PurpleKa

That’s . . . Not exactly what hearsay is or how it works. https://law.indiana.edu/instruction/tanford/b723/14hearsay/T14.pdf But this isn’t a court of law and the conversation isn’t evidence being offered in a case, anyway. I suspect either you are getting me mixed up with someone else or didn’t read all the posts, but to my knowledge nothing of significance that I’ve said I experienced or observed has been “refuted” (someone on the 4th floor who was asleep by midnight saying they didn’t personally experience what someone else on the 10th floor experienced at 3am doesn’t refute either person’s experience, for example—two people can have different experiences and both be valid) and several others have said they experienced something similar as well. Again, I’m trying to process and understand what I experienced, not attempting to get compensation from anyone at this point. It’s been a little over 48 hours since we all arrived home from this cruise, and a little over a day since I joined the conversation. This is an internet conversation, on a discussion board. I’m sick and bored and see no reason why I and others can’t continue engaging in the conversation as long as we are interested in talking amongst ourselves about it. Why are you so invested in discouraging us from discussing it?

I am trying to differentiate clearly between what was my own experience and observations vs. what I’ve seen/heard reported by others. Accuracy is important. You aren’t obligated to continue reading the thread if it bothers you so much that some of us are still participating in an conversation about it 48 hours later.

This is very interesting. It sounds like you were on a lower deck, maybe not toward the front of the ship, and sleeping during the worst of it maybe? Thanks for sharing your experience.

Thank you. This was when we were leaving Juneau though, not Skagway. We had rough seas the night/morning before Skagway too, but nothing to the level we had Sunday night between Juneau and Victoria (skipping Icy Strait Point). ETA: So it’s all a bit confusing to me. Sorry if I’m not understanding what you’re trying to say.

I think what some of us are confused about and are trying to figure out is if normal or not, is that there was no acknowledgment at all—not even the next day—from the captain or crew to the passengers as a whole that this was in any way out of the ordinary, or that anything had happened besides mildly rough seas and missing a port. That is what we’re all trying to wrap our brains around. Especially when these are the types of waves and winds (and possibly ship damage, reportedly) that have resulted in injuries and deaths on ships this size in the past (Louis Majesty sustained enough damage that people were injured and killed from being hit by just three 26-foot waves in similar 70mph winds in March 2010, for example) and we spent so many hours in conditions that were legitimately out of the norm and potentially life-threatening. I’m not saying we needed an apology or a complete refund or anything, but some sort of explanation and reassurance or even just some sort of validation or acknowledgment that this wasn’t business as normal would have been nice at *some* point. It also would’ve been nice to be given timely and accurate information about things like where, and how to get to our cars after we had to disembark at a pier miles from where we left our vehicles without even being told we were not returning to the location we had departed from. And the lack of organization and communication extended to things like the stressful chaos with rebooking shore excursions when we got into Skagway late. There were crew members telling folks to just go in to the theater and then someone else barking at them harshly to get in line and wait their turn in the queue outside the theater. Some people were told to do one thing while others booked on the same excursion were told to do something else. We couldn’t find my grandmother in the crowd and were told they only had confirmed four seats left on the train that they knew of at that point, and we could not change her ticket or reserve a seat for her unless she and her ticket were present, so someone in the group had to get out of line to go find her. Two of us went ahead and got our tickets changed and the crew member handling that told us he couldn’t guarantee the rest of us could get on the train or ride together and snapped at us that we needed to decide right now if we were willing to go without her if she couldn’t get on. So another person had to do what they thought was giving up their seat on the train while the other two thought we were going to have to go without them because of a couple of minutes delay to find her. Nobody knew what we were supposed to be doing. The excursion desk and the staff at the theater were sending people back-and-forth between the two, both telling them they needed to talk to the other one. I saw passengers spoken to very harshly and shoved or harshly gestured around just because they were confused and didn’t know where they were supposed to be going. People were told by NCL crew that their tickets had been canceled and refunded and sent away while trying to get in line for the train. Instructions given to passengers were unclear and conflicting. We were told by multiple NCL crew members that we might not be able to get on an excursion we’d booked that actually had ample room for everyone according to the railway employees. The train personnel told us there was no issue at all with having plenty of room to get everyone on the train and there had never been any concern about that. And that the earlier ones in the party waiting to sit with the ones who ended up much later in the line was no trouble at all. There were no assigned seats on the train, and passengers were allowed to pick any seat and car with the steps down for boarding in the entire train to sit in at their choice. There was no reason for NCL to handle rebooking train tickets in a way that stressed everyone out and made children and a few adults cry (this was before the worst night of the storm). It seemed like there had been no planning at all on NCL’s part about how to handle this before we actually arrived, and nobody knew what was going on or acted like they had expected or planned for this until it was happening. Again, I did think the food was amazing and in general the staff and especially our housekeeping staff were amazing. But certain things were handled very badly.

