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Carnival cruise passenger seen in video moments before reportedly jumping off ship

The coast guard suspended its 14-hour search thursday evening.

FOX Business Headlines 2/18

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A Carnival cruise ship passenger was caught on camera struggling with security moments before she reportedly jumped overboard into the Gulf of Mexico.

In the cell phone video obtained by FOX 8, the woman, 32, is seen being pulled to her feet by security guards on the deck of the Carnival Valor ship on Wednesday.

The ship was on a five-day cruise to Mexico that departed Saturday, Carnival told FOX Business.

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The woman is then seen struggling as the guards try and hold her arms behind her back. At one point, the woman can be heard screaming "Alicia" before being escorted away by security.

The clip cuts off and then shows passengers rushing to the edge of the ship looking over the balcony after the woman had reportedly already jumped into the water. Crew members were also seen rushing to the side with life preservers.

Carnival told FOX Business that the passenger was never in handcuffs at any point during the incident.

US Coast Guard responds to reports of cruise ship passenger overboard in Gulf of Mexico (WVUE-DT)

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Other passengers posted videos to Twitter moments after the woman allegedly jumped, with one showing a life preserver floating in the water nearby.

Carnival previously told Fox News that it received reports about a female guest who jumped overboard from her balcony while the ship was at sea.

A company spokesperson said the ship’s command immediately began search and rescue procedures and returned to the area near where the incident occurred and notified the U.S. Coast Guard.

"Carnival’s CARE team is providing support to the guest’s husband who was traveling with her," the spokesperson said.

US COAST GUARD RESPONDS TO REPORTS OF CRUISE SHIP PASSENGER OVERBOARD IN GULF OF MEXICO

However, after 14 hours of searching, the Coast Guard announced that it suspended its mission.

After getting the call Wednesday, U.S. Coast Guard District 8 began searching for the passenger approximately 150 miles offshore SouthWest Pass.

Crews canvassed more than 2,514 square nautical miles off the coast of Louisiana.

"The decision to suspend a search-and-rescue case is never one we come to lightly," said Chief Warrant Officer Tricia Eldredge, Command Duty Officer at Sector New Orleans. "We offer our deepest sympathies to the family during this difficult time."

The ship arrived back its home port of New Orleans on Thursday morning, Carnival said.

FOX News' Bradford Betz contributed to this report.

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Video shows final moments of woman before she fell overboard off Carnival cruise ship

The ship circled for hours looking for any sign of the woman, article bookmarked.

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Newly emerged video footage, recorded minutes before a woman fell overboard from the Carnival Valor cruise , shows her struggling with cruise ship security.

The 32-year-old African-American woman, who remains unidentified, fell from the Carnival Valor ship into the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday, when it was 150 miles off the coast of Southwest Pass, Louisiana .

Passengers said that the woman appeared in a frantic state following an alleged disturbance in a hot tub on the ship and jumped off from the tenth floor into the ocean.

Now a new video, recorded on a mobile, shows her struggle with three security guards who are tightly holding her hands behind her back. Earlier reports claimed she was handcuffed, however, in the video she wasn’t cuffed.

She is heard screaming “Alicia” as guards help her up a flight of stairs and off the pool deck. The video doesn’t show the moment she fell and it isn’t clear how she she broke free from the guards. However, it shows horrified passengers rushing to the balcony to find out what happened. One of them is heard asking: “who was she?”

A life preserver is seen in the water, reportedly thrown in by the crew to help her stay afloat. However, the woman disappeared soon, the eye witnesses say.

The ship circled for hours looking for any sign of the woman, however, resumed on its route later after the Coast Guard took over the search and rescue efforts which were suspended hours later.

“The decision to suspend a search-and-rescue case is never one we come to lightly,” said Chief Warrant Officer Tricia Eldredge, command duty officer at sector New Orleans. “We offer our deepest sympathies to the family during this difficult time.”

The cruise company says their team is providing support to the guest’s husband who was traveling with her, as well to the rest of her family.

If you are experiencing feelings of distress and isolation, or are struggling to cope, The Samaritans offers support; you can speak to someone for free over the phone, in confidence, on 116 123 (UK and ROI), email [email protected], or visit the Samaritans website to find details of your nearest branch.

If you are based in the USA, and you or someone you know needs mental health assistance right now, call National Suicide Prevention Helpline on 1-800-273-TALK (8255). The Helpline is a free, confidential crisis hotline that is available to everyone 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

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Coast Guard Suspends Search for Passenger Who Fell From Cruise Ship

The U.S. Coast Guard said on Sunday that it halted its search for a woman who went overboard from a Carnival cruise ship near Ensenada, Mexico.

By Johnny Diaz

The U.S. Coast Guard suspended a 31-hour search for a passenger who fell off a cruise ship near Mexico, the authorities said on Sunday.

The woman, who was not immediately identified, was aboard a Carnival cruise ship when she fell on Saturday morning “from the balcony of her stateroom,” Carnival Cruise Line said in a statement. The company said the ship had been on a three-day cruise to Ensenada, Mexico, and the Coast Guard said the woman fell near there.

Carnival did not provide further details of how the woman fell overboard.

On Saturday, the Coast Guard said that it had deployed a cutter called the Forrest Rednour as well as a helicopter, and that it was working with Mexico’s Navy to find the woman.

Crews started searching early in the morning on Saturday and into Sunday, the Coast Guard said. It led a search of about 520 square nautical miles, it said.

One passenger told a California news station, KABC-TV , that he heard someone say, “Man overboard, man overboard port side” on the ship’s speakers. He said that when he looked over the balcony of his room, he saw crew members tossing life preservers into the water.

Daniel Miranda, another passenger, told the station that cruise officials said that they had “verified through the cameras” that a woman had fallen into the water. A photo he took, broadcast by the station, also showed that the area of the ship where the woman fell had been cordoned off with blue tape.

After more than 31 hours scouring the area, the Coast Guard said on Sunday that it had suspended its search “pending additional information.”

The cruise company said in its statement that after assisting the Coast Guard, its ship had returned to Long Beach, Calif., as scheduled on Dec. 12. “Our thoughts are with the guest and her family, and our Care Team is providing support,” the company said.

In California, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents went to the ship “with an evidence response team” to assist in the case, a spokeswoman for the bureau said on Monday.

It is increasingly uncommon for passengers to fall from cruise ships, according to Carolyn Spencer Brown, who has covered the cruise industry for about 25 years, currently as chief content officer of Cruise Media LLC.

“It’s becoming much more uncommon than it was 20 years ago,” she said, citing the “increasingly sophisticated design specifications” that have prioritized safety on ships.

“They are designed to keep you safe,” she continued. “You really don’t hear about it very often, and when it happens, typically there are other factors involved.”

In 2010, Congress passed the Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Act , which required ships be equipped with rails no shorter than 42 inches above the deck, and with alarms and other technology to help signal and find passengers who go overboard.

In 2018 and 2019, 26 and 29 people fell overboard from cruise and ferry ships, according to Cruisejunkie.com , which lists cases reported by the news media, including those involving people who jumped. In 2020 and 2021, when far fewer passengers took cruises because of the pandemic, the site recorded three incidents.

Ross A. Klein, who tracks the cases of people who fall overboard on his website, Cruisejunkie.com, wrote in a June 2019 report that information on people who fall overboard is limited “as cases may not be publicly reported.”

Falls overboard could involve intoxication, accidents or deliberate jumps, Mr. Klein’s report said, but he warned there was reason to be cautious with labels because of the lack of information.

“Alcohol intoxication is known in only a small percentage of cases, largely because there is no systematic reporting of persons overboard, and no accounting of behavior prior to a disappearance (such as alcohol consumption),” the report said.

Asked about how many people have fallen overboard from Carnival ships in recent years, a spokeswoman for the company said she did not have any further information other than the statement about this weekend’s search.

The ship traveling to Ensenada this weekend, the Carnival Miracle, debuted in 2004 and can accommodate more than 2,100 guests and 934 crew members, according to the company.

Johnny Diaz is a general assignment reporter covering breaking news. He previously worked for the South Florida Sun Sentinel and The Boston Globe. More about Johnny Diaz

Coast Guard suspends search for Carnival Cruise Line passenger who went overboard

A Carnival Cruise Line passenger went overboard on the line’s Carnival Magic ship on Monday.

Ronnie Peale, 35, went overboard 186 miles east of Jacksonville, Florida, the U.S. Coast Guard said. The Coast Guard suspended its search Wednesday after crews searched over 5,171 square miles.

“The decision to suspend the active search efforts pending further development is never one we take lightly," Lt. Cmdr. Christopher Hooper, Coast Guard District Seven search and rescue mission coordinator, said in a news release . "We offer our most sincere condolences to Mr. Peale’s family and friends.”

“He was reported missing by his companion late Monday afternoon and an initial review of closed circuit security footage confirms that he leaned over the railing of his stateroom balcony and dropped into the water at approximately 4:10 a.m. Monday,” a Carnival spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

The Coast Guard released the ship from search and rescue efforts and advised its captain to continue on to Norfolk, Virginia, the spokesperson said. The vessel was on a round-trip sailing from Norfolk to the Bahamas at the time of the incident, according to CruiseMapper .

