22. Sea Day - Monday

With a Sea Day, everything slows down, and there is a more relaxed mood all over the ship. Often it turns out to be good day for the swimming pools and Jacuzzis, but as we steamed northward across the Mediterranean, at the end of October, it was cool and breezy on the pool deck. But I had discovered an unexpected surprise in the ship’s Library, which is located inside just forward of the pool deck. The Library on the Norwegian jade was named and dedicated to the ocean liner SS United States. This is the ship built at the Newport News Shipyard from 1950-1952. My father worked on the construction of the vessel and spoke often of the opulence built into the ship as it represented the pinnacle of American shipbuilding in the 20th Century. Of all the ships he worked on during his career at the shipyard, he always considered this one his “Pride and Joy.” In the days when ocean travel was the Only Way to Cross, this ship was America’s answer to the ocean dominance of the British with their Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth. On the maiden voyage of the SS United States in 1952, it captured the speed record for crossing the Atlantic from New York to England, and then claimed the westbound record on its first return trip back to New York. The ship still holds both records to this day. The title trophy is called the Blue Riband, and is displayed in a maritime museum in New York. NCL purchased the ship in 2003, with plans to put it back into service as part of its new division, NCL America, which was created to manage its Hawaii operations. Since then, NCL has sold the ship to a Conservancy which is actively seeking to restore the vessel and position it as a hotel attraction somewhere on the East Coast of the United States. But the SSUS Library remains on the Norwegian Jade and has a large scale model of the ship, with its distinctive Red White and Blue funnels, attractively displayed in a glass case in the center of the library. The hallway photographs, and those on the walls inside the library, show several different views of the ship, including some under full power at sea, or with the New York City skyline in the background. One of them shows the ship at a pier in the shipyard at Newport News, possibly during its construction period. Of course, I could imagine one of the shipyard workers shown in the picture to be my father at work on “his ship.”