Polar Cruise Enterprises talks with G Adventures, ship could also be used as training vessel

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Written by Kari Reinikainen Kari Reinikainen

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Published: 04 September 2013 04 September 2013

Polar Cruise Enterprises, the Norwegian company that plans to build an ice strengthened cruise vessel for operations mainly in Arctic waters, says it is in talks with Gap Adventures, the Canadian expedition cruise company, to employ the projected ship and that it also intends to have it used as a training vessel.

The company calls its project Ursus Maritimus; the projected vessel will have a length of 137m and passenger capacity of 240 persons, while crew of will number 70-plus.

 “There are several tour operators within this passenger cruise niche that would be interested in adding a vessel like this to the fleet they are operating, However, we are in close contact with Canadian G Adventures for an eventual chartering arrangement,” Polar Cruise Enterprises said in a statement.

“We also have plans to get passengers from Asia in the future, especially from Japan and China. The Helsinki- Vantaa airport is a transportation hub for Asia, and most likely in the future Finnair will open a Helsinki to Tromso route. So we will not need to add more than Tromso - Longyearbyen to have the perfect channel to Asia,” the company stated.

The ship is also intended to be used also for scientific exploring. There will be built laboratory facilities as well as facilities for diving activities, such as a portable compression chamber.

Manning and technical management of the ship would be taken care by the Satakunta University of Applied Sciences in Finland. The vessel is planned to be a training ship as well.

It is easy to arrange many trainee cabins and lecture rooms on board this kind of cruise ship. “The ship will be navigated by Finnish officers. In addition to the Finnish crew there will be Filipinos as deck hands and stewardesses. They are found to be very suitable for this type of cruising service,” the company said.

“The vessel will be built with an icebreaker bow and will be built to the highest polar ice class. In principle the vessel will not have any operational limits. It will be able to operate in all seasons in all oceans of the world. The main objective, however will be to operate the vessel in the polar seas: in the North: Svalbard, Greenland waters, Arctic Canada, the Northeast and the Northwest Passage and the waters around the Antarctica,” the company said, adding that no such cruise vessel had been built to date.

The projected vessel is designed by Aker Arctic in Helsinki in cooperation with Capt. Endresen, one of the initiators of the project. The first drawings were made in 2008. Minor changes were made in the spring of 2012. The plan is to build the vessel at STX Finland’s Rauma shipyard and the ship would fly the Finnish flag, with Rauma as home port.