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“The Carnival Care Team is providing support to the guest's companion and traveling party who are on board,” the spokesperson added.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Norfolk field office is investigating, with the help of other agencies, according to a spokesperson.

"The FBI typically has jurisdiction to investigate incidents on the high seas, and works closely with our partners in law enforcement and in the cruising industry to collect the evidence and facts of cases," the spokesperson said in an email, though they did not have additional details to share.

The incident comes after other overboard reports in recent months. The Coast Guard suspended search efforts for a Royal Caribbean International passenger who went overboard during a trans-Pacific sailing in April, and a woman died after going overboard on MSC Cruises’ Meraviglia vessel near Florida’s Port Canaveral in December.

Another Carnival passenger was rescued after going overboard from the line’s Carnival Valor ship in November.

Between 2009 and 2019, there were 212 overboard incidents around the world involving passengers and crew, according to statistics compiled for Cruise Lines International Association by consulting firm G.P. Wild (International) Ltd. Just 48 people were rescued.

Cruise ships have safeguards in place to keep passengers from going overboard and are required by the Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Act of 2010 to have rails that are "located not less than 42 inches above the cabin deck."

Cmdr. Jason Kling, Detachment Chief at the U.S. Coast Guard's Cruise Ship National Center of Expertise, which conducts compliance inspections of cruise ships embarking passengers in U.S. ports or embarking U.S. passengers, told USA TODAY in March that many cruise ships complied with that even before the law was enacted.

Nathan Diller is a consumer travel reporter for USA TODAY based in Nashville. You can reach him at [email protected].

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Woman Falls Overboard on Carnival Cruise, Passenger Says 'High Suspicion of Foul Play'

Coast Guard crews are searching for a woman who fell overboard from a Carnival cruise ship, in a case in which one paramedic aboard has suggested there is "high suspicion of foul play."

The woman fell from the Carnival Miracle cruise ship near Ensenada, Mexico, early on Saturday morning.

Passengers had enjoyed their journey, which began at Long Beach Cruise Terminal on Thursday and had been sailing toward Ensenada as part of a three-day voyage.

But passengers were awoken at about 3:30 a.m. on Saturday following an alert that a woman had fallen overboard.

The woman is believed to have fallen from the fifth-floor balcony of her stateroom and passengers are concerned foul play could be involved, according to the network.

Daniel Miranda, a Northern California firefighter paramedic onboard the vessel, told CBS Los Angeles: "Someone has lost their life, whether it was done by accident or by foul play I don't know - there's some high suspicion of foul play.

"A lot of people are concerned because that's somebody's life, and that's a high likelihood that this person will not be found alive."

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Miranda told reporters he had assisted crews with their search for the woman on Saturday morning.

He added: "They immediately did their best efforts to get crews out on the little boats and rescue, to start a search.

"They had crew literally around the deck to look all the way around the ship to be able to see if somebody was out in the water. They had lights out in the water trying to flash out there, but again it's pretty dark."

The identity of the woman has not been released as of Sunday morning.

Video footage, seen by Newsweek and shared on Facebook by a person claiming to be a passenger on board, showed a rescue team searching the waters close to the vessel in a bid to find the woman.

In a statement issued on Saturday morning, Carnival Cruise Line told CBS: "We advised Carnival Miracle guests this morning of an overboard incident involving one of our guests from the balcony of her stateroom…Our thoughts are with the guest and her family and our care team is providing support."

Newsweek has contacted the U.S. Coast Guard and Carnival Cruise Line for comment.

According to the Carnival Cruise Line website, the Carnival Miracle has a guest capacity of 21,24 and has an estimated 934 crew onboard.

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Search halted for woman who fell overboard from Carnival cruise ship

LONG BEACH, Calif. — U.S. Coast Guard authorities have halted the search for a woman who went overboard on a cruise ship near Ensenada, Mexico.

Authorities searched more than 31 hours for the woman before pausing the search on Sunday pending additional information, Petty Officer First Class Adam Stanton said Sunday.

The woman in her mid-20s was reported to have gone overboard early Saturday, he said.

The Carnival Miracle cruise ship was returning Sunday to the port in Long Beach, where federal authorities were waiting to investigate, KABC-TV reported.

Ship passenger Daniel Miranda said an announcement went out early Saturday that someone had gone overboard, and that areas of the ship were cordoned off and limited information was provided.

The woman was not immediately identified. The ship left Los Angeles area on Thursday.

Woman Goes Overboard On Carnival Cruise, Prompting Coast Guard Search

Senior Reporter, HuffPost

The U.S. Coast Guard is searching for a woman who went missing in the Gulf of Mexico, authorities said on Thursday .

The Coast Guard said it received a call Wednesday afternoon that a 32-year-old woman had fallen overboard from the cruise ship Carnival Valor about 150 miles from Southwest Pass, Louisiana, per the Associated Press . The ship was en route to its home port in New Orleans.

A spokesperson for the Carnival Cruise Line told HuffPost the woman is thought to have jumped from her balcony.

“Carnival Valor is supporting the search for a guest who reportedly jumped overboard from her balcony on Wednesday afternoon while the ship was at sea,” the spokesperson said. “The ship’s command immediately began search and rescue procedures, returned to the area near where the incident occurred and notified the U.S. Coast Guard. Carnival’s CARE team is providing support to the guest’s husband, who was traveling with her.”

Passengers told the New Orleans news station WVUE that the woman had caused a disturbance on the 10th floor deck of the ship, prompting security officials to handcuff her.

Cell phone footage of the incident obtained by WVUE show security guards holding a woman’s arms behind her back before taking her away. The video then presumably cuts to moments after she went overboard, and passengers are shown looking out toward the sea.

Carnival said the claims about the woman being handcuffed were “unsubstantiated and untrue.”

Coast Guard officials told the AP on Thursday that an airplane is conducting search patterns off the coast.

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Coast guard searches for woman who jumped off carnival cruise into gulf of mexico.

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People look overboard after a passenger fell off of the Carnival cruise ship.

A woman is missing in the Gulf of Mexico after she reportedly jumped from a Carnival cruise ship — following a disturbance in a hot tub that landed her in handcuffs, according to fellow passengers.

The US Coast Guard is searching for the 32-year-old woman who went overboard the Carnival Valor, which was sailing from Cozumel, Mexico, to New Orleans on Wednesday.

One man on board the ship tweeted a video of a life preserver and a flare spewing red smoke trailing behind the ship.

Several passengers told WAFB that the woman jumped about 150 miles off the shore of Louisiana after an incident between her and a man in the hot tub area on the 10th deck.

“Security got her out of the hot tub. Whenever they got to take her into custody, apparently she was upset and went over the rail,” Baton Rouge resident Kim Barnette told the outlet.

Darrell Morris, another passenger, said: “Apparently, she was handcuffed — she jumped over the side of the ship.”

Barnette said the woman apparently struck some lifeboats during her fall.

Life ring off the stern of Carnival Valor after man over board in middle of the Gulf of Mexico pic.twitter.com/4HdAjMzjt8 — Johnny (@johnnytrupp) February 16, 2022

“There are some life boats there that apparently she hit on the way down. Which when it hit, it was pretty loud, and of course there was a disturbance here on the ship, which made me go on my balcony on deck 7,” the cruise passenger said.

A third passenger, who identified himself only as Randy, also told WAFB that the woman “apparently hit her head on the side of the boat.”

“And then she hit the water face first, he said.

However, the passenger accounts have not been confirmed by Carnival or the Coast Guard.

The ship was expected to arrive in New Orleans on Thursday.

The Post has reached out to the US law enforcement agency and the company.

A Twitter user captured moments after the man fell overboard and a life preserver was tossed into the water.

“Carnival’s CARE team is providing support to the guest’s husband who was traveling with her,” the company said in a statement.

The incident came two months after a woman died in the Pacific Ocean after going overboard on another Carnival ship . The FBI was investigating the incident amid allegations of foul play .

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cruise ship

Coast Guard searches for woman who reportedly jumped off cruise ship, Carnival says

NEW ORLEANS -- Authorities are searching for a missing passenger who reportedly jumped off of a cruise ship in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Coast Guard said it received a call Wednesday afternoon that a 32-year-old African American woman had fallen overboard from the Carnival Valor cruise ship about 150 miles offshore of Southwest Pass, Louisiana.

"Carnival Valor is supporting the search for a guest who reportedly jumped overboard from her balcony on Wednesday afternoon while the ship was at sea. The ship's command immediately began search and rescue procedures, returned to the area near where the incident occurred and notified the U.S. Coast Guard. Carnival's CARE team is providing support to the guest's husband who was traveling with her," Carnival Cruise Line said in a statement.

The 952-foot, 110,000-ton cruise ship -- which holds approximately 4,000 passengers and crew -- embarked on a five-day voyage from New Orleans to Mexico and back on Saturday, ABC affiliate station WNGO reported . It was scheduled to return Thursday.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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FBI LA investigating after Carnival cruise ship passenger goes overboard; Woman remains missing 3 days later

Neither the woman nor her body has yet been found.

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The FBI has processed and is analyzing evidence gathered as part of the investigation into the circumstances surrounding how a cruise ship passenger went overboard during a trip from Los Angeles to Mexico , officials confirmed Tuesday.

