After reading Lara Anderson’s letter in last week’s DP Times about cruise ships stopping at Dana Point, I can pretty much guess this will never happen. I would like to have a last word about this subject. I have spoken to many people about this and I know I am getting old but I don’t remember talking to Lara about it as she mentioned in her letter. By law every cruise ship must have enough lifeboats (tenders) to cover every passenger and crew on the ship. How a ship can say they don’t carry tenders is hard to understand. I know Royal Caribbean Cruise Line was never an option for stopping here. I have sailed that ship and I know, other than leaving Seattle to head up to Alaska, it doesn’t stop along the western coast of America except when it is on its repositioning cruse at the end of summer. Then it stops in Oregon, San Francisco and San Diego.

Now once a week a Carnival ship takes a four day cruise from LA down to Mexico. It makes two stops in Mexico and one at Catalina Island (where they tender in). Then it cruises in circles off our coast for a day. It’s hard for me to understand why Dana Point can not be sold to them as a fourth stop on that cruise. It would give us one ship a week and it would be on a Thursday. It sounds perfect to me.

It seems to me from Lara’s letter that instead of going out to find out why a cruise ship couldn’t stop here it would have been better to try and sell all the reasons why it should—and there are many. I was in sales for years and the one thing I learned was: You don’t try to find someone who wants to buy, your job is to sell them into buying. That’s why you’re called a salesman. It’s too bad this idea is being put to bed. With all my time (over a thousand days) spent cruising as a dance host and knowing as much as I do on how this can help a community I will never believe this wasn’t a good idea and couldn’t have been accomplished.

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