The Shipping News
Doug Hayward
How long can a ship remain "Faithful"? About as long as it takes to slide all the way down the skids — 53 years, in the case of that once-elegant cruise ship lately known here as the motor vessel Faithful.
Although an ugly pariah on the Alameda Estuary waterfront until the city had her towed away 10 months ago, in her grand and glorious heyday she was a 293-foot beauty queen of the world cruise ship industry. Now she languishes in rusty disarray at anchor along a tawdry, weed-choked bank of the Sacramento River not far from the little city of Rio Vista.
In an ironic twist, this ship which once charged princely sums to capacity crowds of 186 passengers per cruise has become a spin on "reverse ransoming." After 18 months trying to have the owners take away their hulk, the city itself shelled out $200,000 in hard cash to have it towed by a private ship salvager, who also got title (despite the fact that the owners who abandoned MV Faithful were on record. They never did anything to fix her up or remove her as demanded after having been berthed since September of 2005 at an Alameda city quay on former U.S. Navy property.)
In the course of things, to make matters worse, someone else also clandestinely piggy-backed a huge metal barge to the cruise ship. The barge, too, had to be towed away as a single-source contract to a ship salvager.
In her sparkling days of glory when she was first christened in 1955 as the MV Wappen von Hamburg in Germany, the ship first entered North Sea cruise passenger service. Just five years later, she was completely rebuilt and even outfitted with a swimming pool by Nomikos Lines as the
Delos for Greek Islands cruises. Seven years after that, she became Polar Star, and then in 1970 Pacific Star for a firm called Westours, operating Alaskan and South Seas cruises. Next she became Xanadu for Xanadu Cruises in the waters of Mexico and Alaska. The downward spiral really began after that when she was laid up in Puget Sound, Washington, to become an exhibition ship called the Expex, but when that idea went sour, the notion was to turn her into a Christian hospital ship, which is where the name Faithful came in.
But that didn't work out, either, and from there she was taken to port of Los Angeles anchorage and illegally occupied by missionaries, then seized and sold to a medical doctor in Florida who aspired to restore her as a hospital ship named Xanadu 2. Her next-to-last-stop was Alameda, where new owners known as Al Boraq Aviation, planned to reincarnate her as a luxury yacht, Aurora. But Al Boraq Aviation is "a dissolved company" according to the Internet web site Cruise Ship Matters in its January-March 2008 posting.
On the other hand, city attorney Teresa Highsmith has said of Al Boraq Aviation, "They assert they own the boat, they've said so in writing...we've told their attorneys...we intend to recover the public's money." Nothing further has turned up in the dead silence following that. Someday, the salvager implied to the city, he might possibly turn Faithful into a floating restaurant. There is no evidence of that to date.