The passenger, who has been described only as a woman in her mid-20s, was aboard the Carnival Miracle cruise ship around 3:30 a.m. Saturday when she went overboard near Ensenada, Mexico. The woman or her remains were still missing as of Tuesday afternoon.

The FBI is now the lead agency overseeing the investigation into the woman’s death, a spokesperson for the agency’s Los Angeles Field Office told Fox News. FBI investigators and an evidence response team boarded the Miracle when the ship docked in Long Beach, California, on Sunday, the spokesperson said.

U.S. COAST GUARD SUSPENDS SEARCH FOR WOMAN WHO WENT OVERBOARD ON CRUISE SHIP

Carnival Miracle cruise ship seen arriving at Los Angeles-area port on Sunday, Dec. 13, 2021 (KKTV) (KKTV)

The teams completed processing the evidence from the ship on Monday, and the investigation is ongoing.

"We responded due to the circumstances since we have jurisdiction on the high seas," the spokesperson, Laura Eimiller, wrote in an email. "Whether accidental, foul play or otherwise, we look for evidence to determine what actually occurred."

Officials have not yet released the woman’s identity.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Coast Guard is leading the water search for the woman’s body.

The United States Coast Guard searched for more than 31 hours, with no success, before discontinuing their efforts pending additional information, the agency’s Southern California branch tweeted Sunday.

COAST GUARD SEARCHING FOR CRUISE SHIP PASSENGER WHO WENT OVERBOARD OFF COAST OF MEXICO

The vessel departed from the Los Angeles waters on Thursday. Just days later, in the wee hours of Saturday, passengers awoke to an announcement notifying them of a person overboard, Daniel Miranda, who was on the ship at the time, told KABC-TV . He added that portions of the ship were then closed to the public. Miranda told CBS Los Angeles that the woman’s room was located on the fifth floor.

"Someone has lost their life, whether it was done by accident or by foul play I don’t know," said Miranda, a California-based paramedic and firefighter. "A lot of people are concerned because that’s somebody’s life, and that’s a high likelihood that this person will not be found alive."

A U.S. Coast Guard vessel sail off the coast of Key West. (iStock)

Coast Guard Petty Officer Adam Stanton told FOX 11 Los Angeles that the woman plummeted from her stateroom balcony.

The Carnival Miracle boasts 12 stories and is able to accommodate 2,124 guests and 934 crew members.

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A spokesperson for Carnival did not respond to Fox News’ request seeking comment and information on Tuesday, but the company told FOX 11 on Saturday that they advised guests that morning "of an overboard incident involving one of our guests from the balcony of her stateroom."

"After assisting the U.S Coast Guard with a search, the ship has been released and is proceeding to Ensenada and will then return to Long Beach as scheduled on Sunday morning," Carnival told FOX 11. "Our thoughts are with the guest and her family, and our Care Team is providing support."

Stephanie Pagones is a Digital Reporter for FOX Business and Fox News. Story tips can be sent to [email protected] and on Twitter: @steph_pagones.

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Body of Guest Who Jumped Overboard From Carnival Cruise Ship Reportedly Found

By nbc 6 • published march 16, 2022 • updated on march 17, 2022 at 10:01 am.

A search that was underway for a guest who jumped overboard Wednesday night from the Carnival Horizon ship has reportedly ended after the body was found.

The guest jumped from deck 11 at approximately 7 p.m., according to a Carnival spokesperson, and the ship's command immediately began a search and rescue operation.

The U.S. Coast Guard was notified, and the cruise line is providing support to the guest's wife.

A news reporter onboard the ship and the Miami Herald reported the body was found late Wednesday night.

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#BREAKING The captain has informed us that the guest who went overboard has been found. He did not make it. The family is receiving counseling services. pic.twitter.com/ylHbc4Pi6r — David Custer (@DavidLukeCuster) March 17, 2022

The Carnival Horizon departed Grand Turk, Turks and Caicos, two hours before at around 5 p.m ET.

The six-day cruise departed Miami this past Sunday and is expected to return Saturday.

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Coast Guard ends search for woman who went overboard on cruise ship

December 13, 2021 / 8:32 AM EST / CBS News

U.S. Coast Guard authorities have halted the search for a woman who reportedly went overboard on a cruise ship near Ensenada, Mexico. Authorities searched more than 31 hours for the woman before pausing the search on Sunday pending additional information, the Coast Guard said Sunday.

The woman in her mid-20s was reported to have gone overboard early Saturday, Petty Officer First Class Adam Stanton said. The Carnival Miracle cruise ship was returning Sunday to the port in Long Beach, where federal authorities were waiting to investigate.

Daniel Miranda, a Northern California firefighter paramedic and one of the passengers onboard the ship, spoke with CBS Los Angeles while the ship was docked in Ensenada.

"Someone has lost their life, whether it was done by accident or by foul play I don't know — there's some high suspicion of foul play. … A lot of people are concerned because that's somebody's life, and that's a high likelihood that this person will not be found alive," he said.

Miranda said an announcement went out early Saturday that someone had gone overboard, and that areas of the ship were cordoned off and limited information was provided.

"They immediately did their best efforts to get crews out on little boats and rescue, to start a search," Miranda told CBS Los Angeles. "They had crew literally around the deck to look all the way around the ship to be able to see if somebody was out in the water. They had lights out in the water trying to flash out there, but again it's pretty dark."

The woman was not immediately identified. The ship left Los Angeles area on Thursday.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

United States Coast Guard

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'Drunk' 20-year-old man missing after jumping off a Royal Caribbean cruise ship

A 20-year-old man on holiday with his family jumped off a Royal Caribbean cruise.
The man has been missing since jumping overboard in front of his father and brother.
The US Coast Guard has launched a search operation.

A 20-year-old man jumped off the Royal Caribbean's Liberty of the Seas cruise on Thursday morning while vacationing with his family.

The passenger, whose identity has not been revealed, jumped overboard at about 4 a.m. and has been missing since.

The US Coast Guard said on X on Thursday that its crews were "searching for a 20-year-old man who went overboard from the Liberty of the Seas cruise ship near The Bahamas.

Passengers on the Liberty of the Seas ship described the tragedy as a "spur-of-the-moment decision."

Passenger Bryan Sims told the New York Post that the missing passenger was "pretty drunk" and that they had hung out in the hot tub until 3:30 a.m.

Sims said that when they left the hot tub, they encountered the drunk passenger's father while approaching the elevators.

"His dad was fussing at him for being drunk," said Sims.

The unidentified passenger reportedly told his father, "I'll fix this right now," and jumped out of the window.

Fellow passengers said his father and brother witnessed the "impulsive" leap.

Deborah Morrison, another passenger on board the cruise, told the Post that "there was a lot of yelling and that the crew was alerted immediately."

Watch: Cruise ship captain breaks down 8 cruise ship disasters in movies and TV

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photo of Icon of the Seas, taken on a long railed path approaching the stern of the ship, with people walking along dock

Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever

Seven agonizing nights aboard the Icon of the Seas

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Updated at 2:44 p.m. ET on April 6, 2024.

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MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, from the window of an approaching Miami cab, brings on a feeling of vertigo, nausea, amazement, and distress. I shut my eyes in defense, as my brain tells my optic nerve to try again.

The ship makes no sense, vertically or horizontally. It makes no sense on sea, or on land, or in outer space. It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies, like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots. Vibrant, oversignifying colors are stacked upon other such colors, decks perched over still more decks; the only comfort is a row of lifeboats ringing its perimeter. There is no imposed order, no cogent thought, and, for those who do not harbor a totalitarian sense of gigantomania, no visual mercy. This is the biggest cruise ship ever built, and I have been tasked with witnessing its inaugural voyage.

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“Author embarks on their first cruise-ship voyage” has been a staple of American essay writing for almost three decades, beginning with David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” which was first published in 1996 under the title “Shipping Out.” Since then, many admirable writers have widened and diversified the genre. Usually the essayist commissioned to take to the sea is in their first or second flush of youth and is ready to sharpen their wit against the hull of the offending vessel. I am 51, old and tired, having seen much of the world as a former travel journalist, and mostly what I do in both life and prose is shrug while muttering to my imaginary dachshund, “This too shall pass.” But the Icon of the Seas will not countenance a shrug. The Icon of the Seas is the Linda Loman of cruise ships, exclaiming that attention must be paid. And here I am in late January with my one piece of luggage and useless gray winter jacket and passport, zipping through the Port of Miami en route to the gangway that will separate me from the bulk of North America for more than seven days, ready to pay it in full.

The aforementioned gangway opens up directly onto a thriving mall (I will soon learn it is imperiously called the “Royal Promenade”), presently filled with yapping passengers beneath a ceiling studded with balloons ready to drop. Crew members from every part of the global South, as well as a few Balkans, are shepherding us along while pressing flutes of champagne into our hands. By a humming Starbucks, I drink as many of these as I can and prepare to find my cabin. I show my blue Suite Sky SeaPass Card (more on this later, much more) to a smiling woman from the Philippines, and she tells me to go “aft.” Which is where, now? As someone who has rarely sailed on a vessel grander than the Staten Island Ferry, I am confused. It turns out that the aft is the stern of the ship, or, for those of us who don’t know what a stern or an aft are, its ass. The nose of the ship, responsible for separating the waves before it, is also called a bow, and is marked for passengers as the FWD , or forward. The part of the contemporary sailing vessel where the malls are clustered is called the midship. I trust that you have enjoyed this nautical lesson.

