Artfully Ann's Adventures

Travel - May 5 – Sunday – At Sea

We had some REAL excitement at sea last evening.  About 6:30 PM, the Captain announces that we were changing course and had been asked by the International Sea Navigation and Safety people in Norfolk VA to help a ship in distress.  Wait…this only happens in the movies, right???  The Captain indicated that it was a sailing yacht with three people from France, and that they were stranded and needed our help.  Boy, were they in luck.  It’s not often a big cruise ship comes floating by!
 

Here we are, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean just floating along, a thousand miles away from any coastline, keeping track of how far away we are from anything; then here is a stranded boat.  Who in their right mind would be out in a small boat that holds three people??  Talk about a bad nightmare; later that evening we were to find out more.

John and I had a late dinner.  The dining room is on the second deck, right above the engines; they were in “warp drive” to get us to the incident scene as soon as possible.  From the back dining room, we could see the ship’s wake, and it was easy to get a sense of our ship’s available power.  We had to be going at least 20 knots, when we usually do a leisurely 14 knots.
 It took us about two hours at top speed to get to the stranded boat; once there, we slowed to a crawl, and it was at that time that you became very aware of the sea.  In spite of the size of this ship – many hundreds of feet long and weighing many tens of thousands of tons – it began to move in the water like a cork in a tub.  And the wave-induced motion was modified and magnified by the ship’s designed flexibility.  

Needless to say, I didn’t stay in the dining room for desert.  I wanted to be as far on top as possible.  Besides, we all wanted to watch the rescue.  Every inch of available railing on the rescue side of our ship was covered with lookie-lous.  Clearly, we were watching high drama. 

 

I’ve scattered pictures throughout this report to give you an idea of the size of the disabled boat and the rescue.  The good news is that the rescue was successful; the bad news is that a sailboat of about 40 feet in length was abandoned and declared a hazard to navigation in this (near-empty) part of the Atlantic.  It’s free for the salvage taker.  But I’m betting that it has already sunk.  Then again, it could be like a note in a bottle and end up on some distant shore.  

 After the rescue drama, we learned that the boat and its crew had been adrift for four days due to a steering issue.  It turns out that they were only half way, if that far, into their (planned?) voyage from St. Martin to South Hampton via the Azores.  As the last recued crew member departed, he turned out the lights, and we all watched as it drifted away like a ghost ship in the night.  Edgar Allen Poe could not have dreamed up a creepier ending. 

There is a briefing tomorrow at 1 o’clock.  We may hear more information then.  In the meantime we are floating along on a fairly mild sea and loving it.

Here is our towel animal from last night! The Adventure will continue….