December 2007: S.S. Inspiration
On May 15th 1999, I received a phone call that would change my life forever. On the other end of the telephone was Robert “Bob”Axlerod, director of aquatics for Premier Cruise Lines. He needed a dive instructor on one of his ships and I had ten minutes to convince him that I was the guy he wanted. It was a bigger deal than it sounds. I was down to my last penny and about to go back to bartending for a living after getting my PADI OWSI ticket from the Vancouver diving institute two years previous. I had no idea that my experience on that first ship would inspire me so much to succeed in the diving industry ….almost ten years later I found out why it did.
After hanging up the phone a “Yee-Haa” ensued that could be heard across the valley of my Silver Star Mountain bachelor pad: I got the job. For the last two years I had been trying to make a go of the independent PADI instructor life in Vernon BC; a town who’s only dive shop was an NASDS (a now defunct training agency) store. Getting the cooperation and support I needed from them to teach PADI courses there was like trying to be a door to door bible evangelist in a Nazi war camp- you get the picture. I had a grand total of 1 day to pack up my belongings, drop off my old dog Brandy at my folks house, and catch a greyhound to Vancouver preceding my flight to Miami.
My first look at the S.S. Ocean Breeze was a long one, I just knew this job was going to work out. After getting on board, meeting my boss and getting a room / roommate assignment I went for a tour of the ship and learned some of her amazing history.
She had several names during her fifty plus year career, “Southern Cross”, “Calypso”, “Azure Seas” and “Ocean Breeze”. But the one I remember the most was “The Original Party Ship”. In 1971 this was her unofficial name, and that she was. A small cruiser by today’s standards only holding 900 passengers, it was a personal kind of ship where you could bump into the same people a few times during the voyage.
As she was purpose built to operate on the Australian, New Zealand service, a name was chosen befitting her destination, Southern Cross, being the constellation used by Australia and New Zealand on their National flags.
Queen Elizabeth II launched the Southern Cross on 17 August 1954, being an historic event, as the Southern Cross was the first merchant ship to be launched by a reigning Monarch. After her trials, the Southern Cross proudly departed on her Maiden Voyage on March 29, 1955. This beauty was the first cruise ship to have the engines placed at the rear instead of amidships, making her very quiet.
This ship circumnavigated the globe several times and even passed through the panama canal and the Suez Canal; a list of journeys that most cruisers now designed for short distance travel ever undertake.
But the most important part of this fine ships history I would not know until just recently. When I first opened my business in the fall of 2003 I was visited by the owner of the Sidney Hotel, Dennis Paquette. He gave me an old copy of Diver Magazine with a story about Sidney in it. He said this is for good luck and I hope it will inspire you to get things back to the way they were here. Little did either of us know (or understand the significance) that on the opposite page from the Sidney article was an article about the SS Ocean Spirit, the lost heritage of my old cruise ship.
Not in any of the archives could I find anything about this vessel or what it did, but it would “go down” in history. In 1989 Bret Giliam, who’s book “Deep Diving” I’m reading right now, started the worlds largest live aboard dive vessel. It featured a 375 foot deck only six feet above the water line that housed eight 32 foot dive boats, a host of equipment and the largest air compressor system in the world capable of servicing a staggering 350 divers per day I wish I could have seen that !! It’s a real shame that Mr. Giliam was probably ahead of his time, or too late and the plan never really took off
I had read the article several times thinking wow this ship would have been cool to work on, but I never really clued in to her secret identity until reading Bret’s book where she is described in detail with a name not seen in the archives. All I had to do was look at the picture again, of course it was her; unmistakable lines.
Here I was all that time sitting on a piece of history and didn’t know it. Kind of like playing an old guitar you found at a pawn shop that unknown to everyone once belonged to Eric Clapton. It was another sad day in April 2004 when the S.S. Ocean Breeze was sold by Arthur Pollock for scrap after just having a several million dollar refit because she was not wheel chair accessible. This just reminds me of how poor our morals are today, nothing is worth fixing anymore we simply throw it away, get a new one and write it off.
After being my home, place of work, social center and in a lot of ways my college of life for 5 months I moved on to take a job in Vancouver managing one of Greg Kocher’s shops when he was the largest Dive retailer in Canada. A job I never would have landed without my experience from the cruise industry.
Luckily I was able to thank Bob Axlerod for taking a chance on me that day hiring me over the phone from thirty six hundred miles away before he sadly died of cancer last year. From his hospital bed he assured me that had he not hired me someone else would have soon- his last words to me were said in laughter …
Career Inspiration comes in different forms. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life (career wise) until I was well into my twenties. My Inspiration was found on a cruise ship sometime between hurricane Dennis and hurricane Floyd and it has lasted all this time.
“Breathe Continuously”
Dan