April, 2025.
Lihue, Hawaii.

Note: I write all my posts several weeks (if not months) before they are scheduled to publish. That’s why this post is dated April, but published in July. Since we are on the Lens-Artist’s break this week, I thought this would be a good time to share this post about a memory of a long-past cruise.

This morning, I was working on Anne’s photo challenge, “Abandoned.” In that post, I included a shipwreck from Tabuaeran (Fanning Island), which reminded me of our 2007 trip around the Hawaiian Islands with a side trip to Tabuaeran on the Norwegian Wind.

This was only our second cruise, but we were told that one of the best ways to see the Hawaiian Islands is by cruise ship. You travel to several islands overnight and stop at different ports each day. Due to a U.S. maritime law from the 19th century, foreign ships must visit at least one foreign port on their itinerary. The ship was registered in Nassau, Bahamas. From our last stop in Kailua-Kona on the Big Island, we traveled from Hawaii to the atoll some 1,100 miles (1,800 km) distant.

The opening photo features a profile view of the Wind while anchored near the coral atoll at Tabuaeran. The Wind was a mid-sized ship (statistics below). Unlike many modern cruise ships, which feature flatter bottoms and broader beams for enhanced stability and fuel efficiency, the Wind had a more traditional hull design. The four sea days to and from Tabuaeran were a problem for many people prone to seasickness. The Pacific Ocean can be volatile, and the ship rolled and rocked a lot on that part of the journey.

Though the Wind was a mid-sized ship, it dwarfed the tender boats that shuttled passengers from the ship into the lagoon for our visit to Fanning Island.

We embarked on our Hawaiian cruise vacation on February 10, 2007, and learned on the cruise that the ship would be sold in April 2007. We last saw the vessel when we disembarked on February 21. For us, the Norwegian Wind is now but a fond memory. Here’s the timeline of the vessel’s life.

The Norwegian Wind, named initially MS Windward, was a cruise ship built in 1993 for Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL). In 1998, it was lengthened and renamed Norwegian Wind. After serving NCL for several years, it was transferred to Star Cruises in 2007 and renamed SuperStar Aquarius. The ship continued operating in Asia until the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to its retirement. In 2022, the cruise ship, renamed Arius, was sold for scrapping in Alang, India, marking the end of its journey.

Here are the basic stats for the Norwegian Wind:

• Gross Tonnage: Approximately 50,760 GT
• Passenger Capacity: Around 1,748 passengers (double occupancy)
• Crew Size: About 600 crew members
• Length: 754 feet (230 meters)
• Beam (Width): 95 feet (29 meters)

By comparison, my current favorite ship is the Norwegian Bliss. Here are its stats:

Gross Tonnage: Approximately 168,028 GT
Passenger Capacity: Around 4,004 passengers (double occupancy)
Crew Size: About 1,716 crew members
Length: 1,094 feet (333 meters)
Beam (Width): 136 feet (41 meters)

These days, the Norwegian Pride of America sails the Hawaiian Islands with a 90% American Crew and a ship that’s registered in the United States. In fact, I was surprised to find, in researching for this article, that the Pride of America’s Hawaiian maiden voyage was in July 2005, two years before our sail on the Wind.

About the photos: I captured these photos with the Fuji FinePix 3800, a popular digital camera in the early 2000s. Its resolution was 3.2 megapixels, and it was capable of producing images up to 2048 x 1536 pixels. Its 6x optical zoom (equivalent to 38-228mm on a 35mm camera) was extended for the time.

For this post, I found the originals in my archive and used Photoshop 2025 to expand the area around the ship in two images, as I’d cropped them too tightly in camera. I then loaded all three into Luminar Neo for processing. I used the Noiseless and Supersharp tools to improve the JPG images, then made minor adjustments in the Develop module, followed by my usual tweak of Accent AI. I’ve uploaded the pictures to my Flickr album here, so you can view the metadata and see the photos in 2K HD.

John Steiner