Tradewind Voyages / Golden Horizon

[hobbsie65]

For anyone interested the new Clipper ship 'Golden Dawn' will be on sale next month. Looks some great cruises including one around the UK so will be interested to see how they price it. "After spending next Spring cruising from the UK, Golden Horizon will then follow the trade winds east along the Maritime Silk Route, from the Mediterranean to Asia and the Indian Ocean with a fantastic collection of sailing cruises"

[Ional]

Just had a brochure from Trailfinders. A whole page spread on the Golden Horizon. Very definately she is the Flying Clipper. Cruises from May 2021, to and from the UK. 7 from Harwich and 2 from Glasgow.  My question is who will sail her? The Star Clipper crew are amazing, loads of experience and expertise. No one else will have that unless they poach crew. Will a Captain jump ship?

No photos of the inside or details re dining etc.  They mention going down the Suez canal  later in 2021. Lets hope the pirates are holed up then. When the Star Clipper did that last time they took her empty with barbed wire around the deck and machine gunners on the sides.

We would feel sad abandoning the Star Clipper fleet but I guess some will be happy to jump ship!  Interesting to see how they cope sailing to Iceland, Norway and the Baltics. SC tried it but the Tropical bar isnt great in a westerly gale and rain! Cabins are smaller than on normal cruises and space inside limited. Something she is bound to encounter in these waters.

Edited August 28, 2020 by Ional

[FredT]

On 8/28/2020 at 12:27 PM, Ional said:

Interesting to see how they cope sailing to Iceland, Norway and the Baltics. SC tried it but the Tropical bar isnt great in a westerly gale and rain! Cabins are smaller than on normal cruises and space inside limited. Something she is bound to encounter in these water

That was my first takeaway also...   Even in the summer, the North Sea and the Baltic can be ..... "questionable".  300 passengers crammed into the main lounge?  Also, those waters for an inaugural years sail for an inexperienced(at least with a 60 sail tall ship) crew?   An "adventure" may not be appropriate enough a description.  

[Audrey67]

Hello,

 

I've been considering taking the around Britain and Ireland cruise with the Golden Horizon next May but your comments would suggest that this might be a bad idea? Do you think it would be better to wait? They're only doing that particular cruise (with the stop-offs I want to visit) once.

 

Thanks for any advice you could give.

 

Regards

 

Audrey

[Ional]

Last Saturday there was a 6 page supplement in the Daily Telegraph, a major paper in the Uk advertising lots of cruises on the Golden Horrizon. Including through the Suez canal and around Australia.  

My feeling is thats its so sad its not being operated by Star Clippers who know how to sail these ships.  It looks like a Clipper ship, but it isnt going to be run like one.

Hopefully the new crew will learn, but not sure a N European summer will be as nice as tropical seas. Iceland????  Take thermals!

Like other posts I would just say that if the weather is hot and sunny it will be great. However the Tropical bar, or whatever they call it, is open sided and very wet in rain. The deck  open......so take waterproofs! and it will be crowded in the one large inside lounge for everyone to shelter inside.

[Alan2504]

Golden Horizon's Sailing Master:

 

The Sea is Calling for Richard Cruse (yachtsandyachting.com)

 

[ann141]

We have booked on the 4 night voyage from Greenock to Liverpool.Looking forward to seeing how it goes

[tring]

On 5/4/2021 at 9:59 PM, Alan2504 said:

Golden Horizon's Sailing Master:

 

The Sea is Calling for Richard Cruse (yachtsandyachting.com)

 

 

Thank you, an interesting article.  I wonder who else will be captaining the ship and if Richard will be on duty in July for the British cruises?  We are booked on the same cruise as Ann.

[PurleyKing]

I posted this on the Tradewinds forum page but will post it here as well as doubtless some Star Clipper devotees will be interested.

 

We're just back from a mini-voyage (4 nights) along the south coast of England on Golden Horizon (we have been on the Star Clipper ships a number of times). And we had a very good time...accompanied by a couple of our friends who had only done river cruising before. This cruise had only been advertised a couple of weeks ago, so it was no surprise that there were probably only about 70 passengers on a ship with a 270 capacity (though that's if all cabins are filled to the max). I think that many of the passengers were travel agents. Given the then-current corona virus restrictions, they would have been in any event limited to 50% capacity, I believe. The hotel staff and the other staff who interact with passengers all wore masks the whole time; passengers were asked to wear masks when walking around inside the ship, but not when sitting in any venue nor when on deck.