I ascend via elevator to my suite on Deck 11. This is where I encounter my first terrible surprise. My suite windows and balcony do not face the ocean. Instead, they look out onto another shopping mall. This mall is the one that’s called Central Park, perhaps in homage to the Olmsted-designed bit of greenery in the middle of my hometown. Although on land I would be delighted to own a suite with Central Park views, here I am deeply depressed. To sail on a ship and not wake up to a vast blue carpet of ocean? Unthinkable.

Allow me a brief preamble here. The story you are reading was commissioned at a moment when most staterooms on the Icon were sold out. In fact, so enthralled by the prospect of this voyage were hard-core mariners that the ship’s entire inventory of guest rooms (the Icon can accommodate up to 7,600 passengers, but its inaugural journey was reduced to 5,000 or so for a less crowded experience) was almost immediately sold out. Hence, this publication was faced with the shocking prospect of paying nearly $19,000 to procure for this solitary passenger an entire suite—not including drinking expenses—all for the privilege of bringing you this article. But the suite in question doesn’t even have a view of the ocean! I sit down hard on my soft bed. Nineteen thousand dollars for this .

selfie photo of man with glasses, in background is swim-up bar with two women facing away

The viewless suite does have its pluses. In addition to all the Malin+Goetz products in my dual bathrooms, I am granted use of a dedicated Suite Deck lounge; access to Coastal Kitchen, a superior restaurant for Suites passengers; complimentary VOOM SM Surf & Stream (“the fastest Internet at Sea”) “for one device per person for the whole cruise duration”; a pair of bathrobes (one of which comes prestained with what looks like a large expectoration by the greenest lizard on Earth); and use of the Grove Suite Sun, an area on Decks 18 and 19 with food and deck chairs reserved exclusively for Suite passengers. I also get reserved seating for a performance of The Wizard of Oz , an ice-skating tribute to the periodic table, and similar provocations. The very color of my Suite Sky SeaPass Card, an oceanic blue as opposed to the cloying royal purple of the standard non-Suite passenger, will soon provoke envy and admiration. But as high as my status may be, there are those on board who have much higher status still, and I will soon learn to bow before them.

In preparation for sailing, I have “priced in,” as they say on Wall Street, the possibility that I may come from a somewhat different monde than many of the other cruisers. Without falling into stereotypes or preconceptions, I prepare myself for a friendly outspokenness on the part of my fellow seafarers that may not comply with modern DEI standards. I believe in meeting people halfway, and so the day before flying down to Miami, I visited what remains of Little Italy to purchase a popular T-shirt that reads DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL across the breast in the colors of the Italian flag. My wife recommended that I bring one of my many T-shirts featuring Snoopy and the Peanuts gang, as all Americans love the beagle and his friends. But I naively thought that my meatball T-shirt would be more suitable for conversation-starting. “Oh, and who is your ‘daddy’?” some might ask upon seeing it. “And how long have you been his ‘little meatball’?” And so on.

I put on my meatball T-shirt and head for one of the dining rooms to get a late lunch. In the elevator, I stick out my chest for all to read the funny legend upon it, but soon I realize that despite its burnished tricolor letters, no one takes note. More to the point, no one takes note of me. Despite my attempts at bridge building, the very sight of me (small, ethnic, without a cap bearing the name of a football team) elicits no reaction from other passengers. Most often, they will small-talk over me as if I don’t exist. This brings to mind the travails of David Foster Wallace , who felt so ostracized by his fellow passengers that he retreated to his cabin for much of his voyage. And Wallace was raised primarily in the Midwest and was a much larger, more American-looking meatball than I am. If he couldn’t talk to these people, how will I? What if I leave this ship without making any friends at all, despite my T-shirt? I am a social creature, and the prospect of seven days alone and apart is saddening. Wallace’s stateroom, at least, had a view of the ocean, a kind of cheap eternity.

Worse awaits me in the dining room. This is a large, multichandeliered room where I attended my safety training (I was shown how to put on a flotation vest; it is a very simple procedure). But the maître d’ politely refuses me entry in an English that seems to verge on another language. “I’m sorry, this is only for pendejos ,” he seems to be saying. I push back politely and he repeats himself. Pendejos ? Piranhas? There’s some kind of P-word to which I am not attuned. Meanwhile elderly passengers stream right past, powered by their limbs, walkers, and electric wheelchairs. “It is only pendejo dining today, sir.” “But I have a suite!” I say, already starting to catch on to the ship’s class system. He examines my card again. “But you are not a pendejo ,” he confirms. I am wearing a DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL T-shirt, I want to say to him. I am the essence of pendejo .

Eventually, I give up and head to the plebeian buffet on Deck 15, which has an aquatic-styled name I have now forgotten. Before gaining entry to this endless cornucopia of reheated food, one passes a washing station of many sinks and soap dispensers, and perhaps the most intriguing character on the entire ship. He is Mr. Washy Washy—or, according to his name tag, Nielbert of the Philippines—and he is dressed as a taco (on other occasions, I’ll see him dressed as a burger). Mr. Washy Washy performs an eponymous song in spirited, indeed flamboyant English: “Washy, washy, wash your hands, WASHY WASHY!” The dangers of norovirus and COVID on a cruise ship this size (a giant fellow ship was stricken with the former right after my voyage) makes Mr. Washy Washy an essential member of the crew. The problem lies with the food at the end of Washy’s rainbow. The buffet is groaning with what sounds like sophisticated dishes—marinated octopus, boiled egg with anchovy, chorizo, lobster claws—but every animal tastes tragically the same, as if there was only one creature available at the market, a “cruisipus” bred specifically for Royal Caribbean dining. The “vegetables” are no better. I pick up a tomato slice and look right through it. It tastes like cellophane. I sit alone, apart from the couples and parents with gaggles of children, as “We Are Family” echoes across the buffet space.

I may have failed to mention that all this time, the Icon of the Seas has not left port. As the fiery mango of the subtropical setting sun makes Miami’s condo skyline even more apocalyptic, the ship shoves off beneath a perfunctory display of fireworks. After the sun sets, in the far, dark distance, another circus-lit cruise ship ruptures the waves before us. We glance at it with pity, because it is by definition a smaller ship than our own. I am on Deck 15, outside the buffet and overlooking a bunch of pools (the Icon has seven of them), drinking a frilly drink that I got from one of the bars (the Icon has 15 of them), still too shy to speak to anyone, despite Sister Sledge’s assertion that all on the ship are somehow related.

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The ship’s passage away from Ron DeSantis’s Florida provides no frisson, no sense of developing “sea legs,” as the ship is too large to register the presence of waves unless a mighty wind adds significant chop. It is time for me to register the presence of the 5,000 passengers around me, even if they refuse to register mine. My fellow travelers have prepared for this trip with personally decorated T-shirts celebrating the importance of this voyage. The simplest ones say ICON INAUGURAL ’24 on the back and the family name on the front. Others attest to an over-the-top love of cruise ships: WARNING! MAY START TALKING ABOUT CRUISING . Still others are artisanally designed and celebrate lifetimes spent married while cruising (on ships, of course). A couple possibly in their 90s are wearing shirts whose backs feature a drawing of a cruise liner, two flamingos with ostensibly male and female characteristics, and the legend “ HUSBAND AND WIFE Cruising Partners FOR LIFE WE MAY NOT HAVE IT All Together BUT TOGETHER WE HAVE IT ALL .” (The words not in all caps have been written in cursive.) A real journalist or a more intrepid conversationalist would have gone up to the couple and asked them to explain the longevity of their marriage vis-à-vis their love of cruising. But instead I head to my mall suite, take off my meatball T-shirt, and allow the first tears of the cruise to roll down my cheeks slowly enough that I briefly fall asleep amid the moisture and salt.

photo of elaborate twisting multicolored waterslides with long stairwell to platform

I WAKE UP with a hangover. Oh God. Right. I cannot believe all of that happened last night. A name floats into my cobwebbed, nauseated brain: “Ayn Rand.” Jesus Christ.

I breakfast alone at the Coastal Kitchen. The coffee tastes fine and the eggs came out of a bird. The ship rolls slightly this morning; I can feel it in my thighs and my schlong, the parts of me that are most receptive to danger.

I had a dangerous conversation last night. After the sun set and we were at least 50 miles from shore (most modern cruise ships sail at about 23 miles an hour), I lay in bed softly hiccupping, my arms stretched out exactly like Jesus on the cross, the sound of the distant waves missing from my mall-facing suite, replaced by the hum of air-conditioning and children shouting in Spanish through the vents of my two bathrooms. I decided this passivity was unacceptable. As an immigrant, I feel duty-bound to complete the tasks I am paid for, which means reaching out and trying to understand my fellow cruisers. So I put on a normal James Perse T-shirt and headed for one of the bars on the Royal Promenade—the Schooner Bar, it was called, if memory serves correctly.

