The “Celestyal Crystal” left the Greek port of Lavrion for its final voyage at the end of April.
Under the transfer name “Sun Bright”, the ship sailed to India and arrived at a scrapping yard in the port city of Alang. In its 40-year history, the 162-metre-long cruise ship with a capacity of 1,200 passengers caused a stir several times due to accidents.
Around two years ago, the “Celestyal Crystal” made its last voyages for its last owner Celestyal Cruises in the Greek Aegean, and the ship was decommissioned and laid up at the end of August 2023. There were several reports of a possible resale to a new Japanese cruise line, but this never materialized. The final end of the ship was therefore more or less foreseeable, but still comes as a surprise given the abundance of accidents and disasters that the ship, originally built in 1980 as the ferry “Viking Saga” and converted several times, has experienced.
“Celestyal Crystal” has an eventful history
In December 1979, the Finnish shipping company Ab Sally ordered two identical ferries, the “Viking Song” and the “Viking Saga”, from the Oy Wärtsilä Ab shipyard in Turku. After the delivery of the “Viking Saga” in June 1980, the ship was deployed for Viking Line between Helsinki and Stockholm.
Incidentally, its sister ship, the former “Viking Song”, is still in service today in the Mediterranean as the ferry “Regina Baltica”. Around 15 years ago, it was also used for a time in the German Bight as a hotel ship during the construction of the Bard Offshore 1 wind farm.
In May 1985, the “Viking Saga” was renamed the “Sally Albatros” in order to be used for short cruises on the Baltic Sea in future. This was followed in the winter of 1988 by a major refit at the Bremerhaven Seebeck shipyard, where the former ferry was converted into a cruise ship. This included a significant visual change to the lines by adding rounded steel cladding to the previous angular foredeck section of the ship. The cabins and vehicle decks, which were to be used for shows and exhibitions, were also converted.
Total loss due to fire on board
However, the cruise ship only sailed for just under two years when a fire broke out on board on January 9, 1990 during a dockyard layover at Finnboda in Nacka near Stockholm. It took three days to extinguish the fire. The ship was a total loss and it was actually assumed that it would be scrapped completely.
However, in September 1990, the burnt-out hull of the “Sally Albatros” was towed to Naantali in Finland, where the hull was scrapped. However, parts of the floatable hull and the four Pielstick main engines were used to rebuild a new cruise ship, again under the name “Sally Albatros”. This reconstruction was then carried out at the Finnyards shipyard in Rauma until spring 1992. Even though the ship then had a completely different appearance to the previous ferry, the reuse of the hull meant that it was not a new ship, so the IMO number 7827213 remained the same.
Ship ran aground off Finland
The further life of the new “Sally Albatros” remained exciting, however, as the ship ran aground off Finland on March 4, 1994 in icy conditions and was badly damaged. After being repaired in Italy between November 1994 and September 1995, the ship was then chartered to the US shipping company Norwegian Cruise Line, which deployed it primarily in the Caribbean as the “Leeward” until the turn of the millennium. It then went to Asia for two years as the “SuperStar Taurus” for Star Cruises before returning to the Baltic Sea as the “Silja Opera” in 2002. In 2007, the ship was then sold to Cypriot company Louis Cruises and later renamed “Louis Crystal”. On a Mediterranean voyage in June 2015, the ship collided with a tanker off Gallipoli on its way from Greece to Turkey, causing serious damage to the forecastle; fortunately, no one was injured.
In addition to regular deployments in the Greek Aegean, the cruise ship, which has since been renamed “Celestyal Crystal”, was also one of the first to make cruises to Cuba from 2015. (CE)
