Cruise Ship Navigation Challenges

 As we ready ourselves to board a short (and bargain) Royal Caribbean cruise to Alaska out of Seattle later this week, we found this CNN article particularly interesting, especially since one of the challenging areas it highlights is Southeast Alaska. 

The world's most challenging cruise ship routes

We're going to be sailing on the Quantum of the Seas, among the larger cruise ships, 1141 feet long with 18 decks and a capacity of 4,905 passengers and 1,500 crew. 

We sailed on RCCL's Jewel of the Seas in 2009. We thought the Jewel with its 2600-passenger capacity was big. The Quantum Class is impressive for sheer size, and we're looking forward to checking it out, although we'll no doubt miss whole sections of the ship on a 5-night cruise.