November 2011

If James Joyce defines a pier as “a disappointed bridge,” I wonder what he’d call the Megaberth–a disappointed pier?

Hardly. The Megaberth is a fantastic success. Designed to accommodate some of the largest cruise ships in the world, it’s already enticed 89,367 people to visit our city by sea since June, ahead of last year’s 75,563. It’s truly a wonder to see 1,100-foot ships tying up directly to our shores.

True, our new pier came up a little shallow when the liner Caribbean Princess, drawing 26.2 feet, decided she had to leave early for deeper water in September due to “astronomical low tides.”

(Maybe it’s the Scorpio in me, but aren’t all tides astronomical?)

Happily, dredging can fix that.

Former mayor Ed Suslovic, who advocated for the original design while he was in office, says of the unforeseen situation that took us out of our depths, “We had the depth charts all right there! Why wasn’t dredging discussed when they shifted the location?”

In all the clamor, many still do not understand that our lengthening the pier towards open water is what brought us into the shallows–because the pre-dredged 60-foot depth below the former Bath Iron Works drydock rises back to 30 feet as you move further off shore.

In any case, the pier is so well received otherwise it’s reason to cheer. Previous waterfront breakthroughs of this magnitude include: 1) OpSail 2000; 2) the North Atlantic Fleet, including a battleship, anchoring in Long Island Sound in 1944 the night before heading off to D-Day and the Normandy Invasion (making us the last point of land they cleared in the U. S.); and 3) the visit of the Prince of Wales to Portland to celebrate the completion of the TransAtlantic cable in October, 1860. Just 18, the Prince’s dance card was filled. The late Don MacWilliams once reported for our magazine that “women battled for vials containing his bathwater and fought for his discarded dinner napkins.” Now there’s a Harvest on the Harbor.

Click here for a list of visiting ships and their sizes