Cruise Lines

It was a sad day for Fred Olsen on Friday, as a lucky few of us gathered on board Black Prince for cruising's answer to the Last Supper - the Last Lunch.

After 43 years of sterling service for Fred, the ship has fallen foul of new SOLAS (Safety of Life at Sea) regulations coming in in 2010 and been sold to a company in Venezuela, where it will be operating three and four-night cruises in coastal waters (as it will never be more than 12 miles from the coast, the SOLAS regs don't apply).

Black Prince has an interesting past - it was built in 1966 and combined the roles of summer North Sea passenger and car ferry and winter joint passenger and cargo vessel to the Canary Islands until 1986, when its ferry days ended and it became a fully-fledged cruise ship.

At that time there were 100,000 cruise passengers in the UK and Fred Olsen carried 10,000 of them, marketing director Nigel Lingard reminded us. Today, there are 1.55 million British cruisers and Fred Olsen carries 100,000 of them. Times have certainly changed.

While we were saying our fond farewells over drinks and lunch, workers were busy painting out names and packing up everything that was not nailed down, including about £1 million of artwork. Goodness knows how they were going to get this one off the wall, but they have to - it's allegedly worth "a six-figure sum".

All the art is going into storage in Oslo, while everything else - crockery, cutlery, glassware and so on - is going into a warehouse in Southampton until such time as it is needed again.

And it will be one day, it seems, as Fred Olsen has eyes on a new-build - or at least it did until the euro went wild. If the currency ever returns to normal, the plan is to build a ship that holds around 1,500 passengers and has lots of balconies.

Passenger Shipping Association director Bill Gibbons added his memories of cruising on Black Prince to the farewell speeches. Something about a rubber ring and split swimming trunks. Enough. This is a family blog after all.

Provided all the money is transfers according to plan, Fred Olsen will hand over the keys to the new owner on Tuesday but the ship will remain laid up in Southampton until October 25, when it will leave the UK for the last time.

As Lingard said: "A sad moment but life moves on."