Hi everybody this is Bruce here welcome to my youtube channel
Traveling with Bruce please subscribe to my channel today and become a key
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video everybody it's Bruce here with Traveling with Bruce this video here is
something special, I was on a cruise in Italy
through the Mediterranean on Norwegian Cruise Line I was taking the cruise
with my daughter and we were on the Norwegian Jade and we ended up in
Cagliari Italy about halfway through our trip I guess and first thing in the
morning we get up and as is tradition we head to the buffet for breakfast at the
back of the ship and I look out the window and I saw this. This is the QE2
coming into port on her last long extended voyage before she was being
sold to a group of investors in Dubai and I instantly knew I had to grab my
camera and start taking photographs of this magnificent vessel because this was
a time capsule and these images would never be repeated again for anyone to
see like this. This ship is is the last of its kind
from the days from days gone by basically and I knew as a it's an older
guy approaching my 55th year or so I knew that I was looking at the past and this
ship was the dominant carrier of passengers across the Atlantic during
the prime years of my parents lives and it was always in the news whenever it
came to a new port for the first time the ship is just iconic and the history
this ship represents is amazing and so as I was photographing this ship as you
can see here I'm just photographing it as it's coming in you
can see the passengers on that ship on the QE2 looking at us because we're
much bigger than they are in height in size and they were watching us as they
were being pulled in and we were watching them we probably had a thousand
of our passengers maybe more standing on our decks and we were waving at them and
they were waving at us and it was pretty cool and they were photographing us and
we were photographing them but what struck me about this ship was it was
obvious just looking at her coming in that boy have things changed and there's
a reason why her days are numbered she's in perfect sailing condition by the way
she she could keep going for years and years and years but to bring her into
the port they had to have tugboats guide her in and at the beginning of the
sequence you may have noticed there were chains basically attached to the
tugboats where they were basically pulling at her to to steer her properly
in effect the the QE2 engines are on but the propellers were not running now
because this ship is incapable of parking itself and this is one of the
biggest changes in the cruise business the ship we were on was longer taller
wider heavier we had probably 2,400 passengers and 1,100 crew so we had
3,500 people on our ship this ship if it was totally filled out with passengers
it would have had maybe Oh sixteen seventeen eighteen hundred passengers
and a thousand crew and yet it could not park itself our ship could
be guided by GPS satellites and could turn on a dime
we entered the port and left the port without any assistance whatsoever
we can parallel park our ship where this one here no way it had to be guided in
and that is one of the big reasons why this ship was retired because you add up the of all the technology that the new ships have and
to retrofit one like this it's it's literally impossible economically to do
and so a Cunard Line had to really make the hard decision to let this one
go and and you can see here the one of the ship's crew is looking out
reporting to the group inside the captain and all you know the progress of
the ship coming in but they had nothing to do with it it was all being done for
them and this is the problem it limited this cruise ship from going to
certain ports they didn't have balconies like we had you can see a few there
maybe 10 on one side and 10 on the other those were for first-class passengers
only you don't want to know how much it costs
to be in one of those Suites they were tiny they were antiquated they
were added in 90s on the latest retrofit that the ship never had those at the
beginning and yet our ship gosh I think we had out of the 2,400 passengers I bet
you 1800 of us had balcony suites and and the rest we had inside and that type
of thing so anyway here it is coming in I just kept snapping away picture after
picture because I knew I was looking at history right in front of my eyes I had
no idea that this ship was gonna be in my anywhere in my future had no idea I'd
be beside it I was able to get off the our ship later in the morning and walk
up right beside the QE2 and I was within five feet of the hull
of this ship and I was taking photos right from the dock knowing that this is
a scene that was soon to end and a lot of people you know just never would
have had the chance to do this unless you were a passenger of the QE2
and as a non passenger I was thrilled to be able to get this close to this
iconic vessel and and take these shots some stats about this ship its original
voyage was May 2nd 1969 and it finished its service on about November
27 2008 it was sold for a hundred million dollars to a Dubai investment
group they were going to retrofit the ship and turn it into a 500 room
a luxury hotel but unfortunately the timing was terrible in 2008 the economic
crisis hit worldwide recession and Dubai got particularly hard-hit and so
everything was delayed and nothing has happened to that yet the ship has
been modified we are told it is still in Dubai the lifeboats have been removed
the davits have been removed that old the lifeboats in place but we still
don't know what the ultimate fate of the ship is going to be it was originally an
oil-fired ship this is from old school days this ship was originally designed
as a transatlantic transport ship and in the days it was constructed all of these
ships were fired by oil and in 1986 1987 Cunard had a tough decision to make
whether to retire her or to retrofit her and they decided to retrofit her with
diesel engines so it was laid up for almost two years as they retrofitted the
entire engine compartments and they did a major retrofit on the rest of the ship
prior to the retrofit the top speed was 32 knots and that equates to almost
we had about 15% of that so that's about 37 miles an hour after retrofitting with
diesel she went up to 34 knots so they could get her up to almost 40 miles an
hour but if you did that boy did you burn the fuel and you would lose money
big time you would burn off so the ship was usually limited into the 20s where
it was far more fuel efficient and it made a made a profit for Cunard it was
the only transatlantic ship left to ply the North Atlantic during its heyday
basically from the 80s of the 90s until cruise ships really took off in the late
90s and early 2000s this one this ship had it all to herself but as
the years went on she became a cruising ship for for casual cruising tourists
cruising and towards the end she would be on grand tours once a year she would
do a around the world trip for five months or so five six months hundred fifty days
hundred thirty days she would go around the globe and would be welcomed at every
port she came to because she represented so much history with
with with this cruise line there were another series of upgrades in 1992
that's what they added the balconies that we saw a little earlier they did a
number of upgrades satellite systems and that type of thing but at the end in
2008 she had gone 5.6 million miles serviced 2 1/2 million
passengers and traveled the Atlantic across the Atlantic eight hundred and
six times and here are a series of photographs I took as we were leaving
port and we're leaving her behind and as we were pulling out there were probably
eight hundred of us taking photos of her and as we got further and further away I
looked around me and fewer and fewer people were standing around me taking
her photos and by the time I was taking the last of my photos I think there were
three of us left who were taking photos of because we had
telephoto lens to still catch her
otherwise with the naked eye she was becoming just a little dot but as we
pulled away I knew that this I will never see this again I will never have
the privilege of witnessing this scene and I took it all in I I just kept
snapping and snapping and snapping photos because these ships don't they
just don't exist anymore it has operating vessels there's the
there's the Queen Mary in Long Beach which is a great ship to visit they've
tried to keep her restored as best as they have or can it operates as a
hotel and you can go on it and do a day tour or you can stay on it
and it's a great experience it's from the 30s and the 40s a real walk through
history a time machine I hope this one gets resurrected and saved as well but
we'll have to see but here's the QE2 and all our glory
towards the end of her days and thank you for joining my video today subscribe
visit our Patreon page and we'll talk to you soon
we'll leave you with the last shots here out of Cagliari
Italy in 2008 and I believe this is about two months before she was handed
over for the very last time from Cunard lines to the investment group in
in Dubai UAE we'll never see a like the like of this one
again it's really something again thank you for joining my channel Traveling
with Bruce if you have any questions about the line or the ship let me know
just drop me a comment if you liked the video I know I've talked a long time on
this one but I had to get all these shots in just one more time
thanks again we'll talk to you soon