American Glory

American Glory is a catamaran. That is the fact to start with, because almost no overnight cruise ship is one. She was delivered by Chesapeake Shipbuilding in November 2023 as the second of the Coastal Cats, a 100-guest design American Cruise Lines built to reach places its monohulls could not, and the twin hulls are doing specific work: they hold her steady at anchor and underway, they let her run faster for the power, and above all they give her a very shallow draft for a ship with four decks of balcony cabins on top.

The name is a reuse

There was an earlier American Glory, built by the same yard in 2002, 200 feet long, 49 passengers, worked the East Coast and the inland waterways. She was retired, and on November 4, 2019 she was scuttled about fifteen nautical miles off the Indian River Inlet in Delaware to serve as an artificial reef. Divers visit her. The name came back four years later on a ship more than twice her capacity, which is worth knowing if you find yourself reading a review that does not add up.

What the hull buys you

Shallow draft on a coastal ship is the difference between a real town dock and a long tender ride, and this fleet builds its itineraries around walking off the bow into the middle of a place. She gets into small New England harbors, up the Hudson to Albany, and into the shoal water of the Chesapeake and the Intracoastal, none of which is available to a ship that needs fifteen or twenty feet under her.

The trade is the shape of the vessel. A catamaran is beamy, boxy and tall for her length, and she does not have the sea-kindly lines of a small monohull. This is a protected-water ship by design and she is deployed accordingly.

Inside, she is 100 guests across five decks, with staterooms on Main, 2nd, 3rd and 4th. Everything above the Main Deck has a private balcony; the eight Premium Waterview rooms on Main have picture windows instead. Even the cheapest balcony room is 250 square feet, which is larger than most suites on a mainstream ocean ship, and the Grand Suite on 4th runs to 550. The public rooms are the Chesapeake Lounge in the bow, the Sky Lounge aft on top, the Back Porch Café outdoors, a small library called the Study, one glass-enclosed restaurant with a single seating, and a fitness room. There are two elevators. There is no pool, no casino and no theater, and there was never going to be room for one.

Where she actually sails

She follows the weather, and she does it on a two-homeport pattern that is about as clean as anything in this fleet.

Providence, from late spring to late autumn. The largest block of her calendar is a round-trip New England islands week out of Rhode Island, and the port list is the reason people book it: Newport, Bristol, Block Island, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, with Plymouth on some of them. Nothing about that week involves open ocean or a night at sea; it is a short hop each evening and a town every morning, which is what a beamy shoal-draft catamaran is for.

Charleston, from November to April. For the winter she goes south and runs the sea islands week down to Amelia Island, taking the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway behind the barrier beaches and calling at Beaufort, Hilton Head Island, Savannah, St. Simons Island and Jekyll Island. Amelia Island ends up her single most-visited port because of it.

The Hudson, each autumn. In between the two she puts in a foliage block on the river, mostly round-trip out of Albany and sometimes one-way from New York, calling at Catskill, Kingston, Hyde Park, Sleepy Hollow and West Point. It is a genuinely good use of a shallow-draft ship, because the Hudson above Kingston is not deep water.

The rest is a handful of longer and stranger things: a Northeast harbors run between Boston and New York by way of Mystic, New London, Old Saybrook, Essex and Sag Harbor; a Cape Codder week round-trip from Boston; a Potomac and Chesapeake week from Washington to Baltimore; and a fortnight-long inland passage from Baltimore to Amelia Island that stitches the whole eastern seaboard together behind the beaches.

Being US-built and US-flagged is what makes all of it possible. Providence to Nantucket and back, or Charleston to Amelia Island, are voyages between two American ports, and under the Passenger Vessel Services Act a foreign-flagged ship cannot carry passengers on them at all. The entire deployment exists in a gap the rest of the industry is legally shut out of.

Who she suits

People who want the coast and the river rather than the ocean: short hops, a town every day, no sea days, and a ship small enough that you know the crew’s names by Wednesday. The cabins are large and nearly all of them have a balcony, which for the money is the strongest thing she has going.

She does not suit anyone who wants a ship to disappear into; 100 guests means you see the same faces at every meal, and the single restaurant with one seating makes that unavoidable. She is wrong for families with children, wrong for anyone who wants nightlife, and wrong for open-ocean romantics: a catamaran built for shoal water is not a vessel you take offshore for the pleasure of it. She is also the wrong sister for anyone set on the Chesapeake or on Maine, American Legend carries most of that water, and for the Hudson in high summer rather than autumn, which is American Eagle’s season rather than hers.