The Encore is much, much larger than the Sun. I saw a picture of the two next to each other in Ketchikan and the Sun looks like a baby ship next to the Encore, so weather patterns might not have as much of an impact.

I assumed it was a software or connectivity issue too, and/or they didn’t have time to keep it updated due to dealing with other crises. Other channels on the TV stopped working intermittently also, and the electricity was flickering out at times. Even my safe stopped working and threw an error, and I had to get security to come open it next time I needed to get into it. Some sort of announcement or acknowledgment other than the standard, “ as always at Sea, there is the chance of ship movement due to inclement weather, so please take care of your safety and use the hand rails” type of announcement that came out a couple of times at regular announcement times would have been appreciated. Even if it had to be the next day.

Mood. This! LOL

Thank you. I’m not the OP, just another commenter that joined on the thread. I’m sick in bed with covid and land sickness and am having trouble sleeping/sleeping at odd times, so I have time to comment and read intermittently more than usual at the moment.

Thanks for this info. Do you know if there’s a way to see historical data on wave and wind measurements easily, and how to find where exactly we were during the night and early morning Oct 8-9?

I’m sorry, I probably worded this badly. I saw several comments from other people saying that crew members and passengers were sleeping in the hallways and lounges closer to the lifeboats and/or the interior of the ship because they didn’t feel safe in their rooms, and that at least one balcony room and another place in the ship had a window broken. People were not reported to have been sleeping out on the decks in the lifeboats, as far as I know. I did not personally see this, just saw comments about it from several different sources. I did see a lot of people in the lounges on the middle levels around midnight, some sleeping. I didn’t go in the halls on all the levels. I did find it believable because even in an internal room on the 10th floor it was impossible to sleep and the crashing sounds and sensations of impact on the back of the wall I was sleeping against were severe, and family members in view rooms on the 5th floor and passengers I spoke to on the 8th floor were also kept awake by the sound and movement of impacts in the night. But this particular detail is not something I personally observed or can verify. I did personally see water dripping in through the ceiling and coming in through doors in several places, but assumed this was normal in a storm with heavy rain. The door out onto the pool deck was disabled from opening from the outside on the buffet end when winds got high, and there were at least two places on the ship where the doors to the outer deck were open during times the outer decks were supposed to be closed because water dumping from a higher level of the ship was hitting the sensors so hard the doors wouldn’t stay shut, from what I could tell/guess. That was earlier in the day though. I didn’t go out there but I peeked out and the wind and rain was intense. On the upper level observation deck around midnight I heard some passengers suggesting to others to try going to a lower level for less movement and noise if they were on an upper level, and some saying they were up there because they figured it was probably safest near the top of the ship in conditions like that, or were trying to find out what was going on.

It looks like there’s a section on the topic of C-discussions in the guidelines: https://boards.cruisecritic.com/guidelines/#guides_covid I believe my comment falls within the guidelines since it was just sharing my own experiences and the way a specific ship/cruise line handled illness on the cruise, what resources were or were not readily available, cost and feasibility of getting testing, etc. If not I’m happy to edit it if a moderator requests that. I wish I’d known to bring tests and OTC medications along, and am glad someone else said this info was helpful for them.

What a kind comment, thank you. I had young and elderly family members with me and didn’t want to make things more difficult for anyone or worry folks at home, so I played it up to my little one like it was an amazing experience and we were flying like on a roller coaster, whee! I saw another woman with a young child doing the same thing. Otherwise I just tried to stay out of the way as much as possible and watch and listen, and quietly asked other passengers questions when the opportunity arose.

