Greg Mortimer

Greg Mortimer is not a Lindblad ship and it is worth being clear about that before anything else. She is owned by SunStone Ships, she was built for and is operated by the Australian company Aurora Expeditions, and she is named for Aurora’s co-founder, the first Australian to climb Everest without supplementary oxygen. Lindblad has her on a three-year charter beginning in 2027, for the Alaska season only. Each austral summer she goes back to Aurora and back to Antarctica.

Why she is in Alaska at all

Lindblad ran Alaska for four decades on National Geographic Sea Bird and National Geographic Sea Lion, a pair of American-flagged sisters from the early 1980s carrying sixty-two guests each. Both retire in 2026. Greg Mortimer replaces the two of them with one hull, and the arithmetic is the point: two ships at sixty-two become one at a hundred and fifty-four, which is about thirty more berths in the region on a single set of fixed costs, with an international crew and a foreign flag instead of two American ones.

That is a real change and not all of it is in the guest’s favor. The old boats were tiny, shallow, and could tuck into places a 342-foot ship cannot; being US-flagged, they could also run entirely inside Alaska, which a foreign-flagged ship cannot do without touching a foreign port. That is part of why the sailings on offer here lean on Vancouver, with Sitka as the other end. If your memory of Lindblad Alaska is a sixty-two-guest boat nosing into a bay with nobody else in it, this is a different product.

What you get in exchange is a purpose-built expedition ship rather than a forty-year-old one: stabilizers, a real observation lounge, cabins with balconies, a sauna with a sea view and two outdoor Jacuzzis, and a hull that handles the open Gulf of Alaska without complaint.

The bow, first

She was, in 2019, the first passenger ship anyone had built with Ulstein’s inverted X-BOW, a year ahead of National Geographic Endurance, which uses the same idea on a larger and stronger hull. The stem rakes backward instead of forward, so the bow cuts into a wave rather than riding up and dropping onto it. Aurora ordered her for Drake Passage crossings, where that matters most. In the Inside Passage it matters considerably less; the protected water she will spend most of her Alaska summer in does not test a bow.

The rest of her expedition equipment is more relevant to the deployment. She has four Zodiac launch platforms, so a full complement gets off the ship quickly rather than queuing at one gangway, and hydraulic viewing platforms that swing out over the water at close to sea level. On deck seven are two GeoDomes, heated glass observation domes for watching weather you would not otherwise stand in. She is ice class PC6, Polar Category B, which is a genuine polar rating and complete overkill for Southeast Alaska.

Her past is not spotless. In April 2020 she was the ship stranded off Uruguay with a shipwide COVID outbreak, 128 people aboard eventually tested positive and a crew member died. It was one of the defining maritime stories of that spring, and it belongs on her record.

Where she sails

Almost entirely Alaska and British Columbia: Vancouver and Sitka, the Inside Passage, Endicott Arm, Hubbard Glacier and the Great Bear Rainforest, on seven-night sailings with longer fourteen- and fifteen-night Alaska and British Columbia voyages layered over them. Two sailings sit outside that, a repositioning down to Panama and Costa Rica’s Pacific coast, out of Panama City and San José. The window on this site runs March 2027 to September 2028, which is the charter.

Who she suits

People who want Alaska with a full naturalist team, Zodiac work and a modern ship, and who do not need the ship to be small. She is family-friendly by expedition standards, about sixty percent of the cabins take a third person, and twenty-one pairs of cabins connect, which almost no expedition ship offers.

She does not suit anyone chasing the old Lindblad Alaska. A hundred and fifty-four guests is more than twice the number the retiring boats carried, and it changes what a landing feels like. Nor does she suit anyone who wants consistency of brand: she is a chartered vessel with an Aurora crew culture and a SunStone hull, running a Lindblad program on it. That works, but it is not the same thing as sailing a ship the company built for itself.