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Did We Almost Flip Over?


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I GUESS IT WAS A WIND GUST. THIS IS FROM OTHER POSTS.

 

Monday: The weather took a turn for the worse as tropical storm Olga formed south of us. The seas were rough. The main Lido deck pool was closed as was all outside decks except for the Lido deck. I was in the Big Easy Lounge participating in a trivia contest when an 80mph wind gust hit the ship. This caused the ship to list. Everything that was on the vanity shelf in our room fell to the floor. It broke our digital recorder in the process.

The rollover was a bit exciting, most of us were in the cabins at the time and the bunks had been folded up so they fell down with a bang. We were on Deck 2, and the outside cabins' windows were under water, they said it got very dark suddenly. In one cabin down the hall the window leaked a bunch of water, so things were extra exciting for them! They had all the engineers down working on that for a while, and then lots of cleanup.

The "Wave" of Olga tropical storm hit was an adventure, hey??? Didn't see the pools drain over, but we were sitting on a barstools with Tim and Wanita at the Casino bar when it hit...I said to Lowell, "we're tipping..." He just looked at me and kept talking to Tim. I said again "we're tipping...." they finally felt it too, and we hung on to the bar edge. Pop cans rolled off the bar into garbage can nearby, and some glasses were crashing, but the staff had it under control. No bottles of booze went over as they are held in place by the brass enclosures. We walked by the coffeeshop, and there were chocolate cakes all over the floor and the glass cake holders were smashed and glass oall over....so sad..all that chocolate cake !!! Then we ealked by the pools, all empty and water all over the place, pretty deep, people still eating at the tables with feet in all the water. What a mess. The staff quickly cleaned up everything and was back to normal really fast. Glad it was only one 88 mph wind/wave that hit...could have been alot worse. Went up the elevator back to our cabin and noticed a few lifejackets out (staff), I spose in preparedness of another one hitting

 

 

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Sacry.

I think I'll keep my g/f away from this post since our January cruise will be her first. ;)

Better get her hooked befor letting her imagination get the best of her.

;)

 

I'd say that's a good idea!:D

 

Show her pics of where you're going!

 

Happy Cruising! Make sure she writes a review when y'all return!:)

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This one

 

 

 

For the record, I've seen other threads here where people were talking about this particular video, and that ship had NO engine power, and even though the seas are very rough, that is probably why it is rocking and rolling so much! Also, that particular ship, I believe, had NO people on it!

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That YouTube video shows you just how much a ship can take. (which is a lot)

 

The new Princess ship that had a severe list on one of its first sailings is probably the worst I have heard of and it still did not roll over.

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I went on the Triumph 12/8-12/15 and during our trip the first couple days we were battling tropical storm Olga. At one point during the storm the ship slowly tilted to the left extremly hard. Things on our vanity fell to the floor and our wiater said they lost about 600 plates. The ship stayed tilted like that for like 10-15 seconds. Jus t when you thought it would balance it self it just kept going left. It was scary. Was anybody else on that cruise?

The cruise director got on the P.A and tryed to calm everyone basically saying " The captain has regained control of the vessel". :eek:

 

As if to say they lost control at some point?

What actually happended?

Can the ship actually flip over?

 

 

 

I was on this cruise as well, can't say that I recall the cruise directory implying that the captain had lost control....but then again I wasn't panicked about the incident either. He did clarify that it was a strong wind gust. It was my first cruise actually, and the event was interesting to say the least. The remainder of the cruise the question was "where were you when...." every time you met someone new (I was on the lido deck waiting in line to get a burger, watching plates and the like fly off the tables and water pour out of the hot tubs and pools like a waterfall, glad there was something to hold onto). The ship suffered some though, lost a lot of alcohol in the gift shop, the dessert plates in the cafe went crashing through their glass encasements. I had heard that they lost a chandelier in the casino but I don't know that that was true. It was a mess.

 

And hey...lay off the Posieden jokes...thats just not funny. Prior to the cruise my daughter who went with me kept making jokes about being on a lower deck in case we capsized..."cause she has seen Posieden" ...LOL.

 

All in all it was a good trip aside from mother nature choosing to drop an "uncommon" tropical storm on us. It was still a lot warmer then here.

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Exactly.

 

Give me a few minutes and let me see if i can come up w/something. :D i have to be careful of what i link to. there was a nasty linkage incident just prior to CHIRSTMAS...

 

LMAO, err, what are you talkin about? :cool: :eek: :rolleyes:

 

LOL -- see, forgotten already. :)

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My son and I were on a cruise a few years ago when it rolled hard. Don't remember which one, but I think it was the Carnival Holiday. We were having dinner in the dining room and everything was pretty calm. Then we felt about two small motions and then one big roll. Items on the table moved to one side, some chairs fell over, and we heard a few big crashes from the kitchen.

 

The waiter told us hundreds of plates in the kitchen had been broken, that a few cooks had been burned by falling pots or pans (although no one was seriously hurt as far as we know). The giftshops on the ship were closed for the rest of the night and we could see that lots of liquor bottles had fallen off the shelves and broken.

