To the Editor:

Wednesday September 13 at about 3:30 PM I went down to the Rockland Public Landing expecting to work on my boats. At the Landing I have a dinghy with a season sticker and a larger sailboat on a mooring that is on a space I rent from the City. My wife and I have been Rockland residents since 2006 and have paid taxes and fees to the City ever since.

It was a mid-week day in nice weather, and I was planning to do some routine maintenance.

As I drove into Harbor Park I was astounded to see three huge tour buses parked and idling, and a line of people, two or three deep, all the way across the seawall from the the pier to the Pearl restaurant, waiting for something to happen. The line went onto the pier until it reached a little tent just before the ramps down to the docks. At the little tent access to all of the docks was closed off by a black ribbon and a harassed young man in a uniform. He was from The Vision of the Seas, a huge cruise ship, letting a few of the waiting crowd down the ramp to wait for a launch to take them out to the cruise ship anchored a mile or so off the pier.

Access to all the docks were effectively closed off at the little tent. To get to the dinghy dock to do my maintenance, I had to be escorted through the waiting crowd and through the little tent on the pier by our Assistant Harbor master .

I was there at the dinghy dock working for about an hour, during which I only happened to see one launch loading passengers for the big cruise ship – looking at the size of the launch and the size of the crowd, my guess is that it would have needed 5 or 6 round trips to take the crowd back to the ship, each round trip taking roughly 20 minutes. At the end of the hour, the line was just as long as it was when I got there. The ship was due to up anchor at 6 PM.

Oh yes, also tied up to the main dock at the same time was the small cruise ship Independence. The passengers on that ship can just walk on to it from the dock, if they could get through the little tent. I did not see any escorts helping Independence passengers through the line, but they may have been there.

I saw the Chamber of Commerce representative Gordon Page, who told me that he had repeatedly tried to call the cruise ship to see what could be done to get their anxious passengers back to the ship more quickly. Ed Glazer, the acting Harbor Master, was on the scene as well.

The takeaways from this experience:

1: The Royal Caribbean Cruise line had completely taken over Rockland's entire Public Landing for the afternoon, and some of the parking spaces in the Harbor Park as well. All other users, including the small cruise ship passengers and local as well as visiting boaters were essentially cut off from their activities unless they had an escort.

2: Visits by the big cruise ships tax the City's existing facilities to the utmost, to the exclusion of all other users of the Public Landing.

3: The Rockland Public Landing is supposed to be a public space open to all legitimate users. The City of Rockland is obliged to make sure it is available at all times to everyone who needs it.

Thank You,

Howard Robbins

Rockland, Maine