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July 18, 2003Watching a Queen Make an Exit
By WENDELL JAMIESON
here are hundreds of free shows in Manhattan: buildings going up or coming down; policemen running with their hands on their holsters; taxicab races seen from the 35th floor; young women walking in SoHo on the first warm day of spring. My favorite, after the young women, takes place on the far West Side, next to a pier, more than a dozen times a year. It's been going on for decades, but this is the last full season, because early next year, the Queen Elizabeth 2 will leave New York for good.
This is an ocean liner, the last one sailing regularly to Europe. In 1969, when it first came here, there were still others: the France, the United States and the white ships of the Italian Line, the Rafaello and the Michelangelo. There's a picture of me in my parents' photograph album, taken from behind, in which I'm looking out a window and leaning on a railing made of Lucite. I'm on the France, it's 1972 or so, and we are seeing my aunt off on a trip to Europe. I don't remember being on this ship, but I remember my parents talking about it afterward, saying the décor was tacky.
That type of encounter with an ocean liner used to be pretty common in New York, where the big ships docked in the middle of the city. I never went on board the Italian liners, but I remember seeing them as we drove down the elevated West Side Highway in our Volkswagen, because the lattice covering their funnels reminded me of the metal-mesh garbage cans on every street corner. A former boss of mine, an editor at The Daily News, once became uncharacteristically nostalgic when talking about how he and his friends would go into Manhattan from Long Island and visit the liners, jumping from bon voyage party to bon voyage party and getting drunk.
Forget it now: all those other ships are gone, and there are no public tours of the Queen Elizabeth 2; even those who have spent thousands for a trans-Atlantic crossing must wait in long security lines. But those headaches do not prevent anyone from experiencing one of the true pleasures of the ship, which is watching from shore as it sails down the Hudson, through the harbor and beneath the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge at the beginning of a six-day slog through the ocean. The next opportunity for this magnificent show is Tuesday, when the QE2 sails for Southampton, England. There are several terrific vantage points in Manhattan and Brooklyn, but the best view is right there at the pier as it travels the first few feet of the 3,180-nautical mile trip.
Slipping its moorings or out in the water, the QE2 cuts a striking figure: here is an ocean liner traveling to Europe as passenger jets fly above. This is what old postcards look like. It is providing a free performance that harks back in a way to the very reason for the existence of New York, which is of course that it is a port.
The whole operation seems graceful and easy, a carefully orchestrated union of sheer black-and-white steel and brown water, but that's misleading. Every time the Queen Elizabeth 2 arrives, and every time it sails, a powerful struggle ensues among the ship, the pier and the current. The river surface that looks calm to my eye is textured with hints of peril to the pilots who must guide the ship safely in and out of the harbor. No computers here, just pushy tugs, whining engines and taut, snapping ropes. The ocean liner always wins in this struggle, but sometimes the whole thing can seem a little dicey. Just ask the captain.
Cunard is pulling the Queen Elizabeth 2 from trans-Atlantic service to make way for a new ship, the Queen Mary 2, which is twice as big and will arrive next year. The QE2 will visit New York regularly until December, and then twice next year. After that, it will sail on round trip cruises from Southampton, England, mostly to European ports of call. The new ship is an ocean liner, to be sure, but a modern incarnation. The QE2, which made its first voyage in 1969, is the real deal: built for speed on the River Clyde in Scotland, it can go backward faster than most modern cruise ships can go forward. Its predecessor, the Queen Elizabeth, made its final journey from New York in 1968 sailing down the Hudson as thousands watched from office buildings, the piers and Batter Park.
The QE2 is not the same ship that was launched back in the 60's, however. Over the years, as business has cycled back and forth between good and bad, new luxury suites have been added to attract travelers and the original steam power plant has been replaced with diesel-electric engines. Crossings that up until a few years ago took five days now take six, to conserve fuel.
Still, the newer ships are far more maneuverable; to turn in the Hudson River, the QE2 needs help. Hence the great free show.
The captain is a boyish-looking man named Ian McNaught. He's 48 and is not nearly as severe looking as one might expect of a ship captain, although he insists that he can be mean when the situation warrants. He seems genuinely pleased to be the captain of an ocean liner and becomes highly animated when talking about his ship; he grows even more animated when talking about docking in New York.
