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Hotel Booking Shrouded by a dense fog, the vast white vessel slid silently into the bay this morning and anchored far from shore, like a ghost ship unwilling to be noticed. Off the stern, a pair of young sea lions cavorted, tracing arcs in the air, oblivious to their role in the commotion the cruise ship's visit has caused here since it was announced earlier this year.

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Travel Agency When Royal Caribbean, owner of the vessel that came in today and and two other companies announced plans to make Monterey a port of call this year, stewards of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, one of the world's most diverse aquatic ecosystems, shuddered. They had visions of crew members tossing trash overboard and disgorging oily bilge water and sewage, practices for which some companies have paid heavy fines elsewhere.

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Cheap Hotel In an April meeting here, representatives from environmental organizations, the city, the state and the sanctuary told the cruise lines that if they could not refrain from soiling the waters of the bay, they should stay away.

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Flight Booking So the cruise lines agreed in writing, apparently for the first time anywhere, not to discharge anything, not even the relatively innocuous effluence that the law allows.

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Travel Agent "From the ship's master to its crew, every effort is made to ensure that we are good stewards of our ocean environment and of all the ports we visit," William S. Wright, a senior vice president at Royal Caribbean, wrote to a California water quality official on May 28.

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Hotel Chicago As wary travelers forsake journeys abroad after Sept. 11, more cruise ships are plying more United States ports. In most places, the economic benefit of such visits precludes any complaints. Not here.

Online Booking Even today, a small contingent of protesters convened at Fisherman's Wharf, concerned that Royal Caribbean's Grandeur of the Seas, the first of the super-sized cruise ships to debark passengers here, would foul the waters of the bay.

Travel Health Insurance "If cruise ships are allowed to dump anything, they usually dump everything," said Kaitilin Gaffney, a program manager for the Ocean Conservancy, an organization based in Washington that works to protect the oceans, and abroker of the agreement reached here, who watched from Fisherman's Wharf as the Grandeur of the Seas' 1,800 passengers debarked from local boats chartered to take them to shore.

Hotel Reservation "Given their history of dumping garbage in backyards all over," Ms. Gaffney said, referring to cruise ships in general, "we're quite pleased."

London Hotel Booking Royal Caribbean was fined $28 million in 1998 and 1999 after Coast Guard investigators discovered, in what prosecutors described as a fleet-wide practice, that its engineers had rigged illegal plumbing lines to bypass equipment designed to take oil out of bilge water that was about to be dumped at sea.

Discount Travel From 1993 to 1998, cruise ships were found to have caused at least 87 illegal discharges of trash, oil and hazardous wastes into American waters and paid more than $30 million in fines, according to Bluewater Network, a San Francisco environmental organization. Twelve of the cases were in California.

Orlando Hotel Thomas M. Dow, a spokesman for Princess Cruises, one of five cruise lines accused by environmental groups in an April lawsuit of dumping untreated ballast water into California waters, said the discussions with the townspeople here allowed the company to understand their worries about pollution.

Booking Agency "We pretty quickly came to realize that this is what most concerned them," Mr. Dow said, "and that we could operate within those restrictions."

International Travel Medical Tom Greene, director of safety, environment and training for Crystal Cruises, which plans to dispatch its 790-foot Crystal Harmony to Monterey on Oct. 9, said company officials had promised to withhold all liquid and solid waste water while in Monterey Bay. Even though a company policy forbids such dumping, Mr. Greene said the company wanted to reassure local officials in writing that it would abide by their demands.

New York Hotel In November last year, Crystal Cruises was one of six cruise lines that agreed to settlements of $41,250 to $247,500 for a variety of charges concerning excessive smokestack emissions in the port of Juneau, Alaska, over the previous two summers.

Online Travel Booking The first of the three ships scheduled this year for Monterey, the 950-foot, 18-deck Star Princess, with 4,000 passengers and crew members, anchored offshore on May 7 but did not debark passengers because of choppy seas, a disappointment to local business owners.

Travel Medical Insurance In 2000, the cruise industry contributed almost $18 billion to the American economy and generated more than 257,000 jobs, according to the Ocean Conservancy. The industry is growing by more than 8 percent a year.

Miami Hotel "They've been telling us not to throw things overboard," said Margaret Alford, a passenger on the 900-foot Grandeur of the Seas, which made its Monterey stopover as part of a trip of California ports and Mexico. "They're even telling us to use our towels twice, to save water."

Air Deccan Booking Visitors today took in not only the salty-dog seafood snack joints on Fisherman's Wharf, among other things, but Cannery Row, made famous in the John Steinbeck novel of the same name. For many, the area's jewel is the marine sanctuary, which encompasses 5,322 square miles of ocean and is celebrating its 10th anniversary this week. It is believed to house 27 species of whales, dolphins and other marine mammals, 94 species of sea birds and about 345 fish species. The whiskered sea otters, in particular, are much admired, not least for their custom of cracking shellfish open on their bellies while floating on their backs.

Las Vegas Nevada Travel By Nick Madigan
New York Times - 9/19/2002

Topic: Ocean

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