I sat at the bar for a martini and two Negronis. An old man with thick, hairy forearms drank next to me, very silent and Hemingwaylike, while a dreadlocked piano player tinkled out a series of excellent Elton John covers. To my right, a young white couple—he in floral shorts, she in a light, summery miniskirt with a fearsome diamond ring, neither of them in football regalia—chatted with an elderly couple. Do it , I commanded myself. Open your mouth. Speak! Speak without being spoken to. Initiate. A sentence fragment caught my ear from the young woman, “Cherry Hill.” This is a suburb of Philadelphia in New Jersey, and I had once been there for a reading at a synagogue. “Excuse me,” I said gently to her. “Did you just mention Cherry Hill? It’s a lovely place.”

As it turned out, the couple now lived in Fort Lauderdale (the number of Floridians on the cruise surprised me, given that Southern Florida is itself a kind of cruise ship, albeit one slowly sinking), but soon they were talking with me exclusively—the man potbellied, with a chin like a hard-boiled egg; the woman as svelte as if she were one of the many Ukrainian members of the crew—the elderly couple next to them forgotten. This felt as groundbreaking as the first time I dared to address an American in his native tongue, as a child on a bus in Queens (“On my foot you are standing, Mister”).

“I don’t want to talk politics,” the man said. “But they’re going to eighty-six Biden and put Michelle in.”

I considered the contradictions of his opening conversational gambit, but decided to play along. “People like Michelle,” I said, testing the waters. The husband sneered, but the wife charitably put forward that the former first lady was “more personable” than Joe Biden. “They’re gonna eighty-six Biden,” the husband repeated. “He can’t put a sentence together.”

After I mentioned that I was a writer—though I presented myself as a writer of teleplays instead of novels and articles such as this one—the husband told me his favorite writer was Ayn Rand. “Ayn Rand, she came here with nothing,” the husband said. “I work with a lot of Cubans, so …” I wondered if I should mention what I usually do to ingratiate myself with Republicans or libertarians: the fact that my finances improved after pass-through corporations were taxed differently under Donald Trump. Instead, I ordered another drink and the couple did the same, and I told him that Rand and I were born in the same city, St. Petersburg/Leningrad, and that my family also came here with nothing. Now the bonding and drinking began in earnest, and several more rounds appeared. Until it all fell apart.

Read: Gary Shteyngart on watching Russian television for five days straight

My new friend, whom I will refer to as Ayn, called out to a buddy of his across the bar, and suddenly a young couple, both covered in tattoos, appeared next to us. “He fucking punked me,” Ayn’s frat-boy-like friend called out as he put his arm around Ayn, while his sizable partner sizzled up to Mrs. Rand. Both of them had a look I have never seen on land—their eyes projecting absence and enmity in equal measure. In the ’90s, I drank with Russian soldiers fresh from Chechnya and wandered the streets of wartime Zagreb, but I have never seen such undisguised hostility toward both me and perhaps the universe at large. I was briefly introduced to this psychopathic pair, but neither of them wanted to have anything to do with me, and the tattooed woman would not even reveal her Christian name to me (she pretended to have the same first name as Mrs. Rand). To impress his tattooed friends, Ayn made fun of the fact that as a television writer, I’d worked on the series Succession (which, it would turn out, practically nobody on the ship had watched), instead of the far more palatable, in his eyes, zombie drama of last year. And then my new friends drifted away from me into an angry private conversation—“He punked me!”—as I ordered another drink for myself, scared of the dead-eyed arrivals whose gaze never registered in the dim wattage of the Schooner Bar, whose terrifying voices and hollow laughs grated like unoiled gears against the crooning of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”

But today is a new day for me and my hangover. After breakfast, I explore the ship’s so-called neighborhoods . There’s the AquaDome, where one can find a food hall and an acrobatic sound-and-light aquatic show. Central Park has a premium steak house, a sushi joint, and a used Rolex that can be bought for $8,000 on land here proudly offered at $17,000. There’s the aforementioned Royal Promenade, where I had drunk with the Rands, and where a pair of dueling pianos duel well into the night. There’s Surfside, a kids’ neighborhood full of sugary garbage, which looks out onto the frothy trail that the behemoth leaves behind itself. Thrill Island refers to the collection of tubes that clutter the ass of the ship and offer passengers six waterslides and a surfing simulation. There’s the Hideaway, an adult zone that plays music from a vomit-slathered, Brit-filled Alicante nightclub circa 1996 and proves a big favorite with groups of young Latin American customers. And, most hurtfully, there’s the Suite Neighborhood.

2 photos: a ship's foamy white wake stretches to the horizon; a man at reailing with water and two large ships docked behind

I say hurtfully because as a Suite passenger I should be here, though my particular suite is far from the others. Whereas I am stuck amid the riffraff of Deck 11, this section is on the highborn Decks 16 and 17, and in passing, I peek into the spacious, tall-ceilinged staterooms from the hallway, dazzled by the glint of the waves and sun. For $75,000, one multifloor suite even comes with its own slide between floors, so that a family may enjoy this particular terror in private. There is a quiet splendor to the Suite Neighborhood. I see fewer stickers and signs and drawings than in my own neighborhood—for example, MIKE AND DIANA PROUDLY SERVED U.S. MARINE CORPS RETIRED . No one here needs to announce their branch of service or rank; they are simply Suites, and this is where they belong. Once again, despite my hard work and perseverance, I have been disallowed from the true American elite. Once again, I am “Not our class, dear.” I am reminded of watching The Love Boat on my grandmother’s Zenith, which either was given to her or we found in the trash (I get our many malfunctioning Zeniths confused) and whose tube got so hot, I would put little chunks of government cheese on a thin tissue atop it to give our welfare treat a pleasant, Reagan-era gooeyness. I could not understand English well enough then to catch the nuances of that seafaring program, but I knew that there were differences in the status of the passengers, and that sometimes those differences made them sad. Still, this ship, this plenty—every few steps, there are complimentary nachos or milkshakes or gyros on offer—was the fatty fuel of my childhood dreams. If only I had remained a child.

I walk around the outdoor decks looking for company. There is a middle-aged African American couple who always seem to be asleep in each other’s arms, probably exhausted from the late capitalism they regularly encounter on land. There is far more diversity on this ship than I expected. Many couples are a testament to Loving v. Virginia , and there is a large group of folks whose T-shirts read MELANIN AT SEA / IT’S THE MELANIN FOR ME . I smile when I see them, but then some young kids from the group makes Mr. Washy Washy do a cruel, caricatured “Burger Dance” (today he is in his burger getup), and I think, Well, so much for intersectionality .

At the infinity pool on Deck 17, I spot some elderly women who could be ethnic and from my part of the world, and so I jump in. I am proved correct! Many of them seem to be originally from Queens (“Corona was still great when it was all Italian”), though they are now spread across the tristate area. We bond over the way “Ron-kon-koma” sounds when announced in Penn Station.

“Everyone is here for a different reason,” one of them tells me. She and her ex-husband last sailed together four years ago to prove to themselves that their marriage was truly over. Her 15-year-old son lost his virginity to “an Irish young lady” while their ship was moored in Ravenna, Italy. The gaggle of old-timers competes to tell me their favorite cruising stories and tips. “A guy proposed in Central Park a couple of years ago”—many Royal Caribbean ships apparently have this ridiculous communal area—“and she ran away screaming!” “If you’re diamond-class, you get four drinks for free.” “A different kind of passenger sails out of Bayonne.” (This, perhaps, is racially coded.) “Sometimes, if you tip the bartender $5, your next drink will be free.”

“Everyone’s here for a different reason,” the woman whose marriage ended on a cruise tells me again. “Some people are here for bad reasons—the drinkers and the gamblers. Some people are here for medical reasons.” I have seen more than a few oxygen tanks and at least one woman clearly undergoing very serious chemo. Some T-shirts celebrate good news about a cancer diagnosis. This might be someone’s last cruise or week on Earth. For these women, who have spent months, if not years, at sea, cruising is a ritual as well as a life cycle: first love, last love, marriage, divorce, death.

Read: The last place on Earth any tourist should go

I have talked with these women for so long, tonight I promise myself that after a sad solitary dinner I will not try to seek out company at the bars in the mall or the adult-themed Hideaway. I have enough material to fulfill my duties to this publication. As I approach my orphaned suite, I run into the aggro young people who stole Mr. and Mrs. Rand away from me the night before. The tattooed apparitions pass me without a glance. She is singing something violent about “Stuttering Stanley” (a character in a popular horror movie, as I discover with my complimentary VOOM SM Surf & Stream Internet at Sea) and he’s loudly shouting about “all the money I’ve lost,” presumably at the casino in the bowels of the ship.

So these bent psychos out of a Cormac McCarthy novel are angrily inhabiting my deck. As I mewl myself to sleep, I envision a limited series for HBO or some other streamer, a kind of low-rent White Lotus , where several aggressive couples conspire to throw a shy intellectual interloper overboard. I type the scenario into my phone. As I fall asleep, I think of what the woman who recently divorced her husband and whose son became a man through the good offices of the Irish Republic told me while I was hoisting myself out of the infinity pool. “I’m here because I’m an explorer. I’m here because I’m trying something new.” What if I allowed myself to believe in her fantasy?

