It was the last day of our cruise. The overhead speakers announced that the view of Santorini is the best from the front of the ship and that we were already approaching the island. Elisa and I were already reading at the front of the boat and the view wasn’t bad. We had already gotten all ready to disembark. Our suitcases were packed and had been picked up by the crew. We had our backpack with us just so we wouldn’t need to go back to the room. We had gotten our passports and settled our account and we were ready to get off the boat.
The engines made a weird grinding sound when we stopped. I think they had put the boat into reverse. There was a scraping sound like the boat had brushed some rocks too. I thought the anchor had just been dropped. And then, ten minutes later, when the boat started to list, I thought it was just the normal tugging of the boat’s anchor. We were near the bar and we felt sorry for the guy because a whole bunch of the glasses were breaking. Basically the whole bar started to fall apart.
A crew member asked us to go towards the side of the ship that was listing the highest. Lots of people that had just come from their rooms were carrying the standard-issue life jackets from their cabins. It seemed normal to me that a ton of people would have such an overreaction to a normal list. I didn’t even think anything of it. A guy on the restaurant’s staff was panicking and screaming for a few minutes. He was wearing a name tag showing he was a member of the crew, so I didn’t like that he was screaming in front of everybody.
An announcement over the loudspeakers said, “Everyone remain calm! Everything is under control!” That was not reassuring, because it could mean anything. It could mean that they were doing triage, trying to decide which passengers should survive, and the process was under control. I still thought people were just overreacting though. There was a really scared teenage kid. We were joking with him and reassuring him because we didn’t think it was a big deal. About then there was another announcement about how some water-tight doors were shutting and you should keep clear if you saw one. The elevators had been shut down (and the toilets too, but I won’t say more about that). A family that was stuck in the elevator had to get pried out. Their two little kids were bawling. It was hard to watch. I was doing fine but that was probably the most traumatic thing to see. There were a couple other announcements about kids that had been separated from their parents, and I heard that they were all reunited pretty quickly.
We waited for a long time before getting more instructions. In the meantime, some kids raided the kitchen for some sandwiches. Crew members that were sprinting up and down the stairs brought everybody life jackets. Other really tired crew members brought water to all the decks. A few times they asked us to go up the stairs but then changed their minds. There was a lot of waiting. At one point when they began loading a lifeboat, you could hear some people up on the deck in a desperate panic to get on. One of our friends told us that he was on the uppermost deck handing out life jackets, and a 45-year old guy ran up to him and tried to rip the life jacket right off our friend’s neck for himself. So crazy. By this time we had taken dozens of photos of everybody standing on this big incline and we had been exchanging email addresses. Also, we could see that the entire caldera was full of ships (and a bunch of helicopters and a plane) all holding nearby. We exchanged theories about what had happened, and I think I convinced most people that one isolated compartment was full of water and would take all night to fix. Then everyone would leave in the morning.
After a couple hours of this, all the passengers got into a single file line and started going down the stairs. The original plan of going up the stairs to the lifeboats had failed, because they couldn’t get people off on the lifeboats! They started by loading up a lifeboat with little kids and realized on the way down that it wasn’t safe and so they didn’t do it anymore. The lifeboat kept bouncing against the ship because of the angle. And we heard that the crew was missing tools that they needed to work the lifeboat cranes. :/It’s a bit terrifying that no one knew how to work the lifeboats. We’re so lucky that we were so close to shore and other boats could come and evacuate us. Regardless, it took hours, so if the problem had been more severe we’d be swimming. So Elisa and I ended up walking down the stairs with an elderly lady that needed support. A few levels down there was an open hatch where people could be moved to a different boat. There was a lot of confusion. Alarms were ringing loudly in our ears.
