Burgeoning cruise ship industry in North.

• Author: Ross, Ian
• Position: Tourism

LITTLE CURRENT: Bruce O'Hare still remembers that grey, rainy day in October almost five years ago when 5,000 curious visitors from as far away as Sudbury jammed into the Manitoulin Island Town of Little Current to gawk at the gleaming white hull of a luxury liner.

It was the inaugural visit of the Columbus, a 420-passenger cruise ship filled to the gunnels with German tourists, a spectacle not seen in these parts since the days of great passenger steamships that petered out in the 1950s.

In a town of 1,500 that is economically driven by the summer cottage traffic and recreational boating "it was as busy as the busiest day from summer," remembers O'Hare, a local entrepreneur and owner of the 100-year-old Anchor Bar and Grill.

"It was fairly obvious there was some economic upside to this for the local market."

This same year, 1997, when the Columbus and Le Levant steamed into the North Channel for 13 visits, bands played at the waterfront gazebo, downtown merchants rolled out the red carpet and motor coaches lined up to whisk away passengers on various island excursions.

The excitement surrounding the arrival of the ships began turning wheels in the mind of O'Hare, who spun a business off from this cruising renaissance and called it Lakeshore Excursions, which provides three packaged island excursions.

This year, Hapag-Lloyd's Columbus and the smaller 90-passenger luxury yacht Le Levant will deposit an estimated 2,500 tourists on the town's waterfront, up 25 per cent from 2001.

The industry standard rule of thumb is that the average cruise ship passenger on foreign soil will spend an average of $50 US per day.

Just imagine, says O'Hare, that is the equivalent of about 40 passenger coaches in one day depositing a load of first-time visitors who are eager to spend money in the downtown core.

And the overall cruise ship industry forecast only stands to improve with an ongoing annual growth rate of eight per cent.

"The Great Lakes presents huge advantages," says O'Hare, the area's representative to the Great Lakes Cruising...