American Liberty

American Liberty is a catamaran. That single fact separates her from most of the fleet she sails with and explains nearly everything else about her: a 56-foot beam on a 241-foot hull, a seven-foot draft, and a flat, wide, stable platform carrying 100 guests in 54 staterooms. She was delivered from Chesapeake Shipbuilding in Salisbury, Maryland in 2024, the third of the line’s Coastal Cat series after American Eagle and American Glory in 2023 and just ahead of American Legend.

The line has said it intends to build a dozen of them. That is a substantial bet on one hull form, and the bet is that a wide shallow catamaran can go almost anywhere in the United States (up a river, into a shoal bay, alongside a town dock) without giving up the sea-keeping a monohull of the same length would need deeper water to get.

What the two hulls actually change

Not width, in the end. Her 56-foot beam is the same as the monohull Patriot class, which is 248 feet long. What the twin hulls buy is buoyancy spread across two widely separated bodies: stability at low speed and at anchor, and a seven-foot draft carried without the ship becoming tender. She sits shallower than any of the line’s larger monohulls and does not need a keel to stay upright.

The stern is where it shows most. Between the hulls she carries a swim and activity platform that folds down at anchor, with kayaks launched off it. Very little else at this size in American waters offers that, and on the water she actually works (tidal creeks behind the Georgia barrier islands, the marshes off Beaufort, spring-fed rivers in north Florida), it is the difference between looking at the water and being in it.

The accommodation is uniform in a way the older ships are not: 54 staterooms, 250 square feet to a 550-square-foot Grand Suite, and every single one has a private balcony behind floor-to-ceiling sliding glass. Nothing aboard has a window and a curtain instead.

Aboard, she is arranged around the Chesapeake Lounge for the evening cocktail hour and entertainment, a Sky Lounge and sun deck up top with a walking circuit, a chart room, a study, a bow terrace for sitting forward under way, one restaurant with open seating, and the Back Porch Café for grilled food. There is an elevator to each deck, a fitness room, and a guest launderette. There is no casino, no pool and no show lounge in the theatrical sense.

The point of an American hull

She is built in Maryland, registered in the United States and crewed by Americans. That combination is what the Passenger Vessel Services Act requires of any ship carrying passengers between two US ports, and it is the reason her schedule can read Charleston, Beaufort, Hilton Head, Savannah, Amelia Island with nothing foreign in it. A foreign-flagged ship cannot sell that week at all, at any size; not because the water is hard but because the law shuts her out of it.

Where she actually sails

The Southeast, relentlessly. The overwhelming bulk of American Liberty’s calendar is a single eight-night run, Charleston down to Amelia Island, and she repeats it right through the year, high summer included; there is no off season on this route. The interest is what she does between the two ends: rather than running outside in the Atlantic she takes the Intracoastal Waterway, the sheltered channel behind the barrier islands, stopping at Beaufort, Hilton Head Island, Savannah, St. Simons Island and Jekyll Island. That is a chain of sea-island towns with old waterfronts and no cruise terminals anywhere, and getting a hundred-guest ship alongside in the middle of each of them is the entire argument for a seven-foot draft.

Around that spine sit a handful of other things. Out of Jacksonville she runs a Florida rivers week, the Tolomato River, St. Augustine, Green Cove Springs and Blue Spring State Park, which is manatee water and about as far from an ocean cruise as a cruise gets. A fortnight-long inland passage links Baltimore to Amelia Island by way of Norfolk, Kitty Hawk, Morehead City and Wilmington, covering the whole eastern seaboard behind the beaches. An eleven-night run between Washington and Philadelphia takes in the revolutionary ground on the way. And there is a short northern block, New England island weeks round-trip from Providence calling at Newport, Bristol, Block Island, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, plus a Hudson foliage run up to Albany, but it is a thin slice of her year rather than the shape of it. She is a Southeast ship that visits the north, not the other way round.

Who she suits

Someone who wants the Lowcountry at close range (Savannah and Beaufort and the Golden Isles, a town most mornings, no sea days and no crossing to get there), and who will actually put a kayak in the water. Fares include drinks with meals, shore excursions and gratuities, so the on-board bill is close to nothing, and the shoulder months on this route are mild in a way New England’s never are.

She is wrong for anyone who wants a ship as the destination, there is not much of her, and wrong for families with children, who will find nobody their own age. She is wrong for anyone hoping for variety across a schedule: she runs one itinerary most weeks and the sea islands do not change much from Tuesday to Tuesday. And a catamaran is a firm ride: she is very stable at anchor and in a bay, but in a short chop the twin hulls produce a quick, snappy motion that some people like considerably less than the long roll of a monohull. If it is New England you are after, her sister American Glory spends her summers there and American Legend covers the Chesapeake.