Star Legend

Star Legend is the one hull in this fleet that was not built for Seabourn. She was completed at Schichau-Seebeckwerft in February 1992 as Royal Viking Queen, the last ship Royal Viking Line ever ordered and the smallest it ever ran, at a moment when that company was being taken apart. She became Queen Odyssey for Royal Cruise Line in 1995, Seabourn Legend in 1996, and Star Legend when Windstar bought her in 2015. Four names, four owners, thirty-four years, one set of frames.

In between she had a film career. As Seabourn Legend she played the ship in Speed 2: Cruise Control, which is to say she is the vessel that gets driven into a Caribbean town at the end. The town was a set. She was not damaged. It is not a good film and she is by some distance the best thing in it.

The middle of three

Windstar’s Star Plus Initiative, the operation that cut these ships apart and welded a new midbody in, is told properly on Star Breeze’s page, which is where it started. Star Legend was the second one through. Fabrication of her new 25.6-meter section began at Palermo in September 2019, the work on the ship itself started in March 2020, and Fincantieri delivered her back on May 27, 2021, roughly a year late. The delay was not really hers: asbestos found in Star Breeze’s machinery spaces stalled the program, and then COVID stalled everything.

She came out with fifty additional suites, 312 guests where there had been 208, new public rooms and restaurants, and new main engines. Her original figure of 208 was the lowest of the three, so proportionally she gained the most.

Where she actually sails

She is the fleet’s European ship. The bulk of her year runs out of Civitavecchia, Piraeus, Barcelona and Istanbul, and she works north as far as Norway, the Baltic and the British Isles in season; she is working her way up the Irish coast toward Killybegs as this is written. In mid-November she crosses the Atlantic and spends the winter in Central America on Caribbean, Costa Rica and Panama Canal itineraries, then crosses back.

The thing that distinguishes her schedule from her sisters’ is length. Windstar sells Star Collector voyages, which are strings of consecutive itineraries booked as one trip with few or no repeated ports, and Star Legend carries the longest of them: her Grand European Adventure links enough of them together to touch sixty-six places in nineteen countries in a single booking, with three nights in Bordeaux, two days in Rouen and overnights in Helsinki, Lisbon, Seville and Thessaloniki. Her published trips run from three nights to well past two months. If you want a ship to disappear onto for a season, this is the one in the fleet set up for it.

Who she suits

People who want a long, port-heavy European itinerary and would rather do it with 312 others than 3,000. She gets into Bordeaux and Rouen and small Adriatic and Norwegian harbors that larger ships cannot reach, and that access is the entire product. She is all-suite, dining is a handful of small rooms, and the evening consists of a drink and a musician.

She is wrong for children, wrong for anyone who wants a lot of ship to explore on a sea day, and wrong for anyone shopping on newness. Her steel is from 1991. The 2021 rebuild was thorough and it did not change the fact that you are walking around a vessel laid out for two hundred people by a company that no longer exists.