American Spirit

American Spirit is the second of three Independence-class coastal ships and, at 220 feet and 90 guests, the smallest ship American Cruise Lines operates outside its paddlewheelers. She entered service in 2005, which by the standards of this fleet makes her old: two-thirds of the ships around her have been delivered since 2018.

The age shows in one specific and honest way. On the newer ships every single stateroom has a private balcony. On American Spirit they do not. Her six cabin categories include Deluxe Waterview and Standard Waterview rooms (a window, not a door) alongside the balcony cabins and a single 315-square-foot veranda suite. If a balcony matters to you, book the category, don’t assume it.

What a 2005 hull buys you

Her draft is six and a half feet. That is remarkably little for a 220-foot ship, and it is the reason she exists. She can work up narrow channels and into shallow bays where the deeper Constellation- and Patriot-class ships have to stand off, and she ties up at town docks rather than anchoring and tendering. A traditional bow and stabilizers handle the open stretches.

Inside, she is arranged over four decks (Main, Second, Third and the Sun Deck) with no elevator lobby drama and no atrium, because there is no room for one. The public spaces are the Cascade Lounge forward, a midship lounge, an entertainment lounge, a reading room, a small fitness area, and a sun deck with a shaded seating area. Dining is one restaurant on the main deck with windows running most of the way around, open seating, one dinner service, food cooked to order. A complimentary cocktail hour at half past five is the social event of the day, and on a ship with 90 people aboard it functions as one.

American-built, American-crewed

Every hull in this fleet comes out of Chesapeake Shipbuilding in Salisbury, Maryland, sails under the US flag, and is run by an American crew. That is what lets American Spirit string together Tacoma, Seattle, Port Townsend and Friday Harbor without needing a foreign port to make the voyage legal. Large foreign-flagged ships working the Pacific Northwest have to insert Victoria or Vancouver whether the schedule wants it or not. She calls at Victoria too, it is on every week she runs, but as a day worth having rather than a legal requirement, which is a different thing and does mean bringing a passport.

Where she actually sails

Tacoma, and nowhere else. Every departure she has begins and ends at the Foss Waterway, and it is summer work: she runs from late spring to the start of October and then stops.

The week is the eight-night Puget Sound & San Juan Islands cruise, and it is port-dense to the point of being a bus route, Seattle, Bremerton and Poulsbo on the sound, Port Townsend at the corner, Port Angeles under the Olympics, Anacortes, Friday Harbor in the San Juans, and Victoria across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, with a day given to cruising the islands and another to the sound itself. Somewhere ashore nearly every day, short hops overnight, sheltered water throughout: exactly what a shallow-draft ninety-berth vessel is for.

The other thing on her calendar is longer and stranger. The Northwest National Parks cruise runs a fortnight from the same berth and uses the ship as a moving hotel for the land, Olympic National Park from Port Angeles, Mount Rainier from Tacoma, and the North Cascades by way of Burlington up the Skagit valley. It is three national parks and a cruise sold as one booking, and it is the reason a boat whose standard product is eight nights shows a fourteen-night maximum.

There is no Alaska on her calendar and no East Coast season. Apart from the afternoon at Victoria she does not leave Washington water at all.

Who she suits

People who want the Pacific Northwest at close range and do not much care what the ship looks like. On a seven-night loop she calls somewhere nearly every day, the walk from the gangway to town is usually short, and with 90 guests you will have met most of them by the third night.

She is the wrong ship for anyone who wants a new one. She is twenty-one years old, the cabins are not all balconies, the public rooms are small and there is no Sky Walk, no bow terrace and no glass atrium of the kind the line has been building since 2018. If those matter, her sisters won’t fix it either, but American Constitution runs the same week out of the same berth in a newer hull, and she is also the one that carries on to Alaska for the back half of the year, which American Spirit never does.