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I spent forty-odd years in the shipping industry and got to travel on a variety of ships in a variety of oceans. In all that time, I think there were only a dozen occasions when the ship I was sailing in encountered such severe weather that there was danger to life and limb. They were all very unpleasant occasions and a reminder that the sea can be a hostile environment no matter how large a ship might be. Despite this, when you speak to a seasoned cruise passenger about, for instance, the hurricane you were once in, the chances are that you will be countered by their experience which they are sure was worse than yours. As I’ve said before, some passengers very often wear their bad-weather experiences like medals and are more than happy to talk at length about them. So I was interested in two recent bad-weather stories affecting cruise ships. The first concerned the small Clelia II which, returning from a trip to Antarctica, suffered an engine failure in severe weather and, for a while, was escorted by an Argentinean Naval ship until things were sorted out. In this instance, there were no injuries except to one crew member. In the second incident, dozens of passengers and crew were injured when the much larger Brilliance of the Seas encountered such bad weather in the Mediterranean that giant waves sent people and furniture flying around the ship. One report said that the wavs were of such intensity that it caused the ship to ‘rock dangerously from side to side’. I spent a little time looking up the blogs and twitters of some of those involved in these two and other incidents and was not disappointed for there were some who thought their own experiences were more dramatic. But none of them were as bad as when I was on the old Victoria in June 2000. We had left Akureyri and had spent a day sailing round round the coast of Iceland trying to avoid the worst of some very bad weather when the ship was hit by a hurricane. The ship’s motion was quite unbelievable and ...
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Clelia II, Argentinean Navy, cruise ships, Brilliance of the Seas, Royal Caribbean Cruises, bad weather, severe weather, ,
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