Queen Mary 2 Maiden Crossing To New York
By Richard Pyle
Associated Press Writer

Mayor Michael Bloomberg last week welcomed the Queen Mary 2 upon her arrival after the luxury ocean liner’s first transatlantic voyage from Southampton, England to New York City, her U.S. homeport.

NEW YORK (AP) – Gigantic, it is. Titanic, it’s not.

Ninety-two years and eight days after another British ocean liner almost but not quite made it to New York on its maiden voyage, the Queen Mary 2 steamed through the Verrazano Nar-rows and up the harbor for the first time.

Laden with opulence, the Cunard Line’s newest and largest ship even brought its own weather – a London-like drizzle and fog which eased off as the ship arrived.

The luxury liner passed under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge nearly on schedule after making up time lost to fog and the residual effect of storms during the first 48 hours of its inaugural Atlantic crossing.

Pamela Conover, Cunard’s president and chief operating officer, earlier des-cribed the QM2’s arrival as "a very big moment’’ for a company that has sailed the Atlantic for 158 years. "This is the arrival of our new flagship in its U.S. home port,’’ she said in a phone interview.

The ship arrived under extra-tight security that has been in effect for all major events in New York since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Nearly four football fields long at 1,132 feet and 21 stories tall, the massive, black-hulled vessel left South-ampton, England rently for the six days and nights of luxury living and sumptuous dining for its 2,600 passengers, attended by a crew of 1,250.

Though Commodore Ronald War-wick followed the same northerly track known as the Great Circle Route, the Queen Mary 2 was never imperiled by icebergs such as that which sank the RMS Titanic with 1,503 dead in modern history’s worst maritime disaster on April 14, 1912.

But the rough weather – with 30-foot seas and force 10 gales gusting to 63 miles an hour – gave the passengers some nights to remember. According to accounts published by reporters on board, many passengers stayed in their quarters rather than go to the dining rooms.

After three days in port on Manhat-tan’s west side, the Queen Mary 2 will depart on Sunday night, rendezvousing near the Statue of Liberty with the Queen Elizabeth 2, outbound on its own last transatlantic run.

The two Queens, old and new, will travel home in tandem – the first time two Cunarders sailed the Atlantic to-gether instead of passing each other in mid-ocean, officials said.

The Queen Mary 2, successor to the QE2 on Cunard’s Atlantic run, revives the name of a liner that plied the route a half-century earlier. The first Queen Mary, slightly more than half the size of the new one, debuted in New York on June 1, 1936.

During World War II, the Queen Mary and its sister ship, Queen Eliza-beth, became gray-painted troopships, fast enough to outrun enemy U-boats. Winston Churchill later credited them with having shortened the war by a year.

The Queen Mary was retired in 1967 and sold to private investors who turned it into a seaside tourist attraction in Long Beach, Calif.

In the realm of seagoing behemoths, the QM2 is the world’s biggest cruise ship in every way, its closest rival be-ing the 142,000-ton Voyager Of The Seas, in service since 1999 with Royal Caribbean Cruises. But it’s a virtual rowboat next to the largest of all ships – a 564,700-ton supertanker built in 1979 as the Seawise Giant, and now called Jahre Viking.

The first pure ocean liner built in 35 years, the QM2 is three times the size of Titanic, which at 46,300 tons and 800 feet was called the "largest movable object built by man’’ when launch-ed in 1911.

While radar and other state-of-the-art technologies help to tame the turbulent North Atlantic, QM2’s designers acknowledged the ghost of that "unsinkable’’ vessel, using "extra thick steel for strength for transatlantic cross-ings,’’ and two whistles audible at 10 miles – one of them borrowed from the original Queen Mary, according to Cunard.

The Queen Mary 2 paid a previous visit to U.S. shores last January, ending a 14-day cruise through the Azores and Caribbean at Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The ship goes into regular transatlantic service with 12 crossings scheduled this year and 26 next year.