"It's different, it's very different," he said on a recent overcast Saturday afternoon while standing on the starboard bridge wing. The bridge wings are cantilevered over the hull on either side of the enclosed bridge and provide spectacular views straight down and clear sight lines forward and back. From here Captain McNaught and his officers oversee sailing and docking, joined by the docking pilot. There's a small instrument console on each wing with controls for the rudder, throttle and bow thrusters, "all you really need," he said.
"I would say that docking in New York is really one of the most difficult things we do because the slip is at right angles to the current," he says, pointing out into the river. He keeps looking at it and squints. "You've got to lie across the current. Sometimes, if it's an ebb tide, you'll see us moving sideways. We've got to get into the current as fast as we can."
A Tricky Season
The West Side piers jut straight into the Hudson. If a ship pulls into the river during a flood tide when the tide is coming in, or an ebb tide when it is going out, the ship is perpendicular to the current and is slammed from bow to stern. There is always a danger of rubbing against or banging into a pier, potentially scraping the paint or worse. Captain McNaught says this has been an especially tricky season because of the harsh winter: on the second call of the year, in April, the docking pilot warned him that 10 feet of fresh water was coming down from the Adirondacks on top of the regular ebb tide. When the ship entered the current after leaving the pier, it really flew downstream.
On this morning, as the ship returned from a cruise to Bermuda, the docking went smoothly. The Sandy Hook harbor pilot met the ship outside the harbor at Ambrose Light, which is about 14 miles from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and guided it through the Lower and Upper Bays of the harbor to the Hudson, where the docking pilot, who climbed aboard from a tug, took over, directing the ship a few degrees this way and a few degrees that way in consultation with the captain.
Once the liner reached the West Side piers, which run between 48th and 52nd Streets, three tugs guided it on the turn in to the right, toward Manhattan. Here was a tricky moment: the captain, the pilot and the ship's officers directed the docking from the bridge wing on the right side, looking down as they cleared Pier 90's northwest corner by just inches. Then they bolted through the wheelhouse to the left — or port — bridge wing as the ship glided into its berth at the next pier, Pier 92, on its left side.
As Captain McNaught recounts the morning's drama, it's about 3:30 p.m. The ship sails at 4:45; the public address system is already warning those who are not sailing to go ashore. He excuses himself for a cup of tea.
An hour later you can see the captain up on the left bridge wing with his officers. The two gangplanks to the pier had been pulled up, and a pair of longshoremen wait on the pier at each of the bollards, the posts to which one of the QE2's massive mooring lines is lashed. I'm watching from the concrete railing on the top level of the pier's parking garage, just feet from the tip of the bow. There are a few ocean-liner buffs around with cameras; they happily discuss the most minute details of the ship and its history.
Pushing and Pulling
Two tugs pull up. One, the green-and-red Miriam Moran, nuzzles up just below the bow. A tug crewman takes a rope tossed down from an opening just below the QE2's forecastle. Farther away, near the stern, a white tug, the Condor, nudges up to the hull and ties up. At 5 p.m. the liner's whistle blows: three short, vibrating, ear-splitting booms and one long one. The longshoremen drop the ropes that have been holding the ship to the pier into the water with thin splashes. Two give each other a high-five before disappearing into the pier building, their work apparently done for the day.
It seems impossible that something as big as the QE2 could ever move, but move it does, though almost imperceptibly at first. The Condor backs up and pulls the stern south, so that the whole ship is at roughly a 45-degree angle from the pier, with the stern, or rear, pointed southwest. The Miriam Moran guns its engine and pulls, spitting out exhaust and churning the black-brown muck at the bottom of the river. The slack ropes tighten and strain, making a crackling noise. All that effort moves the front of the QE2 just a few feet from the pier. Now the Miriam Moran pivots around the bow and starts to push.
The liner is going backward, fast, into the current, an incoming flood tide. As soon as the QE2 is halfway out into the river, the force of the current is obvious: the stern no longer points southwest but directly west. Thirty seconds later the stern is swinging north, and by the time the bow clears the pier, it is pointed in the right direction but heading backward, the stern pointed north, the bow pointed south toward the harbor and the Atlantic beyond. It looks for a moment as if the QE2 will go to Albany, backward.
