Captain Courageous

Being the captain of a cruise ship is one of the most demanding jobs in the travel industry. And for Kate McCue, the job is a non-stop thrill. Since she became the first American female captain of a large cruise ship in 2015 – the Celebrity Summit (and at only age 37 yet) – McCue has succeeded in completely winning over the world, commanding first the Summit, followed by the Celebrity Equinox and the Celebrity Edge in 2019. She is now the commanding officer of the new Celebrity Beyond, which launched in Spring 2022, in charge of navigation, operations, safety and passenger service, along with a highly specialized crew of 1,200.

For Captain Kate – as she is known – the seed for a life at sea was planted early on when she went on a cruise with her family. “I can remember the exact moment when I was 12 years old,” she says. “It was a four-day cruise to the Bahamas over Thanksgiving. I remember spending all of my time with the cruise staff. When we got off the ship, I said to my dad, ‘I know exactly what I want to be when I grow up.’ And he said, ‘What's that?’ And I said, ‘A cruise director.’

Fate set a different course for her. After business studies, she attended the California Maritime Academy for four years – “I was one of eight women in my class to graduate” – then moved to Hawaii to gain experience working on a catamaran. She then took an entry-level position with Disney Cruise Line, before traveling the world as a second officer for Royal Caribbean. Her promotion there to first officer in 2004, was a huge deal for a woman.

“I had set this goal for myself to be the first female American captain,” McCue says. “That was something I put in my brain – I didn’t think anyone else would care about that. Coming into the cruise industry, where we have so much diversity — every race, religion, cultural background, sexual orientation – no one brought up the fact that I am a woman.”

That all changed when McCue was promoted to captain. “The spotlight was a little overwhelming,” she says, initially asking to be excused from talking to the media. “But when I stepped away from speaking to the press, I found that I was being asked the same questions [about gender] by our guests and crew. That’s when I realized I had been given a platform, to normalize a woman in this position.” Now on the Beyond, 70 per cent of the bridge is female. “Our company went from two per cent female to more than 32 per cent in four years, because of conscious efforts to promote well-deserving female officers.”

The celebrity cat’s pajamas.

One of the ways Captain Kate reaches out to the world, giving them an insider view of life on the bridge of a megaship, is through Instagram, where her followers now number 379,000. “I use social media as a way to reach people,” she says. “My tagline is, ‘If you can sea it, you can be it,’ because growing up, the only thing I saw about cruise ships was The Love Boat. Their depiction of cruise ships is not necessarily what we see on a day-to-day basis.”

But it’s the Instagram account of her pet sphynx cat Bug Naked that is currently causing the commotion, with the cat’s number of followers hitting 60,000. “We call her the maneuvering support mammal, because when I have an officer who’s doing a maneuver for the first time onboard the ship, she will come out of our office and sense their anxiety,” McCue says. “And I've had officers say that when she sits right next to them, they can feel the anxiety leaving their body.”

While the celebrity cat and the Celebrity job are a handful, Captain Kate is well aware of just how fortunate she is to have achieved a lifelong dream, one that took a lot of hard work to achieve. “It’s not a sprint, it's a marathon,” she says. “It took me 19 years to be promoted to captain, but to be given my own vessel is the highlight of a career for a captain. I’m reveling in that right now on the Beyond. This is my $1.3 billion baby and I’m so proud of her – and I'm going to enjoy this for quite a while.”