 

No one seemed to be very shaken by the whole thing, although it certainly gave the passengers something to talk about for a day or so.

 

LOL :)

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I went on the Triumph 12/8-12/15 and during our trip the first couple days we were battling tropical storm Olga. At one point during the storm the ship slowly tilted to the left extremly hard. Things on our vanity fell to the floor and our wiater said they lost about 600 plates. The ship stayed tilted like that for like 10-15 seconds. Jus t when you thought it would balance it self it just kept going left. It was scary. Was anybody else on that cruise?

The cruise director got on the P.A and tryed to calm everyone basically saying " The captain has regained control of the vessel". :eek:

 

As if to say they lost control at some point?

What actually happended?

Can the ship actually flip over?

 

 

No, you did not almost flip over. A small angle of heel can seem like much more than it is, especially if you are on the upper decks. On our sailboat, my wife feels like 15 degrees is perilously close to flipping over. It seems much worse than it is, safety-wise. As someone mentioned (Machman?), it would take much more to capsize the boat. If you were close to capsizing, you and everyone and everything around you would have been sliding to the lower side of the ship.

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We were on the Veendam the same week. The night it was the worse was 12/14 from Cozemel on the way back to Tampa. Was that the night of your incident? They drained the pools as the water was spilling out and curtailed the show due to dancers being in peril. The next day we heard that liquor bottles had broken and shelves in the shops had fallen.

We were glad to be midship down low and slept through the worst of it.

That announcement would have had me worrying!!! The word Poseiden had crossed my mind as well but Capt. Dunford did a great job and the listing was nothing like as bad as you describe.

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From NY TIMES article;

 

April 18, 2005

Big Wave Leaves Some Unlikely to Go Down to the Sea in Ships Again

By KAREEM FAHIM

 

More than 2,000 passengers, shaken by the experience of having a seven-story wave pummel their storm-tossed cruise ship on Saturday, disembarked in Manhattan today, with some vowing never to sail again.

 

"It was the perfect storm," said one passenger, Celestine Mcelhatton, a contractor from Rockland County. Mr. Mcelhatton and his wife, Anne Marie, had spent their honeymoon on the 965-foot-long cruise ship, the Norwegian Dawn, which docked at Pier 88 on the Hudson this morning.

 

Mr. Mcelhatton said he was in a reception area on Deck 7 when the wave crashed into the front of the ship early Saturday off the coast of Georgia.

 

"People started fighting with members of the crew, and blaming them for the storm," he said after coming ashore today. "Many people wore life jackets. The furniture was broken, and passengers started smoking. It was chaos."

 

The Norwegian Dawn was on its way back to New York from Miami Friday night when it ran into rough weather. Passengers said the storm buffeted the ship for almost 11 hours, keeping many up all night, before the giant wave hit the ship near dawn on Saturday.

 

A spokeswoman for Norwegian Cruise Line, Susan Robison, said the wave reached as high as Deck 10 on the 15-deck vessel and injured four passengers, broke windows and flooded 62 cabins. None of the injuries were considered serious, she said, though one of the passengers required stitches.

 

After the wave struck, the ship turned around and put into Charleston, S.C., for inspections and repairs. A few hundred of the ship's passengers decided to leave and complete their journey via other means.

 

Passengers said today that they had been offered a refund of half the price of their cruise and half off a future cruise, though many said that, at the moment, they felt it was unlikely that they would take advantage of the second part of the offer.

 

Some passengers questioned why the ship's captain had chosen to ride out the storm instead of turn back as it had approached. "We rode those waves for 11 hours," said Jean Marie Cranston of Berkeley Heights, N.J. "We should have turned around before we did."

 

Jiji Thomas, one of the Norwegian Dawn's co-pilots, said that his shift ended two hours before the wave hit the ship, and that until then, the storm had not been severe enough to turn the vessel around.

 

Mr. Thomas, who described the captain, Niklas Peterstam, as "calm" throughout the storm, explained that the crew had had access to extensive data on the weather and had prepared a number of options for dealing with it if it had worsened.

 

"The big problem was that wave," he said.

 

 

 

 

 

STAR-BULLETIN / 1997

A 95-foot-high wave nearly caused the Queen Elizabeth II to capsize in the North Atlantic;

 

artbrill.jpg

 

 

 

<H1>Missing ships might have been lost to rogue waves

 

SINCE PEOPLE first ventured out onto the ocean, sailors have returned from voyages telling of "holes in the sea" and monstrous waves. Their stories have largely been dismissed as tall tales until recently.

 

Even now, a ship is lost at sea every week, and not small ones; 200 ships lost in the past 20 years have been more than 650 feet long. Unlike heavily investigated airplane crashes, there is often little or no evidence left behind and no information about the reasons behind the losses. They are simply blamed on bad weather or human error.

The stories of the old salts are gaining credence with scientific documentation of rogue waves, which are now suspected to be the cause of the sinking and mysterious disappearances of many ships.