The excursions that were canceled by the ship were automatically refunded. The ones like the Tram in Juneau, where a few people got to go before the tram was shut down for the rest of the day, we were not refunded for. Someone else in my party was told by NCL staff he asked that we would be automatically refunded if we didn’t use the tickets. There was no general announcement or info sent out about it that I saw or heard. When I finally asked a day or two later when I noticed it was still on my charges, I was told we had to turn in our unused tickets to the excursion staff and specifically request a refund. But by that point, nobody was working the excursion desk and some people had already thrown away their unused tickets. Guest services could not help me or refund the money, but they took my tickets and wrote a note to go with it, and told me they would leave it for the excursion staff. I don’t think it’s gotten completely straightened out yet but now I no longer have the unused tickets since guest services kept them. So we’ll see.

they knew the weather was bad enough that they were going to skip the icy strait point stop by Friday October 7th, in enough time that they had already made the adjustment before the evening newsletter was printed and sent out on October 7, well before we were in the eye of the storm. I don’t know much about sailing, but I was confused about why they chose to spend an extra day at sea in the middle of a storm instead of taking any other option when they clearly had more than 24 hours warning that it was going to be very bad.

The Norwegian Sun is 848 feet long, not tall. 121.3 feet beam and 26 ft draft. So for perspective, the waves were taller than the amount of the ship under water. Combine that with the troughs and wake, and water was coming up almost even with the top of the ship—or at least looked that way to me. It felt rougher to me in the middle of the night than at 11pm also, so I would be surprised if the waves weren’t significantly higher than the 11pm measurement at points. Another comment here from someone on the eighth floor said they had debris from waves hitting the decks on level 8. I was seeing waves that appeared to be peaking almost level with or above the windows on level 12 around midnight, but I don’t know enough to feel I can grade or guess at the accuracy of that perception.

This was the Norwegian Sun round-trip cruise from Seattle WA to Alaska Oct 2-11, 2023.

The worst of the storm was on Sunday night/Monday morning Oct 8-9. We were at sea Oct 8 and 9, docked in Victoria BC on Tuesday Oct 10 from 8:30am until about midnight (instead of the originally-scheduled 2pm), and disembarked in Seattle on Wednesday Oct 11 between 8 and 9am. So by that point it had been several days since the worst of the storm and any damage, and they’d had a full day docked in a port already also.

The point is that there was little to no communication or explanation to the passengers of what was going on, no reassurances or acknowledgement that anything unusual happened at all, slow or no response even to calls for help from the passengers, and NCL’s bad communication and handling of the situations made things even worse than they otherwise would have been. Several people have mentioned that they feel the captain made a bad decision to go out into/through the storm in the first place even though he somehow managed to get us through it alive by some miracle. This was my first cruise and we had no idea what to expect or do. There should be some sort of warning about the risks of traveling to Alaska this late in the year, if they are going to run cruises to Alaska in October at all. Most cruise lines won’t send ships there after September at all, I’ve now learned.

Another thing I forgot to mention: The way Norwegian Sun staff handled rescheduling excursions when we docked in Skagway in the afternoon instead of the morning was ridiculously chaotic and confusing, with people being told different things and milling around crammed into the theater and waiting for extended periods of time with no clear instructions and unsure where to go or what to do. We were being given conflicting information by different crew members, and being made to feel we might not get on the train at all, children crying because we were told our tickets had been canceled and wouldn’t be rescheduled, being put in one line and then told to get in another, etc. when in reality there was more than enough space for everyone who wanted to go. The railway staff told us they would have just added extra cars if needed and there was plenty of room for everyone. There was absolutely no reason for this to be so stressful and handled so poorly.

26.9 foot waves, according a screenshot someone took of bouy info around 11pm Sunday night

Or even the next day

Some sort of acknowledgment or reassurance from the captain or crew at some point during the night when we were in a life-threatening storm would’ve been nice.

I saw info elsewhere that it was 26-foot waves and 69mph wind where the Norwegian Sun was that night. Glass blown out on the ship in multiple places and quite a few people were worried enough they slept out with the lifeboats. People who have spent years on the sea saying it was the one of the worst storms they’ve been in. Even the staff were terrified, reportedly

Although they were already boarding people for the next cruise by 8:45 AM when we were getting off in Seattle yesterday, so there must not have been very extensive repairs needed to the ship. Hopefully.