Mariner of the Seas
This review is written by Amy Blume.

On February 22nd, 2009, Royal Caribbean's 138,000grt Mariner of the Seas made her maiden departure from her new home port of Los Angeles.  She arrived in the middle of the night on the 19th having completed a repositioning around Cape Horn.  Mariner was the last of five Voyager class ships, her maiden voyage on Novermber 16, 2003.  Her arrival to the Los Angeles market is part of the new-to-you campaign that Royal Caribbean have been waging successfully in LA for the last few years as she seems to be quite an advancement over Monarch of the Seas and Vision of the Seas which she replaces.  In fact, her itinarary is more Vision than Monarch so the LA short trip passenger is now solely catered for by Carnival down at Long Beach.  The day was dark and overcast, not the best for photographing our new resident, but we decided to head down to the port for the occasion anyway, and the rain held off long enough for our harbor cruise aboard Fiesta.

As we passed her on Fiesta, she gave a great bellow on her whistle and began to pull in her lines.  Waving madly at all the people on deck, we were lucky enough that there wasn't enough time for our Captain to get us back to Ports O'Call before she came up behind us.  So it was with great fun that we got our socks blasted off as we pulled out of the way and were passed by the gargantuan lady.
A Met Life blimp flying overhead, MOTS sailed out into an unusually dark LA sunset.  We didn't get to follow her to Land's End that day, but left happy knowing that there would be more oppotunities in the future.

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© Amy Blume 22nd February 2009
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