Many of you already know that in September, longtime Cruise Director Barry Hopkins left Regent Seven Seas Cruises to join Seabourn. Barry will be on the Seabourn Spirit beginning November. Barry was hired to take out the company’s three new ships and has been busy in the Miami headquarters assisting with the onboard plans. I can’t think of anyone better than Barry to design the entertainment venues on a new ship. The Odyssey will be the first new Seabourn ship in the series and is scheduled to be launched in June 2009.

Taking his place at Regent is Ray Solaire. Ray has been with SilverSea for many years and took the reigns on the Mariner this fall with the Grand Asia-Pacific cruise. In addition to his work as Cruise Director, Ray is quite the entrepreneur with a beautiful stately home in England’s Lake District that he runs as a bed & breakfast with his brother along with a vegetarian restaurant, a jazz club and a bowling alley!

John Barron will be back on the Mariner in January for the Ring of Fire. I am excited to join John on the first portion of this cruise. No promises but we will see if we can get Lynsay and Luke on for a while - wouldn’t that be great!

And at the end of the Alaska season Bryan Townsend was talking about future projects in his home state of Texas. Located on what T. Boone Pickens calls the “Wind Corridor”, Bryan’s hometown of Amarillo will be at the heart of the development of alternative energy – and he wants to help lead the way. Don’t know what that will mean - if he’ll be trading the waves of the deep blue sea for the amber waves of Texas grain - but its a great cause and I support him in whatever he does. Go Bryan!

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 9:57 am and is filed under General, Community board, Cruise News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.