Celebrity Cruises' Captain Kate McCue has a novel way of welcoming guests onboard the 2,850-passenger Celebrity Equinox (built 2009).
“This is Captain Kate, but you can call me Captain because it took me 19 years to earn this title,” she regularly says, according to the New York Times.
She told the newspaper: “People don’t have a tendency to call men captains by their first name.”
In 2015, McCue was the first US woman to captain a cruiseship in 2015 and is due to take over the billion-dollar, 2,918-passenger newbuilding Celebrity Edge in September.
This vessel was designed by women and overseen by Lisa Lutoff-Perlo, Celebrity Cruises chief executive.
A welcome stride towards greater diversity in a male-dominated industry.
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Explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton's Endurance ship was famously trapped in ice and lost in Antarctica in 1915.
So news that a UK-led expedition to find it has had to give up due to horrendous weather and ice did not come as a surprise.
A remotely operated vehicle 3,000 metres beneath the ice lost contact with the 134-loa research ship SA Agulhas II (built 2012).
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Spoof bid of the week: Someone claiming to be Vladimir Putin offered 25 cents for the Falls of Clyde, the world's last sail-driven tanker. The bid sank without trace.
