From all our cruises, only once have we been on a ship when somebody was rescued at sea. And we didn’t even know about the rescue, let alone see it.
There was a good reason. It happened at 4 a.m. and, while it lasted two and a half hours, we’re not always up at the crack of dawn (we think of “dawn” as more of a Mafia boss). Word seeped under our cabin door when we were informed our ship, the Norwegian Sun, was running two hours behind schedule and this is why.
Such rescues by cruise ships are more common that you might think. On Friday, there was another one. A passenger on the Disney Magic posted a note about it on a Disney discussion board, and USA Today’s Gene Sloan picked up on it, confirming the event with Disney, although the official version was a little less dramatic than the passenger’s.
Eighteen Algerians had been adrift in the Mediterranean for days. No wonder they called this ship Magic.
“The shipboard team heard crew members from two other vessels talking on the radio about sighting the boat and then losing a visual of it, so the Disney Magic then joined the search and quickly spotted the small boat, which had lost power,” Disney spokeswoman Rena Langley told Sloan.
Holland America’s Westerdam also rescued some Algerians in 2007. The Carnival Valor rescued 10 Cuban refugees on a home-made boat in the Caribbean that same year, and the Golden Princess fished a Seattle couple and their dogs out of a small boat in rough waters en route to Hawaii.
Earlier this year, the MSC Poesia crew assisted in saving four people whose boat had capsized off the coast of Miami…it’s likely every cruise line has a rescue story.
Disney is averaging one a year. In 2009, the Disney Wonder pulled from Caribbean waters a cruiser who’d gone overboard in the night…from a Carnival cruise ship.
The latest Disney adventure took place, like ours by Norwegian, at 4 a.m. We’d have missed this one, too.