The Octantis has 256 crew members and can accommodate up to 378 pasengers. Right: The Living Room communal space on Viking Octantis features ample seating and hundreds of books with polar and discovery themes. ![]() Left: Cruise guests took their seats in a Viking submarine as they prepared to make a dive in Lake Superior near Silver Islet, Ontario. Top: Kayaks trailed behind a Zodiac boat during an expedition from the cruise ship Viking Octantis in Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay near Killarney, Ontario. But I love the Great Lakes - so I had to be on this cruise. I went into it as something of a cruise skeptic. I wanted to find out if the Viking experience lived up to the hype - and the luxury-caliber pricing. In late July, I found my way onto Octantis' seven-day, Canada-centric "Great Lakes Explorer" cruise from Milwaukee to Thunder Bay, Ontario. Its sister ship Polaris will follow in its wake. The gleaming white, $225 million Octantis debuted in harbors from Toronto to Duluth this spring, on a string of lake-spanning itineraries. When the Norwegian-flagged cruise line announced in 2020 plans for two new expedition-class ships, purposely built for Antarctica and the Great Lakes, it promised to be a sea change for tourism on our inland seas. Submarine dives are just one way Viking is trying to thread the needle for leisure cruising and scientific exploration in Octantis' maiden season. We were now at the bottom of it - and I was glimpsing the world's largest freshwater body as very few people have. I realized that Pyritic Island far above us was merely the tip of a tall sea stack. At some 130 feet, Philip activated the thrusters and navigated to the base of a rock wall. We gently descended, ever deeper into the turquoise abyss. The pilot, Philip, relayed our location to Octantis and filled the diving tanks with water, as the sub slipped below the surface. The passengers, who had been together for the past six days on a Viking cruise of the Great Lakes, laughed nervously, remembering a casual line from the submarine safety video: "If the pilot becomes unconscious, press the green button." I eyed the green button, just below the controls. ![]() Today the waters of this big, cold lake, which are often crystal-clear, glistened with an opaque aquamarine. ![]() I took my assigned seat and gazed out the panoramic windows. One by one, we climbed on top of the sub, then down the hatch into a submerged cockpit. Six passengers from the cruise ship Viking Octantis approached on an inflatable Zodiac motorboat. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice.Our pilot stood on the roof of the yellow submarine named John, floating beside a Lake Superior islet where cliffs rise straight from the water and end in a shock of pines. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. Click ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices, or learn more. Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This includes using first- and third-party cookies, which store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier. If you agree, we’ll also use cookies to complement your shopping experience across the Amazon stores as described in our Cookie Notice. We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements. We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice.
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