They Missed Their Cruise Ship. That Was Only The Beginning.
January 03, 2025 at 04:30PMI’ve never been drawn to cruising as a form of travel for a range of reasons—small rooms, limited time to actually visit ports of call, proximity to other humans—but not because I feared having a stroke while stranded on a small island off the coast of Gabon. Now I know better, thanks to Bridget Read’s rollicking chronicle of the truly bananas experience of nine abandoned cruisers.
Lana Gies, 55, was 8,000 miles away in Redwood City, a beach town south of San Francisco, when she got the phone call. “I’m with your mom in São Tomé and Príncipe,” Jill told her. The first thing Lana thought was “Where?” Julia was an 80-year-old retired gymnastics coach and frequent cruiser who lived in Eugene, Oregon. She had saved up $20,000 to enjoy the Dawn’s African itinerary in the highest-end cabin, and before she left, Lana, who lived near Orlando but was visiting family in California, had sent her an AirTag to stick in her bag. Lana frantically pulled the location up on her phone and saw Julia’s dot on a tiny speck of land in the sea. Her heart dropped. When Jill added that her mother wasn’t saying much, Lana burst into tears. Julia was a relentless motormouth. Something was very wrong. Sarah, the ER doctor, unofficially examined Julia. It seemed to her like she’d had a stroke. Jill relayed her assessment to Lana, who began to panic even more. She hung up with Jill to try and call Norwegian to get someone to tell her what had happened to her mother.
Can you imagine being either party in this situation? I cannot. I also assumed that cruise ships were fairly heavily regulated and had some kind of duty of care to their passengers, but once again, shame on me: International waters remain a lawless place.
The ocean itself functions as a kind of giant loophole in which no government authority is technically in charge. Cruisers love to say that ships are like small cities; they have jails, morgues, and medical centers. But they’re more like lawless autonomous zones with go-cart tracks and Imax theaters. No one knows exactly how much crime, injury, and death occurs in the loophole. Meanwhile, over the years, cruise passengers have been drugged and raped, drugged and murdered, robbed and assaulted. People regularly slip overboard after a day of partaking in bottomless drink packages. In the aughts, American lawmakers tried to rein in the cruise lines after a particularly high-profile case in which a newlywed groom fell (or was pushed) to his death after partying with a group of men in a Royal Caribbean cruise casino. Afterward, Congress managed to pass the Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Act, which mandated a host of regulations for cruise ships that dock on American soil, including minimum heights for railings and that ships be stocked with rape kits. Cruise companies were also supposed to begin to report crime statistics to the FBI. But advocates say the legislation, passed with heavy input from cruise-industry lobbyists, is essentially toothless. The crime data is self-reported and delayed. Very few companies have adopted the latest technology to detect when someone goes overboard, even though one or two people go over every month and, of that number, less than a third are rescued, according to one report.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/01/03/they-missed-their-cruise-ship-that-was-only-the-beginning/
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