This Side of the Pond

So let’s say you’re kicking back bored on the sofa, somewhere in the south of England, wishing you could have a vacation to clear the cobwebs. You’re dubious of planes and bored to tears of caravan parks, and you certainly can’t spend a couple of weeks on an all-expenses-paid cruise.

But there’s still a way you can enjoy the glitz and glamor of those giant ships, thanks to an entrepreneur from my home county. Paul Derham lives in Mudeford, a modest coastal village in Dorset where not a lot usually happens and the locals like it that way.

Derham spent a quarter century working on the cruise ships, eventually working his way up to the position of deputy captain for P&O Cruises, which is probably the most famous of the British cruise companies. He gave up the life to launch his own business, pootling around the waters off the south of England in his own pair of passenger ferries.

The pandemic hasn’t been great for business across most of the vacation industry, and it didn’t do much good to the ferry business, but Derham made a discovery that was destined to cheer him up – and everyone else, for that matter. Looking out across the bay, he realized the view wasn’t quite what it usually is.

Instead of clear, calm waters and the odd seagull, he was looking at a line of enormous ships on the horizon that didn’t seem to be going anywhere. It looked like someone was playing Battleships using actual boats, but got bored in the middle of the game.

With his background as a seafarer, it didn’t take Derham long to figure out why they were there. As we speak, along that coast are dozens of cruise ships that don’t have any place to be.

These vessels usually spend the summer buzzing back and forth in the Mediterranean and Caribbean, carrying thousands of tourists on dream vacations to exotic destinations, but the early outbreaks on cruise ships brought the industry to a standstill.

And so, for now, those ships stand almost empty. They don’t want to go into port, partly because there’d be a gridlock but mostly because it would cost them a wad of cash in berthing fees, so they’re all at anchor in the middle of nowhere.

Each one has a skeleton crew to prevent “anchor drag”, which is what happens when there’s weather. Presumably these huge cruise companies would prefer to come back in a year and find their ships where they left them, rather than wandering across the Bay of Biscay.

They do need to bring the ships into dock in ports such as Southampton every so often to refuel and grab a few bags of tortilla chips for the engine room crew. Apart from that, they sit quietly out at sea, dreaming of the days of cocktail umbrellas and 80s-themed dance parties on the pool deck.

They’ve come to be known as the “ghost ships”; behemoths of the ocean, abandoned and silent, too far from shore to be explored by the brave and curious who can see them from the beach.

Derham realized he could fix that problem. On a whim, he advertised a couple of tours of the cruise ship graveyard on his Facebook page.

They sold out within two hours. It turned out that getting up close and personal with the ghost ships was something that interested a lot of people.

Derham now runs his tours almost daily, using his knowledge of the industry to spice up the experience. He says many of his passengers simply wanted to see the massive vessels up close in their natural habitat, because you can’t get a sense of their scale while they’re sitting in port – these things can be over 20 stories high.

For your reference, if you haven’t experienced one for yourself, my parents tell the story of not being able to find their ship when they went on their first cruise. When they finally located someone to ask for directions, they realized they’d been stood next to it all along, except they’d assumed the darned thing was a building.

One of the cruise ships is especially welcoming, according to Derham. The captain has fashioned a six-foot hand out of plywood and uses it to wave at the tour boats as they go past. I imagine this is quite the highlight for tourists, even if it does break the “ghost ship” illusion.

When Derham passes another of the ships, he toots his ferry’s little horn. The Aurora responds with its own, somewhat more powerful blast. I suspect this is as fun for the cruise ship captain as it is for the tourists, as he must be getting a bit lonely out there by now.

The ferry is able to get close enough to the cruise ships that one passenger apparently discovered he could still access the WiFi. I think Derham himself is also part of the attraction, a man who can tell stories about working on the iconic Canberra back in 1975 and on P&O’s Aurora during its 2001 maiden voyage, when it helped to rescue eleven Russian sailors as their liner sank in the South China Sea, the cruise ship’s passengers lined up along the railings to scan the water for survivors.

Derham says he’s now fielding up to 100 calls per day from people who want to visit the ghost ships, and he’s taking out passengers just as quickly as he can. He’ll keep going through the fall and as far into winter as he can – the only thing that will stop him is the weather.

It just goes to show the power of a good idea, even in the worst of times, and the ability of the human spirit to find entertainment anywhere we look. Even if that means being entertained just by looking at the things that are not currently entertaining anyone at all.