Report from the high seas

[Thought I would share this very entertaining email from my dad, who is "enjoying" a South American cruise.]

The cruise has been quite an experience so far. We spent a day in Montevideo, Uruguay and then headed south along the Atlantic towards the Falkland Islands which was supposed to take two days. At the dress up dinner after the first day, we were enjoying our meal when the ship took a sudden lurch, sending glasses and plates and silverware shuffling all over the table. I was heroic in that I kept two glasses of water, mine and the lady next to me, from tipping. The Captain came onto the PA system and I never heard a room of a hundred people or more get so quiet so quickly. He announced that there was no problem but that we had hit a quite tall wave. Unfortunately, he indicated that it was very rough seas ahead and that we could expect some more.


Shortly, thereafter, in our beds, the ordeal began. The lurching, yawing, rolling, increased and it was evident that there were quite heavy swells. This was the beginning. We then endured the night with very little sleep because the ship would rise 40 or more feet into the air on a swell and reach the top while 40 to 50 mile per hour winds pushed directly on our bow, momentarily keeping the huge ship of thousands of tons up while blowing away the viscious connection between it and the sea. The result, seconds later, was that the ship would fall the 40 feet, plus another 40 into the trough, maybe a half inch behind the water itself. At the bottom the bow would plunge hard into the water and the slap would emit a sound like someone had hit both sides of the ship with a sledge hammer. While this was happening, Cathy and I, in our bed, felt as though we had been body slammed and at the very moment of the slam would come the pound. There would be another pound milliseconds later at the first harmonic of the distance from the top to the bottom of the ship. Very unnerving. We had a good chance to study this effect over the next 38 hours while being body slammed from between 10,000 and 15,000 times.

Simultaneously, every interfacing surface in the cabin that could articulate, did articulate, giving out a grinding sound like a rope being stretched to its limits and about to part. That sound, like a ¨kkkk, kkkk, kkkk,,,,,kkkk¨ would coincide with an increasing pressure on your head and neck as it was mashed deeper and deeper into the mattress.

It was inevitable that we started vomiting, and before long we had matching wastebaskets on either side of the bed. Cathy discovered seasick pills by calling on the phone for assistance, and they were delivered. They were supposed to be taken with food, I was very glad to hear. I ate a saltine cracker, chewed a pill, and immediately retched it up. A half hour later, when I had regained my composure, I nibbled an infinitisimal edge of cracker, then a slight bit of a pill and after an hour, I had kept half a cracker and a whole pill down. It did help. I now had all of the foregoing effects going on, but they were disconnected, especially from my stomach. 39 hours had passed since I had had a single drop of liquid or a single crumb of food. We were notified that we were going to be 4 hours late going into Port Stanley and that we were in the worst sea conditions of the last two years. We couldn´t put tenders ashore, but were going to pull into the outer harbor so that a guest could be medivacced off. For a while I thought they were talking about me, but it turned out to be a woman who they put in a lifeboat, lowered over the side and into a pilot boat and took away to a hospital. We, in turn, went on with our voyage of discovery of the depths of human suffering.

When we finally got to the bottom of South America and turned east, we got some relief and by Cape Horn, the seas were quite calm. We found out that we had swells of over 50 feet and headwinds of 46 knots. I could not help but think, why didn´t we bring the kids, this is so much fun.

Special thanks to roving correspondent, John, for this update that no doubt makes all of us grateful that the past few days were nowhere near as exciting here on land.