2 photos: 2 slices of pizza on plate; man in "Daddy's Little Meatball" shirt and shorts standing in outdoor dining area with ship's exhaust stacks in background

“YOU REALLY STARTED AT THE TOP,” they tell me. I’m at the Coastal Kitchen for my eggs and corned-beef hash, and the maître d’ has slotted me in between two couples. Fueled by coffee or perhaps intrigued by my relative youth, they strike up a conversation with me. As always, people are shocked that this is my first cruise. They contrast the Icon favorably with all the preceding liners in the Royal Caribbean fleet, usually commenting on the efficiency of the elevators that hurl us from deck to deck (as in many large corporate buildings, the elevators ask you to choose a floor and then direct you to one of many lifts). The couple to my right, from Palo Alto—he refers to his “porn mustache” and calls his wife “my cougar” because she is two years older—tell me they are “Pandemic Pinnacles.”

This is the day that my eyes will be opened. Pinnacles , it is explained to me over translucent cantaloupe, have sailed with Royal Caribbean for 700 ungodly nights. Pandemic Pinnacles took advantage of the two-for-one accrual rate of Pinnacle points during the pandemic, when sailing on a cruise ship was even more ill-advised, to catapult themselves into Pinnacle status.

Because of the importance of the inaugural voyage of the world’s largest cruise liner, more than 200 Pinnacles are on this ship, a startling number, it seems. Mrs. Palo Alto takes out a golden badge that I have seen affixed over many a breast, which reads CROWN AND ANCHOR SOCIETY along with her name. This is the coveted badge of the Pinnacle. “You should hear all the whining in Guest Services,” her husband tells me. Apparently, the Pinnacles who are not also Suites like us are all trying to use their status to get into Coastal Kitchen, our elite restaurant. Even a Pinnacle needs to be a Suite to access this level of corned-beef hash.

“We’re just baby Pinnacles,” Mrs. Palo Alto tells me, describing a kind of internal class struggle among the Pinnacle elite for ever higher status.

And now I understand what the maître d’ was saying to me on the first day of my cruise. He wasn’t saying “ pendejo .” He was saying “Pinnacle.” The dining room was for Pinnacles only, all those older people rolling in like the tide on their motorized scooters.

And now I understand something else: This whole thing is a cult. And like most cults, it can’t help but mirror the endless American fight for status. Like Keith Raniere’s NXIVM, where different-colored sashes were given out to connote rank among Raniere’s branded acolytes, this is an endless competition among Pinnacles, Suites, Diamond-Plusers, and facing-the-mall, no-balcony purple SeaPass Card peasants, not to mention the many distinctions within each category. The more you cruise, the higher your status. No wonder a section of the Royal Promenade is devoted to getting passengers to book their next cruise during the one they should be enjoying now. No wonder desperate Royal Caribbean offers (“FINAL HOURS”) crowded my email account weeks before I set sail. No wonder the ship’s jewelry store, the Royal Bling, is selling a $100,000 golden chalice that will entitle its owner to drink free on Royal Caribbean cruises for life. (One passenger was already gaming out whether her 28-year-old son was young enough to “just about earn out” on the chalice or if that ship had sailed.) No wonder this ship was sold out months before departure , and we had to pay $19,000 for a horrid suite away from the Suite Neighborhood. No wonder the most mythical hero of Royal Caribbean lore is someone named Super Mario, who has cruised so often, he now has his own working desk on many ships. This whole experience is part cult, part nautical pyramid scheme.

From the June 2014 issue: Ship of wonks

“The toilets are amazing,” the Palo Altos are telling me. “One flush and you’re done.” “They don’t understand how energy-efficient these ships are,” the husband of the other couple is telling me. “They got the LNG”—liquefied natural gas, which is supposed to make the Icon a boon to the environment (a concept widely disputed and sometimes ridiculed by environmentalists).

But I’m thinking along a different line of attack as I spear my last pallid slice of melon. For my streaming limited series, a Pinnacle would have to get killed by either an outright peasant or a Suite without an ocean view. I tell my breakfast companions my idea.

“Oh, for sure a Pinnacle would have to be killed,” Mr. Palo Alto, the Pandemic Pinnacle, says, touching his porn mustache thoughtfully as his wife nods.

“THAT’S RIGHT, IT’S your time, buddy!” Hubert, my fun-loving Panamanian cabin attendant, shouts as I step out of my suite in a robe. “Take it easy, buddy!”

I have come up with a new dressing strategy. Instead of trying to impress with my choice of T-shirts, I have decided to start wearing a robe, as one does at a resort property on land, with a proper spa and hammam. The response among my fellow cruisers has been ecstatic. “Look at you in the robe!” Mr. Rand cries out as we pass each other by the Thrill Island aqua park. “You’re living the cruise life! You know, you really drank me under the table that night.” I laugh as we part ways, but my soul cries out, Please spend more time with me, Mr. and Mrs. Rand; I so need the company .

In my white robe, I am a stately presence, a refugee from a better limited series, a one-man crossover episode. (Only Suites are granted these robes to begin with.) Today, I will try many of the activities these ships have on offer to provide their clientele with a sense of never-ceasing motion. Because I am already at Thrill Island, I decide to climb the staircase to what looks like a mast on an old-fashioned ship (terrified, because I am afraid of heights) to try a ride called “Storm Chasers,” which is part of the “Category 6” water park, named in honor of one of the storms that may someday do away with the Port of Miami entirely. Storm Chasers consists of falling from the “mast” down a long, twisting neon tube filled with water, like being the camera inside your own colonoscopy, as you hold on to the handles of a mat, hoping not to die. The tube then flops you down headfirst into a trough of water, a Royal Caribbean baptism. It both knocks my breath out and makes me sad.

In keeping with the aquatic theme, I attend a show at the AquaDome. To the sound of “Live and Let Die,” a man in a harness gyrates to and fro in the sultry air. I saw something very similar in the back rooms of the famed Berghain club in early-aughts Berlin. Soon another harnessed man is gyrating next to the first. Ja , I think to myself, I know how this ends. Now will come the fisting , natürlich . But the show soon devolves into the usual Marvel-film-grade nonsense, with too much light and sound signifying nichts . If any fisting is happening, it is probably in the Suite Neighborhood, inside a cabin marked with an upside-down pineapple, which I understand means a couple are ready to swing, and I will see none of it.

I go to the ice show, which is a kind of homage—if that’s possible—to the periodic table, done with the style and pomp and masterful precision that would please the likes of Kim Jong Un, if only he could afford Royal Caribbean talent. At one point, the dancers skate to the theme song of Succession . “See that!” I want to say to my fellow Suites—at “cultural” events, we have a special section reserved for us away from the commoners—“ Succession ! It’s even better than the zombie show! Open your minds!”

Finally, I visit a comedy revue in an enormous and too brightly lit version of an “intimate,” per Royal Caribbean literature, “Manhattan comedy club.” Many of the jokes are about the cruising life. “I’ve lived on ships for 20 years,” one of the middle-aged comedians says. “I can only see so many Filipino homosexuals dressed as a taco.” He pauses while the audience laughs. “I am so fired tonight,” he says. He segues into a Trump impression and then Biden falling asleep at the microphone, which gets the most laughs. “Anyone here from Fort Leonard Wood?” another comedian asks. Half the crowd seems to cheer. As I fall asleep that night, I realize another connection I have failed to make, and one that may explain some of the diversity on this vessel—many of its passengers have served in the military.

As a coddled passenger with a suite, I feel like I am starting to understand what it means to have a rank and be constantly reminded of it. There are many espresso makers , I think as I look across the expanse of my officer-grade quarters before closing my eyes, but this one is mine .

photo of sheltered sandy beach with palms, umbrellas, and chairs with two large docked cruise ships in background

A shocking sight greets me beyond the pools of Deck 17 as I saunter over to the Coastal Kitchen for my morning intake of slightly sour Americanos. A tiny city beneath a series of perfectly pressed green mountains. Land! We have docked for a brief respite in Basseterre, the capital of St. Kitts and Nevis. I wolf down my egg scramble to be one of the first passengers off the ship. Once past the gangway, I barely refrain from kissing the ground. I rush into the sights and sounds of this scruffy island city, sampling incredible conch curry and buckets of non-Starbucks coffee. How wonderful it is to be where God intended humans to be: on land. After all, I am neither a fish nor a mall rat. This is my natural environment. Basseterre may not be Havana, but there are signs of human ingenuity and desire everywhere you look. The Black Table Grill Has been Relocated to Soho Village, Market Street, Directly Behind of, Gary’s Fruits and Flower Shop. Signed. THE PORK MAN reads a sign stuck to a wall. Now, that is how you write a sign. A real sign, not the come-ons for overpriced Rolexes that blink across the screens of the Royal Promenade.

“Hey, tie your shoestring!” a pair of laughing ladies shout to me across the street.

“Thank you!” I shout back. Shoestring! “Thank you very much.”

