Man-made overboard

FINLAND - The captain does not request the pleasure of your company for cocktails. He will not ask you to dress for dinner - but helmet and harness will be required for those passengers wishing to climb the artificial rock face on the upper deck. And as you cling by your fingertips and toes in the bracing sea breeze, take a moment to consider the ship beneath you, the largest cruise liner in the world.

More than 366m long and 30m wide, it has a shopping mall, casino, theatres, an ice-skating rink, a golf course and a machine that allows surfers to ride a fake breaker 73m above the real waves.

In the distance is the coastline of Africa or Sicily or somewhere, but really, who cares? Why whizz ashore to look at ancient relics when there is so much to do on this ocean-going palace of thrills?

At £515 million, ($1.3 billion) this is the most expensive cruise liner ever. Or it will be, once it is built. Project Genesis does not yet exist, except as blueprints, because it has only just been ordered by the cruise line Royal Caribbean.

It is to be built by Aker Yards in Finland and is expected to launch in the autumn of 2009.

Five times heavier than the Titanic, the new ship is being seen by some in the cruise industry as a sign that their present boom will prove unsinkable. A new generation of super-ships is being planned that will make Genesis look like a tug.

This year, liners will carry 15 million passengers (10 million from America and at least a million from the fastest-growing market, Britain). Compare that to 1970, when only half a million people took cruises.

At least 23 new cruise ships will launch in the next four years. Cunard's Queen Mary II is the biggest now, but will be superseded by Royal Caribbean's Freedom of the Seas in June, which will in turn concede the title to Genesis.

After that, who knows? There are no technical reasons cruise liners may not be twice as big as Genesis and carry 12,000 passengers or more. You might want to call them floating islands, but they are already bigger than that.

"There is no limit to the potential size of these ships," says Paddy McGregor of Royal Caribbean. "Everybody thought that the arrival of the jumbo jet was the defining moment in air travel, but now we are getting the triple-decker."

Innovations are being planned by ship builders, including roller coasters, solar sails and sonic guns that see off pirates. Not that many people in cruising like to talk about pirates. Or terrorists. Or the number of people who go missing while on board.

These are dark, threatening clouds on the horizon of an industry that prefers blue skies.

Security has been a problem on the high seas since sail was first unfurled, but modern pirates carry AK-47s, not cutlasses. Slow-moving cruise ships are a perfect target for terrorists, as British Prime Minister Tony Blair and 30 other world leaders were warned by experts last year.

The irony is that cruising has benefited from the fear of flying generated by the September 11 attacks, although people in the industry do not like to say so.

Neither do they like to give details of their security measures, although some did emerge when speedboats approached the luxury liner Seabourn Spirit as it sailed off the coast of Somalia last November. They fired rocket-propelled grenades, one of which hit the ship.

But the attackers were repelled using a futuristic US Navy-style sonic blaster that can knock a pirate off his feet. Nobody was hurt. But there is an attack (usually against a freighter) every day.

Douglas Ward, author of the Berlitz Guide to Cruising and Cruise Ships, was called to Washington to testify on behalf of the cruise industry 20 years ago, after a liner was hijacked.

It does not happen more often because it is harder to board a luxury liner than to get on an aircraft, thanks to searches, scans and sniffer dogs.

Attack from the air or sea remains a nightmare, however. If successful it could be disastrous to the industry, putting people off a way of travelling that is relatively confined and highly visible, even ostentatious.

Ships can be seen as a way of getting rich people to exotic places and away again before they have to face reality. It is certainly hard not to feel angry or resentful when you watch from the shanty town on the edge of a port as a luxury liner takes its moorings.

"They are sitting targets," admits Ward, "but then so is anything on land. The likelihood of a cruise ship being targeted is small. This is a safe way to travel."

Unless you fall overboard. Reports suggest that 14 people have gone missing at sea in the past two years. The US Congress has investigated the disappearance of 26-year-old George Smith, who was lost from a Royal Caribbean ship in the Aegean last June.

His wife Jennifer believes he was murdered, and says she was badly treated by the cruise line.

The ship left her in Turkey and sailed on. Royal Caribbean has offered sympathies and said it was co-operating with the FBI.

The glamour of the industry, still lingering from its golden age early in the last century, means that when something goes wrong cruise liners get a lot of bad publicity.

The latest involved the QMII, which cancelled stops in the Caribbean and Brazil because of a broken propeller. Passengers who had spent up to £17,000 ($44,000) each launched legal action, but were placated by full refunds.

The P&O ship Aurora suffered engine trouble at the start of a world cruise last year, and gave up after circling the Isle of Wight for 11 days.

The failure cost the company £25 million ($65 million). Then there are the bugs, which rampage through passenger lists, confine people to their cabins and make headlines. Aurora and its sister ship Oceana have suffered those.

Bigger ships still break down, and environmentalists fear they will also mean more pollution.

The Bluewater Network, whose campaigns have helped to result in several lines being fined millions of dollars for polluting the seas, says: "A typical cruise ship on a one-week voyage generates more than 51 tonnes of garbage, 3.8 million litres of grey water [waste from sinks, showers, galleys and laundries], 795,000 litres of sewage and 132,000 litres of oil-contaminated water.

"Most of this waste is dumped directly into the ocean, some treated, some not."

David Dingle, managing director of Carnival UK, which operates P&O among others, disagrees: "Environmentally, cruising is the most regulated travel tourism industry there is," he says. Waste is disposed of on land. "The regulations keep getting tighter."

The environmental impact of large new quays in unspoilt places has yet to be estimated, but they will be built if there is money in it.

And there is: British passengers alone spend £1.24 billion ($3.2 billion) a year on cruises. British bookings have quadrupled in 10 years.

The average age of British passengers has fallen to 54, as men and women with grown-up children and money in the bank use a cruise as a stylish, adult version of the gap year they never had.

Companies are now targeting families and younger people. Easyjet's founder, Stelios Haji-Ioannou, offers cruising along the French Riviera for £25 ($65) a day, although the cabins have been compared to prison cells.

In contrast, it cost £3000 ($7899) to be on board the P&O's Artemis when it sailed out of Southampton, bound for the Amazon and Orinoco rivers.

For that, passengers have access to a full English breakfast, morning coffee and icecream, a five-course lunch, afternoon tea with cake and sandwiches, snacks throughout the day and a six-course dinner every evening.

There is also a gym, but the Artemis is a smaller, stylish liner with "touches of teak and brass" that seeks to evoke the golden age of cruising.

So, as a tribute to this age, it also offers the "glittering occasion" of the Captain's Reception.

Even in the coming era of the super-liner, there will still be ships for those with fantasies of officers in crisp, white uniforms and pink gin at sunset. As long as nobody goes overboard.

- INDEPENDENT