At Sea with Doug Newman

Most of us had long since written off Orient Lines after NCL announced the sale of its only ship, Marco Polo, in June 2007, with no replacement in sight. When Marco Polo ended her last Orient Lines voyage in April 2008 (she’s now owned by Global Cruise Lines and chartered to Transocean Tours), it seemed the 15-year-old line, founded by legendary industry entrepreneur Gerry Herrod and later bought by NCL, had sailed off into the sunset. So I was surprised to learn last week that former NCL parent Star Cruises, which retained the dormant brand after NCL gained its independence, had sold Orient Lines to an American company called Origin Cruise Group who intended to bring it back to its former glory.

It turns out that Origin Cruise Group is owned by Floridian Wayne Heller, who worked for NCL in the 1980s (long before Orient Lines existed, let alone as part of NCL) and then went on to found Cruises Only, America’s largest seller of cruises. In a release, Orient Lines said that it plans to buy ships similar to Marco Polo, “vessels that are rich in history and character and that can carry 600 to 800 passengers in great comfort and safety to all seven continents”.

Several reliable sources indicate that the company is now negotiating to purchase the 24,220 GT, 630-berth Maxim Gorkiy, whose charter to Phoenix Reisen ends in November 2008, from Sovcomflot. Built in 1969 as Hamburg for the now-defunct Deutsche Atlantik Linie and briefly renamed Hanseatic in 1973 before being sold to the Black Sea Shipping Company (Blasco), part of the Soviet state-owned shipping monopoly Morflot, in 1974 and renamed Maxim Gorkiy. Already established as one of Germany’s best cruise ships, she’s spent most of the remainder of her career on charter to German tour operators; Phoenix Reisen first chartered her in 1988 and has been her sole charterer ever since. With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, her ownership passed on to Sovcomflot (unlike many other ships that remained with the less-financially-sound and now-extinct Blasco) and under the management of Sovcomflot and Phoenix she gradually became the grand old ladly of the German cruise scene. But her high running costs as a steam-turbine ship with a high consumption of bunker oil eventually led to Phoenix’s announcement of her retirement in November 2007. Since then, she’s been facing an uncertain future. It remains to be seen whether the problem of running costs and the upcoming SOLAS requirements that will enter into force in 2010 (a deadline that has reportedly been extended to 2013 for Maxim Gorkiy) will be surmountable or whether Orient Lines will resume operating with a more modern, probably less-interesting ship instead, but there is no doubt that Maxim would be an ideal fit for the Orient Lines product, and I’d certainly be delighted to see her flying the Orient Lines flag.