It hangs there for a minute before its own engines get the better of the current. One can imagine Captain McNaught's stress level decreasing. (Perhaps it's time for another cup of tea.)
In the next hour there will be other good views of the liner. First, about 15 minutes after it gets into the current, from the end of the Chelsea Piers. Fifteen minutes later it will glide by Battery Park City after emerging into view from beyond the Holland Tunnel vent just off the foot of Canal Street. Here the ship will be framed between the cast-iron lampposts.
A spot at the rail on NY Waterway's Hoboken or Jersey City ferries, from the World Financial Center, could provide a truly spectacular, looking-up view of the ship, but the timing could be tricky. The ferry would need to sail just as the liner was getting near.
Finally, one of my favorite vantage points is in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, next to the Shore Parkway, where the QE2 comes by roughly 45 minutes to an hour after sailing. As you head south from Manhattan, there is a small scenic parking spot off the parkway just before you reach the exit for the Verrazano. Despite the highway, it is somehow quieter here, and you can clearly hear the hum of the liner's diesel electric engines as it sails beneath the bridge and then slowly disappears into the Atlantic.
The views from Manhattan will be the best during the summer, when the sun will still be high while the ship sails; otherwise it would be backlighted. Seen from a distance, its ocean-liner pedigree can be appreciated: the sleek, raked prow, the black hull, the black-and-red funnel, the white superstructure with its ascending levels of decks tapering toward the stern. The December sailing should be spectacular, but very different: the liner will be a sheet of lights moving in the darkness.
I was on the Queen Elizabeth 2 a few times while I was a reporter. I recorded the thoughts of people embarking on a world cruise in the late 1990's — a happy occasion for Cunard — and visited the ship in December 1994 with other reporters after a disastrous, public-relations nightmare crossing. It had been put back into service too soon after a $45 million refit, and there had been some problems, including, if memory serves, exploding toilets. Not a happy occasion for Cunard.
And once, before that, I was a passenger.
This was 1992. My girlfriend and I got a budget deal on a four-day cruise to Bermuda. I think we paid $800 each. Not bad, considering that all meals were included, even though it was more than my monthly rent in Brooklyn. I looked forward to this trip for months. But my first reaction after getting aboard after a lifetime of watching these big ships was — sad to say — disappointment.
The décor was not what I'd expected. The Queen Elizabeth 2 was built at a time when designers were trying to make ships look like creatures of the jet age. This meant a weird hybrid of kitschy late-1960's décor and nautical themes, sheathed in cheesy colors. (Other travelers must have shared my reaction. Since 1992 Cunard has redone almost all of the ship's interiors. They are now anachronistically woody but quite graceful.)
What, No Film Stars?
The other passengers probably got discount deals like ours. One group in their 20's monopolized the Jacuzzi near the stern, blasting tunes out of a boombox and drinking sickly colored drinks. An older steward who cleared away their soggy towels and crumpled plastic cups at dusk looked deeply pained. I'm not sure whom I had expected: movie stars, models and suave world travelers, I suppose. Well, there weren't any. The food was good, and there was certainly plenty of it, but it was hardly spectacular to a couple who ate out regularly in Manhattan. And the Broadway-style musical revue? Ugh.
There's a lesson here: romantic ideals from childhood are perhaps best experienced from a distance, so they can never be spoiled. But on the first morning on the way to Bermuda, my feelings started to change.
I got up on deck before anyone else and was stopped by the warm, tropical sea air as I opened the heavy metal door. The sky seemed as if it had been freshly painted dark blue, and the ocean was a shade of green I had never seen before. The wooden decks were wet from a fresh washing. The unique, indescribable smell of a pristine ship mixed with the sea salt. The sunshine itself looked cleaner.
Even inside it was surprising how much you could sense the ocean. As the ship went over a swell, I could feel the wave moving up the corridor outside our cabin, rattling the blond-wood paneling as it went along.
Later in the day, as we sat reading in our deck chairs away from the Jacuzzi-boombox people, I felt a strange, almost existential freedom. I was gripped at times by a powerful desire to hurl my camera into the sea. I don't know why, but I could see it flying through the air and then plunking into the ocean, along with my various cares and anxieties from shore. It was oddly relaxing.
Maybe that's how Captain McNaught feels after his ship clears Pier 92.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company