Friday, April 8th, 2005- Atlantic Ocean

Today Amanda, Josh, and I tried, and got on the Bridge Tour (where steering of the ship occurs). When we got there we were introduced to the Second Staff Captain. He showed us around the bridge and allowed us to take turns sitting in the Captain’s chair with a captain’s hat.

Conversation soon turned to the day of the storm and questions about that. The SSC said that looking back on it that it was a very scary situation and that we did have a good chance to go down when the engines went out. He said that the boat was rolling around 45 degrees each direction and that if it rolled over that it would take less than a minute to go down. When the question was asked if it were ever an option to be put in life boats he said, “No”, with his reason being that the lifeboats are for calm conditions and they wouldn’t stand a chance in the storms that we were in. Also with the temperature of the water we wouldn’t have survived more than a couple of minutes if we somehow fell in. This was all pretty scary to me considering they had tried to keep us so calm. To think that we really had come so close to the end.