91Čȱ¬

91Čȱ¬ South's Transport Correspondent Paul Clifton gives his first impressions of these giant ships that will soon change Southampton’s skyline:

I'm writing in Turku, a modern, unremarkable city hidden behind innumerable islands on the flat tree-lined coast of Finland.

In the dull, rain-soaked half light of Scandinavian winter, it seems an unlikely place to find the largest passenger ship the world has seen – and the ship that will absolutely dwarf it.

But shipbuilding has been a way of life here since before the Vikings.

Paul Clifton & cameraman Trevor Adamson filming

On 25 April Independence of the Seas will arrive to be named in Southampton, its home port for the summer. The family berths are already sold out for the school holidays.

A multinational army of 1,700 workers are still swarming around like hornets. It certainly does not look remotely ready to welcome passengers. But that’s normal: these giant ships are built in 18 months and everything comes together at the last moment.

In shipyards you walk miles. The scale of everything is breathtaking. Independence needs 111,000 gallons of paint, 1,000 miles of welding and 2,200 miles of electrical cables. It will carry 4,400 passengers – that’s 1,000 more than Cunard’s Queen Mary 2, though in fact the ship is only slightly larger.

But what I really wanted to see is just beginning to take shape in the dry dock nearby. It doesn’t even have a name yet; just a working title of Project Genesis. This too is expected to come to Southampton in late 2009.

Independence of the Seas in Finland

At 220,000 tonnes it will be the length of four football pitches. It will carry 5,400 passengers. Together with the crew, it will have a population of 8,000 – that’s the size of Midhurst, Alresford, Shaftesbury or Amesbury.

The cameraman, Trevor Adamson clambered with me to the top of the shipyard’s giant crane, more than 100 metres above the ground. Bitterly cold in a howling wind, we gazed down on one of the biggest dry docks in the world, builtĚý to construct oil supertankers. Project Genesis will only just fit.

I love filming in shipyards. The sparks, the smells, and the faces of the workers illuminated by the white light of welders’ torches.Ěý

Minna Herrala showed us round. A female welder in this male-dominated arena is unusual enough.

Minna Herrala is one of the ship's welders

But Minna, born and brought up beside the shipyard, speaks four languages fluently. She was a veterinary nurse, then a chef in Paris before putting on heavy blue overalls and a helmet.

“I have the best job in the world,” she says, and she means it. “We work until the temperature goes down to minus 18 centigrade. I never have a bad hair day, I never have to worry about what to wear. I just turn up and weld metal. That’s enough!”

The ship’s young Argentinian captain has been on board since October. Soon Hernan Zini will have 1,300 staff. Today he has only 30 crew.

He tells me I filmed his wife at the water’s edge in Southampton last year as he took another new ship on its maiden voyage.

The ship is due to arrive in Southampton in April

She’d travelled down from their home in Milton Keynes to stand on her own, away from the crowds, waving to the ship’s bridge. It’s a small world!

But what really struck me was the comment from Toivo Ilvonen, the man in charge of building Project Genesis.

“Every 10 years the cruise ships have doubled in size,” he told me. “So by 2020 we could be looking at ships of 400,000 tonnes carrying 16,000 passengers and crew.”

Why not just fix some propellers to the Isle of Wight?