News item: A blanket of fog kept 60 vessels from moving in or out of the Houston Ship Channel…
If you haven’t heard, the vessels included cruise ships. If you haven’t heard, some passengers were livid. And if you haven’t heard, the only time fog is generated by anything or anyone but Mother Nature it’s when they use for effect at entertainment events. Dry ice, it’s called.
Lividity, thy name is folly.
Okay, vacations were spoiled — or least diminished — by the fog off the coast of Texas last weekend. Three ships were in the area — the Ecstasy (right) and the Conquest from Carnival, and Royal Caribbean’s Voyager of the Seas — and all were affected.
Carnival got the worst of it. The Ecstasy was forced to sit six miles from the channel for a day. That not only delayed its return to Galveston, but also its next departure, so two ships of passengers were affected.
Incoming Ecstasy passengers were assisted, presumably financially when necessary, in changing flights if they missed theirs. Outgoing Ecstasy passengers were offered full refunds if they passed on the cruise that had to be shortened by a day, or 50% refunds if they went on the 3-day cruise with port change — Progreso, Mexico instead of Montego Bay, Jamaica.
For some passengers, it wasn’t enough. At the risk of being apologists for Carnival, did they really think the cruise line should be liable for fog that made the channel unsafe?
Should somebody have reimbursed us for the vacation we spent in Honolulu, lying on the beach for a week, wrapped in towels, in the rain? In hindsight, we’d rather have been on a cruise ship in the fog.