A man in Independence Square Park comes by and asks if I want to play with his monkey. I haven’t heard that pickup line since the Penn Station of the 1980s. But then he pulls a real monkey out of a bag. The monkey is wearing a diaper and looks insane. Wonderful , I think, just wonderful! There is so much life here. I email my editor asking if I can remain on St. Kitts and allow the Icon to sail off into the horizon without me. I have even priced a flight home at less than $300, and I have enough material from the first four days on the cruise to write the entire story. “It would be funny …” my editor replies. “Now get on the boat.”

As I slink back to the ship after my brief jailbreak, the locals stand under umbrellas to gaze at and photograph the boat that towers over their small capital city. The limousines of the prime minister and his lackeys are parked beside the gangway. St. Kitts, I’ve been told, is one of the few islands that would allow a ship of this size to dock.

“We hear about all the waterslides,” a sweet young server in one of the cafés told me. “We wish we could go on the ship, but we have to work.”

“I want to stay on your island,” I replied. “I love it here.”

But she didn’t understand how I could possibly mean that.

“WASHY, WASHY, so you don’t get stinky, stinky!” kids are singing outside the AquaDome, while their adult minders look on in disapproval, perhaps worried that Mr. Washy Washy is grooming them into a life of gayness. I heard a southern couple skip the buffet entirely out of fear of Mr. Washy Washy.

Meanwhile, I have found a new watering hole for myself, the Swim & Tonic, the biggest swim-up bar on any cruise ship in the world. Drinking next to full-size, nearly naked Americans takes away one’s own self-consciousness. The men have curvaceous mom bodies. The women are equally un-shy about their sprawling physiques.

Today I’ve befriended a bald man with many children who tells me that all of the little trinkets that Royal Caribbean has left us in our staterooms and suites are worth a fortune on eBay. “Eighty dollars for the water bottle, 60 for the lanyard,” the man says. “This is a cult.”

“Tell me about it,” I say. There is, however, a clientele for whom this cruise makes perfect sense. For a large middle-class family (he works in “supply chains”), seven days in a lower-tier cabin—which starts at $1,800 a person—allow the parents to drop off their children in Surfside, where I imagine many young Filipina crew members will take care of them, while the parents are free to get drunk at a swim-up bar and maybe even get intimate in their cabin. Cruise ships have become, for a certain kind of hardworking family, a form of subsidized child care.

There is another man I would like to befriend at the Swim & Tonic, a tall, bald fellow who is perpetually inebriated and who wears a necklace studded with little rubber duckies in sunglasses, which, I am told, is a sort of secret handshake for cruise aficionados. Tomorrow, I will spend more time with him, but first the ship docks at St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Charlotte Amalie, the capital, is more charming in name than in presence, but I still all but jump off the ship to score a juicy oxtail and plantains at the well-known Petite Pump Room, overlooking the harbor. From one of the highest points in the small city, the Icon of the Seas appears bigger than the surrounding hills.

I usually tan very evenly, but something about the discombobulation of life at sea makes me forget the regular application of sunscreen. As I walk down the streets of Charlotte Amalie in my fluorescent Icon of the Seas cap, an old Rastafarian stares me down. “Redneck,” he hisses.

“No,” I want to tell him, as I bring a hand up to my red neck, “that’s not who I am at all. On my island, Mannahatta, as Whitman would have it, I am an interesting person living within an engaging artistic milieu. I do not wish to use the Caribbean as a dumping ground for the cruise-ship industry. I love the work of Derek Walcott. You don’t understand. I am not a redneck. And if I am, they did this to me.” They meaning Royal Caribbean? Its passengers? The Rands?

“They did this to me!”

Back on the Icon, some older matrons are muttering about a run-in with passengers from the Celebrity cruise ship docked next to us, the Celebrity Apex. Although Celebrity Cruises is also owned by Royal Caribbean, I am made to understand that there is a deep fratricidal beef between passengers of the two lines. “We met a woman from the Apex,” one matron says, “and she says it was a small ship and there was nothing to do. Her face was as tight as a 19-year-old’s, she had so much surgery.” With those words, and beneath a cloudy sky, humidity shrouding our weathered faces and red necks, we set sail once again, hopefully in the direction of home.

photo from inside of spacious geodesic-style glass dome facing ocean, with stairwells and seating areas

THERE ARE BARELY 48 HOURS LEFT to the cruise, and the Icon of the Seas’ passengers are salty. They know how to work the elevators. They know the Washy Washy song by heart. They understand that the chicken gyro at “Feta Mediterranean,” in the AquaDome Market, is the least problematic form of chicken on the ship.

The passengers have shed their INAUGURAL CRUISE T-shirts and are now starting to evince political opinions. There are caps pledging to make America great again and T-shirts that celebrate words sometimes attributed to Patrick Henry: “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government.” With their preponderance of FAMILY FLAG FAITH FRIENDS FIREARMS T-shirts, the tables by the crepe station sometimes resemble the Capitol Rotunda on January 6. The Real Anthony Fauci , by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appears to be a popular form of literature, especially among young men with very complicated versions of the American flag on their T-shirts. Other opinions blend the personal and the political. “Someone needs to kill Washy guy, right?” a well-dressed man in the elevator tells me, his gray eyes radiating nothing. “Just beat him to death. Am I right?” I overhear the male member of a young couple whisper, “There goes that freak” as I saunter by in my white spa robe, and I decide to retire it for the rest of the cruise.

I visit the Royal Bling to see up close the $100,000 golden chalice that entitles you to free drinks on Royal Caribbean forever. The pleasant Serbian saleslady explains that the chalice is actually gold-plated and covered in white zirconia instead of diamonds, as it would otherwise cost $1 million. “If you already have everything,” she explains, “this is one more thing you can get.”

I believe that anyone who works for Royal Caribbean should be entitled to immediate American citizenship. They already speak English better than most of the passengers and, per the Serbian lady’s sales pitch above, better understand what America is as well. Crew members like my Panamanian cabin attendant seem to work 24 hours a day. A waiter from New Delhi tells me that his contract is six months and three weeks long. After a cruise ends, he says, “in a few hours, we start again for the next cruise.” At the end of the half a year at sea, he is allowed a two-to-three-month stay at home with his family. As of 2019, the median income for crew members was somewhere in the vicinity of $20,000, according to a major business publication. Royal Caribbean would not share the current median salary for its crew members, but I am certain that it amounts to a fraction of the cost of a Royal Bling gold-plated, zirconia-studded chalice.

And because most of the Icon’s hyper-sanitized spaces are just a frittata away from being a Delta lounge, one forgets that there are actual sailors on this ship, charged with the herculean task of docking it in port. “Having driven 100,000-ton aircraft carriers throughout my career,” retired Admiral James G. Stavridis, the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, writes to me, “I’m not sure I would even know where to begin with trying to control a sea monster like this one nearly three times the size.” (I first met Stavridis while touring Army bases in Germany more than a decade ago.)

Today, I decide to head to the hot tub near Swim & Tonic, where some of the ship’s drunkest reprobates seem to gather (the other tubs are filled with families and couples). The talk here, like everywhere else on the ship, concerns football, a sport about which I know nothing. It is apparent that four teams have recently competed in some kind of finals for the year, and that two of them will now face off in the championship. Often when people on the Icon speak, I will try to repeat the last thing they said with a laugh or a nod of disbelief. “Yes, 20-yard line! Ha!” “Oh my God, of course, scrimmage.”

Soon we are joined in the hot tub by the late-middle-age drunk guy with the duck necklace. He is wearing a bucket hat with the legend HAWKEYES , which, I soon gather, is yet another football team. “All right, who turned me in?” Duck Necklace says as he plops into the tub beside us. “I get a call in the morning,” he says. “It’s security. Can you come down to the dining room by 10 a.m.? You need to stay away from the members of this religious family.” Apparently, the gregarious Duck Necklace had photobombed the wrong people. There are several families who present as evangelical Christians or practicing Muslims on the ship. One man, evidently, was not happy that Duck Necklace had made contact with his relatives. “It’s because of religious stuff; he was offended. I put my arm around 20 people a day.”

Everyone laughs. “They asked me three times if I needed medication,” he says of the security people who apparently interrogated him in full view of others having breakfast.

Another hot-tub denizen suggests that he should have asked for fentanyl. After a few more drinks, Duck Necklace begins to muse about what it would be like to fall off the ship. “I’m 62 and I’m ready to go,” he says. “I just don’t want a shark to eat me. I’m a huge God guy. I’m a Bible guy. There’s some Mayan theory squaring science stuff with religion. There is so much more to life on Earth.” We all nod into our Red Stripes.

“I never get off the ship when we dock,” he says. He tells us he lost $6,000 in the casino the other day. Later, I look him up, and it appears that on land, he’s a financial adviser in a crisp gray suit, probably a pillar of his North Chicago community.

photo of author smiling and holding soft-serve ice-cream cone with outdoor seating area in background

THE OCEAN IS TEEMING with fascinating life, but on the surface it has little to teach us. The waves come and go. The horizon remains ever far away.

