Ocean Breeze

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The Ocean Breeze, (formerly Calypso, Azure Seas, and Dolphin) was an ocean liner, and later a cruise ship.

Formerly used for many years as a high speed mail and passenger liner (no freight), the Southern Cross was built after World War II on the keel of a cruiser that was laid in Scotland, but never built because of the war's end.

The Ocean Breeze is about 650 feet long which is 200 feet shorter than the RMS Titanic. Built in Belfast, Northern Ireland by the firm of Harland & Wolff, which was the same company that built the Titanic back in 1909. She was long and racer-like, and very unusual because her steam turbine engines were placed to the rear — with the most aft of any smokestack of any liner ever built. Thus she rained no soot on passengers when moving—and she was very fast. She was christened by the newly crowned [[Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom|Queen Elizabeth II]. When airliners took away the mail in the 1970s, she was refitted as a luxury cruise liner, and sailed for the same owners as the Calypso, finally laid up for years, then repurchased by another company and cruised as the SS Azure Seas for at least ten years. She operated out of Los Angeles and did the 3 and 4 days cruises to Ensenada, Mexico and Catalina. She was a very popular ship and known as a favorite weekend getaway to the Southern California market. Passengers loved this special ship and there were still traces of her past elegant years though. (She was steam powered, so was never an 'MS' actually.) She started out at 32,000 tonnes as a large cruise ship, but by the 1990s when the great floating hotels-on-a-barge came into vogue she was considered a small liner. She carried 842 passengers.

In the early 1990s this ship was based in Aruba, and did a 7–day Eastern Caribbean up through Barbados and then leewards to St. Thomas, alternating with one–week Panama Canal cruises with stops in Colombia and Costa Rica. The decks sloped gently down forward from the stern, then gracefully upward from amidships. The best cabins opened into a central inside corridor, and had windows — not portholes — that faced the teak promenade deck, which went all the way around the ship. Passengers considered the service and food on Dolphin to be excellent for the price. If a customer had special needs, the ship's carpenter would custom modify the solid wooden deck-chairs in less than an hour.

In the early 1990s she was fully rebuilt for several million dollars and renamed Ocean Breeze. She cruised only one year for a branch of the Royal Caribbean Lines, then was leased to Dolphin Cruise Lines until they went bankrupt in about 2001.

She then was leased by a short-haul line, Imperial Majesty Lines, running only from Port Everglades, Florida to the Bahamas as a gambling ship, and although still well maintained and looking good, she was suddenly sold for scrap in 2003, when the gambling-ship company got a cheaper lease on an old Holland-America ship that had been running as "the Big Red Boat". She was run aground at high tide in November 2003 on the coast of India, where old ships are pulled apart almost by hand by low paid, often barefoot Indian workers.