At the evacuation point some crew members were yelling, “Women and children first!” By the way, worst thing you can do when trying to keep people calm during an evacuation! For one, it implies that not everyone is getting off. 😕 And secondly, here they’ve been trying to get families back together, only to split them up. Chad made me cooperate and go without him. So I got to “walk the plank. “There were two ways to get onto the rescue boat. You either slid down the mattresses or you walked a narrow plank up to a high corner of the boat. There was another rescue boat where people had to climb down a rope ladder hanging out the side of the ship. I reluctantly got on the rescue boat without Chad. And then, I had to wonder whether he was getting on the same boat as me and whether we were getting dropped off at the same place. I had a great view of the sinking ship. 🙂
While the women and children crowded on, the men sat around sipping water. A crew member brought a tray of biscuits from the kitchen. It was a pretty laid back atmosphere (except for the alarms and the helicopter noise). Someone told me that there was flooding in the lower decks, so that meant that some unlucky people’s belongings were getting destroyed. At one point I moved a suitcase out of people’s way. The thought crossed my mind, “I wonder where our suitcases ended up?” And then in the middle of a pile of luggage, I spotted our suitcases! I thought about bringing them on the rescue boat with me, but I also thought that it might just be easier to get them in the evening when everybody got to come back and get their stuff. And in the end I just decided that bringing them with me would be more convenient, so that’s what I did. I slid down some mattresses into the rescue boat wearing a backpack and toting both suitcases.
Eventually all the crew evacuated and we got uneventfully dropped off on shore. Elisa saw me from the top deck of the rescue boat so we got reunited right away. Since we were disembarking in Santorini anyway, we were all prepared–we had a hotel reservation, we had all our luggage and we had someone meeting us at the port. 🙂 Everyone else was pretty jealous that we already had our stuff off the boat.
The ship had drifted almost all the way into land. Another girl said that it had hit the cliff. After everyone was off they tugged it towards another port out of sight.
Night was falling by now. We got to see our first Santorini sunset. 🙂 They’re famous, you know. Santorini’s pier is hundreds of feet below the towns, so you have to either ride a cable car or ride a mule or ascend 600 steps to get to the top. We tried to leave on the next cable car and were denied because the port authorities didn’t want anyone to leave. We were wandering around and chatting with people for the next couple hours while the cruise director tried to get things sorted out. One of the kids we had met earlier in the week was down in his room when the ship hit. First he smelled smoke and as the boat began to tip, water started to fill his room. I believe he said it got up to six inches within minutes. It was his 21st birthday. So we sang to him on the pier.
They finally determined that they could get 300 people onto another ship that was in the bay. And a sister ship to the Sea Diamond, the Perla, would be in Santorini by 1 am to take the rest of the passengers and crew back to Athens. So they had everyone get registered and I got to give my German notebook paper to help.
The guy from the travel agency found us then. He talked to the authorities and we were free to go. Then somehow he got us to the front of the cable car line (skipping past hundreds of other passengers). By now we had heard that the catastrophe was being broadcast on CNN world news. In the cable car station I got interviewed by a local news crew. 🙂 We got a shuttle to the hotel so we could finally sleep. It was a seven-hour ordeal.
In the morning we asked our travel agent what was happening to the ship. He said it sunk. We laughed and asked what really happened. Really though, he said again that it had sunk. It had been dragged to a shallower part of the caldera and then it had gone under! We then heard from other people later that they had seen on the news that all that was left were the orange lifeboats where the ship had been. It sounds like they have plans to fix it, or do something with it, but I don’t know what. It is sickening and makes everything five times scarier. I thought about everything that was on board being destroyed in the water–except for our baggage. We know that all the people got off the boat safely. There was a broken finger but that’s all I heard of. Elisa and I are the only people from the entire ship that escaped with all our luggage.
I woke up this morning half wondering if it had really happened, because it seemed like another one of my crazy dreams. Unbelievable. It’s all anyone has talked about today.
Elisa and I got in the water today and it was bone-chilling. It felt like below 50 degrees. You know that feeling where all your nerves are tingling, right on the edge where you are about to lose feeling? If we had needed to swim away from the cruise ship, it would have been terrifying. I can just imagine people who are already scared jumping into the cold water and not being able to make out in their heads how cold it is. I imagine jumping into that water, combined with the shock, you would wonder if it would be able to sustain life.
