Celebrity Summit
Celebrity Summit as seen at the New Jersey Cape Liberty terminal at the 5th of september 2010. From here, the ship sails cruises to Bermuda again from this year on, since the departure of Zenith in 2007. As you can read on the introduction-page to Celebrity Cruises, the cruises to Bermuda were the reason Celebrity Cruises was started up in the first place.
As a part of the Millennium-class of ships for Celebrity Cruises, Summit was introduced as the thirth member and she was accepted by the company in october 2001. The ship was built as yardnumber T31 at the Chantiers de L'atlantique wharf at Saint Nazaire, France where all ships of the class were built. She has a tonnage measurement of just over 91.000 and she is 294 meters long, 32,30 meters wide and her draft is 8 meters. The ship has 13 decks of which 11 are accessible for her maximum of 2450 passengers. On a two-per-cabin basis, the number given is 2158. There also are 999 crewmembers aboard. The ships normal sailing speed is 24 knots, quite fast for a passengerliner at the moment. She is driven by two Rolls-Royce/Alstrom designed Mermaid pods. After delivery, she started her sailings in november 2001.
As a remembrance to the earlier liners, something that can be found on every ship of the Millennium class, Summit had aboard several panels from the French Line ship Normandie, one of the greatest liners of all time that had sadly been lost due to a large fire in New York in 1939. The panels are inside one of the ships' restaurants, just as a bronze statue from that same ship called La Normandie. This statue had been bought by Celebrity Cruises during the building of Summit from the Miami Beach based Fontainebleau Hotel.
Just as het earlier sisters Millennium and Infinity, the pod-problems that came to light within the Millennium class of ships also effected this sister. In march 2002, a cruise had to be cancelled due to problems with the pod-system and this was repeated in june 2005, when a cruise in Alaska had to be cancelled.
But another strange story can be told about the ship, that was renamed Celebrity Summit in may 2008, and this happened at the 3rd of april 2010. A man named Bob Gvicious fell of the ship (how this is possible when you behave normally on the outer decks keeps surprising me) and plunged into the water during a Caribbean cruise. Instead of drowning, the 55 year old man from Virginia managed to swim a staggering 19 hours untill he reached the shore at Cayo Lobos, some 3 miles of the coast of Fajardo, Puerto Rico. At least we can say he is a very sportive man, surviving an ordeal like this.
On Christmas eve 2011, a crewmember commited suicide by jumping overboard during a cruise and after searching for nine hours, the ship left and the US Coast Guard searched alone. He was never found. The ship was again in the news in march of 2012, when two men had sex in their cabin while the ship was docked in Dominica, but they left the shades open. Several people at the dockside complained about this and the men were charged for indecent exposure.