 

The trip didn't start well - understatement! We cast off from the cruise terminal jetty in Dover Harbour on time at 6 pm (last Thursday) and were shepherded to a backwater part of the harbour by a huge tug. An announcement said that there was a problem with the paperwork and we would be staying in harbour overnight. Still there the next morning, a search for the ship on Google revealed that we were under arrest! It transpires that Star Clippers has won its legal claim against the Croatian shipyard that built the ship, and is owed 13m Euros; they had served a writ against the shipyard as the payment of the money was long overdue....so the ship was arrested, with us on it. A police van was placed on the dockside to keep an eye on us. It then became obvious why the big tug had been connected to Golden Horizon by a big cable - it was to stop our captain making a break for the open sea! On Friday morning, we were considering the unwelcome possibility of spending another three nights without going anywhere but, by late morning we heard that 6 or 7 million Euro had been paid over to Star Clippers through the courts and we were free to go - we sailed at 2pm. That afternoon had some useful wind from astern, so we didn't use the engines. The rest of the cruise was in beautiful summer weather but with hardly a breeze, so the engines were then used a lot.

 

The ship looks splendid....a bigger better version of Royal Clipper. Everything, of course, looks like Star Clippers, given that Star Clippers designed it....down to the blue carpets with the rope design. The standard cabin is usefully bigger than on the other ships....the double bed is set away from the hull wall, for instance, so you can get in from either side. The double-deck dining room, the piano bar, the lecture theatre and the (splendid) library are all more spacious and there is a large reception area that doesn't exist on the Star Clipper ships.

 

The officers included a few we have seen before; the captain was Mariusz Szalek, a lean Polish chap who we know from old. And the hotel manager was Steve Adamson who had that role on a Bali to Singapore cruise we did three years ago, if I remember correctly. There didn't seem to be the direct equivalent of a cruise director....we could have benefitted from such a person to keep us informed about what was going on with the delay to the departure and with the inevitable changes to the programme that this caused.

 

There is a vast amount of usable deck space compared to the other ships. I counted over 160 sturdy teak sun loungers set out on the sun deck, with plenty of spacing. What we were short of given the beautiful weather was shade....they will definitely need to rig a few more awnings. There is a lot of room up by the bridge to watch sail-aways from, but we weren't allowed down on the foredeck, so no 'hanging out' in the nets. Their sail-away music has been specially composed (they tell us) and was very appropriate....but not a patch on Vangelis!

 

The food was generally very good....it would certainly equate to the other ships. Because of covid restrictions, all meals were a la carte served at your table. Even the afternoon tea snacks (a smaller affair than on the other ships) were served to you (in the Piano Bar), though you could go to the display and tell the member of staff what bits you wanted. Meals could be taken at tables outside in the equivalent of the Tropical Bar - we only tried this one lunchtime and didn't bother again as the menu was limited compared to the main dining room.

 

Again, given the covid restrictions, we were only allowed off the ship as part of an organised excursion (this is a restriction imposed by the ports in England at the time); our enforced change of dates following our arrest meant that only one excursion went ahead so, apart from a photo safari, we stayed on board. There were two good guest lecturers on board - the ship had been scheduled to be going all round Scotland last week until the Scottish government banned cruise ships from docking at Scottish ports but the one lecturer had prepared a whisky-tasting talk for that voyage and held it anyway - very enjoyable. The pianist on board was excellent, as was the musical duo in the outside bar of an evening.

 

I fancy that those of us who prefer the smaller Star Clippers ships because of the more interesting sailing and/or the intimacy will still tend to stick with the smaller ships unless a particularly attractive itinerary is being undertaken by Royal Clipper or Golden Horizon. Those who prefer Royal Clipper to the two smaller ships should definitely give Golden Horizon a go. Our accompanying friends just want to know where to sign up for the next cruise - they loved it!.

 

And we had a free bar the whole trip because of the arrest.

 

I'll be happy to try to answer any questions.

[FredT]

Annnnd.   Based on this (very good) review, I googled the lawsuit and found this:

 

https://shipmonk.co.uk/2021/04/04/star-clippers-awarded-substantial-damages-in-row-over-the-worlds-biggest-tall-ship-now-known-as-golden-horizon/

[cluso]

Today, on the initial Cruise Critic page, there is a short story about the arrest/payment.

 

[hobbsie65]

She was docked outside my house on the Isle Of Wight last week 🙂 She does look very beautiful & thanks for the update 

[portofrome]

6 hours ago, hobbsie65 said:

She was docked outside my house on the Isle Of Wight last week 🙂 She does look very beautiful & thanks for the update 

 

Beautiful! Thank you for posting.