Star Pride

Star Pride is the oldest of Windstar’s three ex-Seabourn yachts and the one the company has had to spend heavily on twice. She was completed at Schichau-Seebeckwerft in Bremerhaven in November 1988 as Seabourn Pride, the first of that line’s original trio of small all-suite ships, and she was christened by Shirley Temple Black. Windstar bought her in 2014; she was the first of the three to change hands, ahead of the ships that became Star Breeze and Star Legend.

The reef at Coiba

Just before Christmas 2015, a year into her Windstar career, she went aground at Isla de Coiba off the Pacific coast of Panama at around a quarter past six in the morning. Nobody was hurt. Guests and crew were taken off to the mainland by Star Breeze, which happened to be nearby, and by a local vessel; everyone got their fare back and a voucher for the same value again. Divers found real damage to the hull and she was towed to Balboa.

She was out of service for six months. Windstar used the time, it had little choice, and spent $4.5 million refurbishing her while the steel was being put right, so she came back in June 2016 for the Mediterranean season in better shape than she went in. It is the sort of thing that only happens to small ships working close to shore, which is also the reason people book them.

Last through Palermo

The Star Plus Initiative is described in full on Star Breeze’s page, since she went first. Star Pride went last. Fincantieri handed her back at Palermo on October 13, 2021, five months behind Star Legend and nearly a year behind Star Breeze, and even then she sat in Italy over the winter and did not carry paying guests again until April 2022 in the Mediterranean.

What she got is what her sisters got: a new midsection, 312 guests where there had been 212, new engines in place of the old ones, a proper spa and an infinity pool aft. Two useful consequences of going last. Her yard work was the most recent of the three, which is worth something in a cabin. And she came out into a schedule Windstar had four years to think about rather than one it had to improvise around a pandemic.

Where she actually sails

She works both hemispheres of the Atlantic in a yearly loop. The summer is Iceland, seven-night circumnavigations from Reykjavik with an overnight in Seydisfjordur and calls at Akureyri, Isafjordur, Grundarfjordur and Heimaey in the Westman Islands, with Husavik added in August for the whales. She is scheduled back there in July 2027.

Late in the season she runs a fourteen-night crossing by way of Greenland, calling at Narsarsuaq and Qaqortoq and then working down the Newfoundland and Nova Scotia coast to Boston, where she picks up a fall of Canada and New England work out of Montreal. Then she repositions to San Juan for the winter and spends it in the Windward and Leeward Islands, which is where the majority of her sailings are. A handful of Panama Canal transits and northern European runs fill in the edges. Trips range from three nights to twenty-five.

Who she suits

People who want Iceland and the eastern Caribbean at 312 guests instead of 3,000, and who understand what that trade costs. There is no casino floor, no production show, no second dining room the size of a hotel ballroom. Evening entertainment is a musician in the lounge. She is all-suite, the marina platform folds down off the stern for swimming in calm water, and the reason to be aboard is what she can get close to.

She is wrong for families with young children and wrong for anyone who wants a new ship. Her hull was launched in 1988. Half of what you touch dates from 2021 and the shape you walk around does not.