American Independence

American Independence is the third and last of American Cruise Lines’ Independence-class coastal ships, delivered by Chesapeake Shipbuilding in June 2010, three months ahead of schedule, and sent straight to New England for her inaugural cruise out of Providence, Rhode Island on the twenty-third of that month, followed by a summer of weekly Maine coast departures from Portland. She is the largest of the three at 2,169 gross tons and 222 feet, and she is the one where the class stopped being a coastal ship that could take a swell and started being one that was comfortable in it.

The four feet

The whole case for this hull over her sisters is beam. American Star, three years older, is forty-six feet across. American Independence is fifty. On a ship this small that is a large proportional difference, and the line spent it on two things: staterooms noticeably bigger than anything the class had carried before, most of them with a private balcony, and active wing stabilizers.

Stabilizers are not standard equipment on small US coastal vessels and they are the reason this ship reads differently from the two ahead of her in the series. Some of the water she works is protected (the Chesapeake is an estuary, not an ocean), but the Gulf of Maine is not, and neither are the legs that move her between seasons. A ninety-passenger ship without fins moves.

She was announced at a hundred and two passengers and the line now lists her at ninety. Ninety people on a 222-foot hull is a lot of room per head by the standards of anything else afloat.

What being US-built actually buys

She was built in Maryland, she flies the American flag and her crew are American, and that combination is the legal condition of carrying passengers between two US ports at all. A foreign-flagged ship cannot run Baltimore to Washington, or Portland to Bar Harbor, without inventing a foreign call to hang the voyage on. That restriction is the reason this whole fleet exists in the form it does, why every itinerary on it is domestic, and why the competition on the Chesapeake is essentially nobody.

Where she actually sails

She migrates, on a short leash. Summer is the Maine coast, the shoulders are the Chesapeake, and Rhode Island sits between the two. Nothing she does runs longer than eight nights.

Maine is the bulk of her year. From early summer into September she works the Maine Coast & Harbors cruise round trip out of Portland, Maine, Bath, Boothbay Harbor, Rockland, Camden, Bar Harbor, Bucksport and Bangor up the Penobscot, with a full day given to nothing but cruising the coast. A one-way version of the same week finishes at Bangor rather than turning for home. This is the classic downeast run, done in a hull small enough to tie up in the middle of each of those towns instead of anchoring off and tendering in. Bangor is the call that shows what the class is for: it sits far up the Penobscot, well inland of anywhere a large ship can reach, and getting there needs a shallow draft and no cruise terminal at the far end, which is the whole specification of this vessel.

Providence gives her the islands. The New England Islands cruise leaves from the port where she made her first voyage in 2010 and takes in Newport, Bristol, Block Island, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, the shortest hops of anything she does, and the densest week of calls.

Autumn, and the front edge of spring, are the Chesapeake. She comes south for the Potomac River & Chesapeake Bay cruise, one-way between Washington and Baltimore, and the Chesapeake Bay round trip out of Baltimore: Annapolis, St. Michaels and Cambridge on the Maryland side, then up the York for Yorktown and Williamsburg, with slow days spent simply cruising the bay. It is the colonial and Civil War itinerary the line has sold longer than any other, and she is one of the two small ships that still work it.

Who she suits

People who want the American coast at a walking pace, on a boat small enough to tie up in towns that have no cruise terminal and never will. The shore program is included rather than sold on top. Mobility is straightforward, with an elevator, short gangways and no tendering, which matters on a Maine itinerary where the gangway is the whole of the transfer.

She is wrong for families, for anyone who wants a second restaurant or a bar open after ten, and for anyone who finds a fixed group of ninety people for a week claustrophobic rather than sociable. And the sailing itself is deliberately undramatic: sheltered water, short overnight runs, an anchorage or a town dock every morning. The interest comes from what is ashore, and if that is not what you are buying, this is a long way to go for it.