We met a young couple with an intriguing story to tell while on the Celebrity Millennium this year. Husband and wife, they were from California; in fact they probably still are. Both are flight attendants with Southwest, so they’re able to schedule blocks of time off to pursue their passion.
It’s called cruising the world.
Their intriguing story was having a “pirate drill” while cruising with Royal Caribbean. Really, we said, a pirate drill?
This was on a ship going to Dubai. They’d wanted to go through the Suez Canal, because its original designer (Ferdinand de Lesseps of France) also had a hand in the creation of the Panama Canal — together the two most famous transitional water passages in the world. After clearing the Suez and sailing the Red Sea, the ship’s course took them through the Gulf of Aden. As everyone knows, for the past few years those waters have been infested with pirates who, like something out of a bad movie, have been capturing whole ships and holding them for ransom.
Anyway, the “pirate drill” consisted of what to do if attacked by some of “Blackbeard’s boys” off the shores of Yemen. Something like the lifeboat drill that is mandatory procedure on every cruise ship, except they are more about emergencies from within the ship than without. The pirate drill, according to our friendly flight attendants, was basically to stay in your stateroom if attacked and the crew would board up all windows on the back half of the ship.
Cruise ships can outrace pirate ships, if necessary, and there’s no real threat of a successful attack, given the size of your typical cruise ship. But just the fact that it has to be addressed makes for interesting cocktail conversation…and for an interesting blog.
The whole thing might even be a little humorous if it weren’t for the fact that because of these Somali pirates, the popular tourist port of Mombasa, Kenya, has been severely affected. In the first four months of this year, only 500 visitors arrived on cruise ships, down from 11,000 in 2009, a drop of 95%.
That’s it, we’re done.