Until recently, scientists thought they could predict the heights of ocean waves using the "linear model," which defines the probabilities of certain wave heights from measured heights.

The distribution is a Rayleigh distribution rather than the more common bell curve of a normal distribution. A Rayleigh distribution is skewed toward the lower end such that the peak of the curve is at a lower height than the average; there are significantly more waves lower than the average than there are waves higher than the average.

Except for tsunami or surface disturbances, water waves are generated by wind. In the linear model, the distribution of wave heights is a function of the wind speed and the time that the wind blows over a certain stretch of water.

Recording the heights, wavelengths and frequencies of waves on a choppy sea surface is a difficult task and was done until recently by "eye" from the pitching, rolling and yawing deck of ship. Modern equipment on the stationary platforms of offshore drilling platforms has allowed for the measurement and continuous recording of wave heights.

At any given time and place, waves of different characteristics are coming from all directions, having been generated by local winds and by winds from storms halfway around the world.

Even within a stormy region, the speed and direction of wind and gusts changes from minute to minute, making prediction of wave heights impossible, so the linear model was the best that was available.

In the linear model, wave heights of given "sea" are reported as the significant wave height (SWH), which is the average height of the highest one-third of waves.

The Rayleigh distribution of the linear model predicts that the most frequent waves will have a height about 50 percent of the SWH, the average waves will have a height about 60 percent of the SWH and the highest 10 percent of waves will be about 25 percent higher than the SWH.

A "rogue" wave is now defined as any wave that is more than double the SWH, which the Rayleigh distribution predicts should occur only in about one wave out of every 3,000.

On Jan. 1, 1995, the Draupner oil platform in the North Sea off Norway electronically recorded a 95-foot wave during a storm with SWH of approximately 40 feet. The wave caused minor damage on the platform, confirming that the reading was valid.

According to the linear model, a wave of this size should occur in 40-foot seas only once in every 10,000 years.

The Draupner wave was the first positively confirmed rogue wave and the first to cast aspersions on the validity of the linear model with reliable measurement.

Since then other reliable reports have come from several sources.

In February 1995 the cruise liner Queen Elizabeth II encountered a 95-foot wave during in the North Atlantic that her captain described as "a great wall of water -- it looked as if we were going into the White Cliffs of Dover." He estimated that the ship listed so far that five inches more would have caused it to capsize.

Within a week between in late February and early March 2001, 100-foot waves in the South Atlantic smashed the bridge windows of two cruise ships, the Bremen and the Caledonian Star. The Bremen drifted parallel to the waves without navigation or propulsion for two hours before the engines were started and power restored.

Radar data from the North Sea's Goma oilfield showed 466 rogue wave encounters in 12 years and stimulated interest among skeptical scientists and engineers who had previously relied on the linear model for designing drilling platforms and ships to withstand maximum wave heights of only 50 feet.

In April 2005 a wave estimated to be 70 feet high smashed windows on the ninth and 10th decks of the Norwegian Dawn off the Florida coast. A company spokeswoman told reporters that the sea had calmed down after a storm when the wave seemed to "come out of thin air" at daybreak. The ship's captain, who has 20 years on the job, said he had never seen anything like it.

As more data are collected, it appears that rogue waves occur multiple times in a given week somewhere in the world.

In December 2000 the European Space Agency began a project (MaxWave) to monitor and model the occurrence of rogue waves. ESA scientists used radar satellite data with a resolution of 30 feet to conduct a global rogue wave census.

Over a three-week period in 2001, they identified more than 10 individual rogue waves greater than 80 feet in height, a shocking revelation that showed rogue waves to be very real and much more common than anyone expected.

Scientists are beginning to draw patterns. Sites where ordinary waves encounter ocean currents and eddies can concentrate wave energy in a small area, such as where the Gulf Stream interacts with waves coming in from the Labrador Sea in the northern Atlantic Ocean between eastern Canada and southwest Greenland.

This is the where the Andrea Gail, made famous by the 2001 movie "The Perfect Storm," was lost during an unusually intense nor'easter.

Sustained winds can enlarge waves moving in sync with the wind in the vicinity of weather fronts and low-pressure centers to generate rogue waves.

Unfortunately, satellite research shows that rogue waves also occur in areas that are not affected by currents, geographical formations or weather. Such "random" rogue waves are more problematic because they are unpredictable. Wave mathematicians are delving into nonlinear quantum mechanics for solutions to model how some waves steal energy from neighboring waves to grow into "holes" and steep rogue waves.

</H1>
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For the record, I've seen other threads here where people were talking about this particular video, and that ship had NO engine power, and even though the seas are very rough, that is probably why it is rocking and rolling so much! Also, that particular ship, I believe, had NO people on it!

 

 

If you go to the main forum page and then to the photo discussion page, from there look for the thread that talks about rouge waves. You will find a link to a video of the pax who were on that ship. But I will warn you, as it has audio and you can hear the upset kids.

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