Thread: Titanic jokes helped cruise ship survivors (Times Online)

PASSENGERS aboard the stricken cruise liner Explorer told yesterday of their ?Titanic moment? when they were set adrift in darkness in lifeboats and rubber dinghies after the ship was holed below the water line.

Link To Original Article

Now we are getting some of the first hand stories of what happened!

The stiletto-sharp ice tore through the ship’s steel bulkhead into one of the cabins. Passengers were awoken by the crash and by ice-cold water gushing in. They rushed to the upper decks to sound the alarm.

Andrea Salas, a guide on the cruise which had left Ushuaia in her native Argentina 12 days earlier, said: “I was in the ship’s bar having a drink with colleagues and some passengers when two passengers from the cabins below came in shouting, ‘There’s water, there’s water!’ ”

Crewmen struggled for an hour to strip walling and insulation from the cabin to reach the foot-wide hole but water poured down a 2in-wide scupper pipe used to remove condensation from the cabin. It flooded the engines below and there was a power cut, knocking out the bilge pumps which had been clearing the water from the hull.

Peter Svensson, the Explorer’s first officer, said: “In the water we tried to cover the hole — we managed it at first but then we got a small blackout and the water started coming in more.”

As the Explorer began to list at 25 degrees, an order was given to abandon ship.

From the article:

It was just after midnight on Friday when the starboard bow of Explorer, a 30-year-old veteran of Antarctic cruises on a trip to retrace the steps of Sir Ernest Shackleton, the Anglo-Irish polar explorer, collided with a dagger-shaped ice floe just below its water line.

The stiletto-sharp ice tore through the ship’s steel bulkhead into one of the cabins