germany and nearby Netherlands. Some 200 RV campers and thousands of spectators had stationed themselves along the riverbank to make a holiday out of waving goodbye.
It turned out to be a long, wet goodbye. There was so much wind that the river's depth was 3 feet below the anticipated high because the water literally had been blown downstream. So the departure was postponed a day, which allowed additional time to snoop around a ship whose interior in places was feathered in stickums. They marked the dents and scratches, many barely visible, that would have to be fixed before Royal Caribbean took over the ship.
Some 850 members of the crew live in cabins on the lower decks behind a plethora of signs prohibiting guest access. The crew has its own exercise gym and outdoor deck. No more than two people share a cabin, each equipped with a VCR/television, a refrigerator, and Internet service.
Crew members generally work a 10-hour day on cruises. Depending on seniority, they get a trip home annually that lasts six to eight weeks, all the transportation costs paid by Royal Caribbean. The crew may pamper guests, but make no mistake, the company pampers the crew ''because hiring and holding onto good workers has become an extremely competitive business," said Jaye Hilton, a spokeswoman for Royal Caribbean.
Of the 36,000 employees working for the company, only 3,000 live ashore. Everyone else lives at sea. They speak English as the shipboard language. The ship is their home. As one waiter put it, ''Guests really are just that. Guests."
The lowest deck supports three room-size clothes-washing machines and a 50-foot-long contraption resembling a small car wash that presses, folds, and sorts all the towels and sheets.
Some 22 walk-in refrigerators are located one deck up, directly under a pair of spacious galleys that serve 12,000 meals daily and would be the envy of many a land-based chef. There is also a print shop with a pair of offset presses producing 75,000 copies weekly of onboard schedules in six languages. And how do they keep the bananas fresh? The fruit is sorted into three large bins in progressive stages of ripeness.
If something breaks, it is fixed at sea by one of 38 engineers in the power plant department or 72 engineers assigned to hotel/public space repairs. If they don't have the spare part, they log onto the Web, find the specifications, and make it in the machine shop.
If both gas turbines break down?
''Then we become a sailing ship," one engineer said.
It was not breakdowns but lies that got Royal Caribbean in deep trouble a decade ago. The company had tried to save on hazardous waste disposal costs ashore by dumping at sea -- and then denying it. Royal Caribbean eventually pleaded guilty in 1998 to 21 felony counts and paid $27 million in fines. Before returning to one pristine cruising ground, Jack Williams, the then-new company president who inherited the legal debacle, had to convince a skeptical local population that Royal Caribbean had mended its ways by drinking a glass of treated bilge water.
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Shortly before midnight on April 4, Meyer Werft decided it was safe enough to leave. So began a ship-handling exercise that would resemble sinking a $320 million golf ball across a 50-foot sloping green.
It fell on Teitge, the laconic shipyard employee in his early 40s with a captain's rating and a 962-foot ship underfoot, to work out the details. They were considerable.
For example, Jewel is what the industry calls a ''Panmax" ship. It was built to the maximum width (106 feet) allowable for passage through the 108-foot-wide locks in the Panama Canal. There are three drawbridges between Meyer Werft and the North Sea, all of them just a few feet wider than Jewel. With no room for them alongside the ship, tugboats had to help guide Jewel under the bridges using lines attached to the bow and stern, rather than the sides -- not the best system.
Because the water was so shallow, Jewel carried minimal fuel, water, and provisions. More than 1,000 tons lighter than normal, the ship floated 3 feet higher, with little ballast and a lot of exposed surface to catch the wind broadside.
Finally, Teitge had to do everything backward. Propellers actually remove some water from under the hull when a ship goes forward. So Jewel plodded stern-first to the sea with the pair of 16-foot-wide props rotated 180 degrees. On the bridge, this meant that all the labels on control knobs were backward -- port was starboard, forward was reverse, etc. Using masking tape and a marker, Teitge had applied his own labels using the names of towns on either side of the river to remind himself which way to push the toggles. One hour into the 40-mile trip, Jewel had moved perhaps 100 feet. Thousands of spectators photographed the inaction through the drizzle. Then they photographed some more. On the stern, one man peering down at the great muddy cyclones rising from the prop wash was Bernard Meyer, 55, the owner of the shipyard.
''I'm not worried about running aground. It's a soft bottom," Meyer said. Then he added: ''I feel I am about to say goodbye to my baby." He is a boyish-looking man who, with few exceptions, would remain on deck the entire rain-soaked trip, finally stepping ashore sneezing, all but voiceless, but proud as a new father.
At first light, Jewel was making about 3.1 knots (roughly 3.6 miles per hour) across such a crosswind that the ship looked like a loaded hammock slung between the tugs.
By 9 a.m., wind instruments on the bridge indicated a steady 36 knots -- gale force -- with maximum gusts reaching 63 knots, one knot shy of hurricane force.
At the captain's feet, still wrapped in plastic, were his turkey sandwich supper, his fried egg breakfast, and empty plastic Leisslinger water bottles. Hanging from his belt were cell phones with which he talked with lookouts. Slung over a shoulder was the VHF radio with which he spoke with the tug captains. There were two bridges astern, with one to go.
Anticipating disaster, a half-dozen news stations circled in airplanes and helicopters with camera operators no doubt very airsick. Ahead lay Gandersam Bridge.
''Not easy, not today," Teitge said. Interview over.
He set all three bow thrusters and the two variable direction propellers at different angles and power settings. The tugs yanked and pulled from either end, and Jewel rumbled, shook, and heeled in the howling wind like a roped animal being nudged ahead. Slowly, obediently, with just feet to spare on either side, the giant ship squeezed through. Ahead, nothing but wide open water, then the ocean.
Teitge's emotions surged to the surface. He smiled.
David Arnold can be reached at northwester@comcast.net.
