American Constitution

American Constitution is 280 feet long, carries 170 guests in 90 staterooms, and is one of only two ships in her class, the other being American Constellation, delivered a year earlier in 2017. She is the largest coastal ship American Cruise Lines had built when she appeared, and she remains the one the line uses for its hardest coastal deployment.

Her nine-foot draft is the deepest figure on any of the line’s coastal ships. For a company whose entire pitch is shallow water and small landings, that sounds like a defect. It is the opposite: it is what makes her steady enough to be worth putting in Southeast Alaska for a full season.

Six decks on a 280-foot hull

The Constellation class stacks more into a small ship than anything the line had tried before. Staterooms run over five levels; two elevators serve all of them, which given who actually books these cruises is not a convenience but a requirement. The Cascade Lounge sits forward with the windows that matter, the Sky Lounge is aft and high, and there is a study, a fitness room on the fifth deck, a Back Porch Café for grilled food, and a sun deck with a putting green on it.

Cabins go from 230 square feet to a 375-square-foot Veranda Suite. Most have private balconies with floor-to-ceiling sliding doors, but not all: she still carries Deluxe Waterview and Single Waterview categories, which have windows. Check the category. Dining is one room, open seating, everything cooked to order, one dinner sitting for all 170 people.

The Alaska case

She is American-built at Chesapeake Shipbuilding in Salisbury, Maryland, US-flagged and American-crewed, which is the whole reason her Alaska itineraries look the way they do. A foreign-flagged ship sailing round-trip in Southeast Alaska has to call in Canada to be legal. American Constitution does not, so her Alaska weeks stay inside Alaska: Juneau, Haines, Skagway, Glacier Bay, Petersburg, Wrangell, Ketchikan. There is no throwaway day in Victoria and no border formality.

Her size does the rest. At 170 guests she puts a small enough group ashore to call at Petersburg and Wrangell, which are fishing towns with fishing-town docks and no infrastructure for three thousand people at once.

Where she actually sails

Two waters, roughly half and half, and Tacoma is her busiest homeport of the two. That is the correction worth making to the usual description of her: she is not an Alaska ship with a Puget Sound tail. She works Puget Sound in the spring and autumn and Alaska in between.

Alaska, May to August. The core is the eight-night Southeast Alaska cruise, round trip from Juneau, with Glacier Bay, Endicott Arm and the Dawes Glacier as the ice days and Haines, Skagway, Petersburg and Wrangell as the towns. She runs an eleven-night Alaskan Explorer up from Ketchikan to Juneau, taking in Misty Fjords and Metlakatla and the Wrangell Narrows on the way. There are longer cruisetours that begin inland at Fairbanks and finish at Juneau, with a rail and coach section through Denali, Anchorage, Seward and the Kenai Fjords bolted onto the front, which is why her advertised lengths run out past two weeks when the time afloat is closer to a week. If you are comparing prices, compare what is inside the number of days. At the ends of the season she makes the long repositioning run herself, Juneau down to Tacoma through the Inside Passage.

Puget Sound, March to May and September to October. The eight-night Puget Sound and San Juan Islands cruise sails round trip from Tacoma and it is the single itinerary she operates most: Seattle, Port Angeles on the Olympic Peninsula, Port Townsend, Poulsbo, Bremerton, Anacortes, Friday Harbor in the San Juans, and a full day cruising the islands. Note that this one does cross the border; Victoria, British Columbia is on it, which the Alaska weeks deliberately are not. A longer Northwest National Parks version stretches to a fortnight and adds Olympic, Mount Rainier and North Cascades ashore.

Who she suits

Travelers who want Southeast Alaska without a resort ship: no dedicated naturalist theater, no glass observation dome, no 2,000 people at the rail, but also no Canadian detour and no tendering. She is at her best for anyone who wants the small ports rather than the glacier photograph. She also suits anyone who has decided against Alaska entirely and wants the Olympic Peninsula and the San Juans instead; that half of her year is a genuinely different holiday sold under the same hull, at lower latitudes and lower prices.

She is not the right ship for families, for anyone who needs a pool or a gym bigger than a hotel room, or for anyone who assumes every cabin has a balcony; her sister does not solve that either. Nor is she a way of choosing between the two Constellation-class ships: American Constellation now runs the same itineraries out of the same homeports, and the honest advice is to pick on the date rather than the hull. And on the open water between Juneau and Puget Sound she is still a 280-foot ship; the nine-foot draft helps, but it is not a liner.