I am constantly told by my fellow passengers that “everybody here has a story.” Yes, I want to reply, but everybody everywhere has a story. You, the reader of this essay, have a story, and yet you’re not inclined to jump on a cruise ship and, like Duck Necklace, tell your story to others at great pitch and volume. Maybe what they’re saying is that everybody on this ship wants to have a bigger, more coherent, more interesting story than the one they’ve been given. Maybe that’s why there’s so much signage on the doors around me attesting to marriages spent on the sea. Maybe that’s why the Royal Caribbean newsletter slipped under my door tells me that “this isn’t a vacation day spent—it’s bragging rights earned.” Maybe that’s why I’m so lonely.

Today is a big day for Icon passengers. Today the ship docks at Royal Caribbean’s own Bahamian island, the Perfect Day at CocoCay. (This appears to be the actual name of the island.) A comedian at the nightclub opined on what his perfect day at CocoCay would look like—receiving oral sex while learning that his ex-wife had been killed in a car crash (big laughter). But the reality of the island is far less humorous than that.

One of the ethnic tristate ladies in the infinity pool told me that she loved CocoCay because it had exactly the same things that could be found on the ship itself. This proves to be correct. It is like the Icon, but with sand. The same tired burgers, the same colorful tubes conveying children and water from Point A to B. The same swim-up bar at its Hideaway ($140 for admittance, no children allowed; Royal Caribbean must be printing money off its clientele). “There was almost a fight at The Wizard of Oz ,” I overhear an elderly woman tell her companion on a chaise lounge. Apparently one of the passengers began recording Royal Caribbean’s intellectual property and “three guys came after him.”

I walk down a pathway to the center of the island, where a sign reads DO NOT ENTER: YOU HAVE REACHED THE BOUNDARY OF ADVENTURE . I hear an animal scampering in the bushes. A Royal Caribbean worker in an enormous golf cart soon chases me down and takes me back to the Hideaway, where I run into Mrs. Rand in a bikini. She becomes livid telling me about an altercation she had the other day with a woman over a towel and a deck chair. We Suites have special towel privileges; we do not have to hand over our SeaPass Card to score a towel. But the Rands are not Suites. “People are so entitled here,” Mrs. Rand says. “It’s like the airport with all its classes.” “You see,” I want to say, “this is where your husband’s love of Ayn Rand runs into the cruelties and arbitrary indignities of unbridled capitalism.” Instead we make plans to meet for a final drink in the Schooner Bar tonight (the Rands will stand me up).

Back on the ship, I try to do laps, but the pool (the largest on any cruise ship, naturally) is fully trashed with the detritus of American life: candy wrappers, a slowly dissolving tortilla chip, napkins. I take an extra-long shower in my suite, then walk around the perimeter of the ship on a kind of exercise track, past all the alluring lifeboats in their yellow-and-white livery. Maybe there is a dystopian angle to the HBO series that I will surely end up pitching, one with shades of WALL-E or Snowpiercer . In a collapsed world, a Royal Caribbean–like cruise liner sails from port to port, collecting new shipmates and supplies in exchange for the precious energy it has on board. (The actual Icon features a new technology that converts passengers’ poop into enough energy to power the waterslides . In the series, this shitty technology would be greatly expanded.) A very young woman (18? 19?), smart and lonely, who has only known life on the ship, walks along the same track as I do now, contemplating jumping off into the surf left by its wake. I picture reusing Duck Necklace’s words in the opening shot of the pilot. The girl is walking around the track, her eyes on the horizon; maybe she’s highborn—a Suite—and we hear the voice-over: “I’m 19 and I’m ready to go. I just don’t want a shark to eat me.”

Before the cruise is finished, I talk to Mr. Washy Washy, or Nielbert of the Philippines. He is a sweet, gentle man, and I thank him for the earworm of a song he has given me and for keeping us safe from the dreaded norovirus. “This is very important to me, getting people to wash their hands,” he tells me in his burger getup. He has dreams, as an artist and a performer, but they are limited in scope. One day he wants to dress up as a piece of bacon for the morning shift.

THE MAIDEN VOYAGE OF THE TITANIC (the Icon of the Seas is five times as large as that doomed vessel) at least offered its passengers an exciting ending to their cruise, but when I wake up on the eighth day, all I see are the gray ghosts that populate Miami’s condo skyline. Throughout my voyage, my writer friends wrote in to commiserate with me. Sloane Crosley, who once covered a three-day spa mini-cruise for Vogue , tells me she felt “so very alone … I found it very untethering.” Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes in an Instagram comment: “When Gary is done I think it’s time this genre was taken out back and shot.” And he is right. To badly paraphrase Adorno: After this, no more cruise stories. It is unfair to put a thinking person on a cruise ship. Writers typically have difficult childhoods, and it is cruel to remind them of the inherent loneliness that drove them to writing in the first place. It is also unseemly to write about the kind of people who go on cruises. Our country does not provide the education and upbringing that allow its citizens an interior life. For the creative class to point fingers at the large, breasty gentlemen adrift in tortilla-chip-laden pools of water is to gather a sour harvest of low-hanging fruit.

A day or two before I got off the ship, I decided to make use of my balcony, which I had avoided because I thought the view would only depress me further. What I found shocked me. My suite did not look out on Central Park after all. This entire time, I had been living in the ship’s Disneyland, Surfside, the neighborhood full of screaming toddlers consuming milkshakes and candy. And as I leaned out over my balcony, I beheld a slight vista of the sea and surf that I thought I had been missing. It had been there all along. The sea was frothy and infinite and blue-green beneath the span of a seagull’s wing. And though it had been trod hard by the world’s largest cruise ship, it remained.

This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “A Meatball at Sea.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

IMAGES

Carnival Cruise Passenger Jumps Overboard Intentionally
Carnival cruise ship: Desperate search underway after man jumps overboard
Lady Jumps Overboard From tenth flooring Of Carnival Cruise Ship
The Coast Guard suspends search for a man who went overboard from a Carnival cruise ship nearly
Man Jumps Overboard Carnival Cruise Ship In Another Passenger Incident This Year
New Details About Carnival Cruise Passenger Who Fell Overboard Transcript

COMMENTS

Carnival cruise passenger seen in video moments before reportedly
A Carnival cruise ship passenger was caught on camera struggling with security moments before she reportedly jumped overboard into the Gulf of Mexico. In the cell phone video obtained by FOX 8 ...
Woman falls overboard from Carnival cruise ship off Mexico
A woman fell off a Carnival Cruise Line ship balcony and into the Pacific Ocean early Saturday, spurring an international search effort. The incident, which happened shortly after 3 a.m. aboard a ...
Video shows final moments of woman before she fell overboard
Newly emerged video footage, recorded minutes before a woman fell overboard from the Carnival Valor cruise, shows her struggling with cruise ship security.. The 32-year-old African-American woman ...
Coast Guard Suspends Search for Passenger Who Fell From Cruise Ship
The U.S. Coast Guard said on Sunday that it halted its search for a woman who went overboard from a Carnival cruise ship near Ensenada, Mexico. Share full article The Carnival Miracle cruise ship ...
A Carnival cruise passenger that jumped overboard was seen being
A Carnival cruise passenger that jumped overboard was seen being restrained by security before the incident, reports say. Zahra Tayeb. Feb 19, 2022, 2:37 AM PST. The US Coast Guard said in a ...
Carnival cruise passenger goes overboard
0:41. A Carnival Cruise Line passenger went overboard on the line's Carnival Magic ship on Monday. Ronnie Peale, 35, went overboard 186 miles east of Jacksonville, Florida, the U.S. Coast Guard ...
Woman Falls Overboard on Carnival Cruise, Passenger Says 'High
A woman fell overboard the cruise ship over the weekend. The Carnival Miracle sails up the St. John's River after a trans-Atlantic voyage from its Finnish shipyard February 23, 2004 in ...
Crews search for woman who reportedly jumped from Carnival ship
The Coast Guard received a call Wednesday afternoon that a 32-year-old woman had fallen overboard from the Carnival Valor cruise ship about 150 miles from Southwest Pass, Louisiana, authorities said. The woman jumped into the ocean from her balcony while the ship was at sea, said Matt Lupoli, a spokesman for the South Florida-based Carnival ...
Search halted for woman who fell overboard from Carnival cruise ship
By The Associated Press. LONG BEACH, Calif. — U.S. Coast Guard authorities have halted the search for a woman who went overboard on a cruise ship near Ensenada, Mexico. Authorities searched more ...
Woman Goes Overboard On Carnival Cruise, Prompting Coast ...
The Coast Guard said it received a call Wednesday afternoon that a 32-year-old woman had fallen overboard from the cruise ship Carnival Valor about 150 miles from Southwest Pass, Louisiana, per the Associated Press. The ship was en route to its home port in New Orleans. A spokesperson for the Carnival Cruise Line told HuffPost the woman is ...
FBI investigates after woman falls overboard on cruise ship l GMA
Federal agents have sent an evidence response team to the Carnival Miracle after the cruise line said a woman in her 20s fell overboard early Saturday mornin...
Carnival Valor passenger goes overboard in Gulf of Mexico: report
Updated Feb. 17, 2022, 12:59 p.m. ET. People look overboard after a passenger reportedly jumped off the Carnival Valor. johnnytrupp/Twitter. A woman is missing in the Gulf of Mexico after she ...
Coast Guard searches for woman fell overboard from Carnival Valor
The Coast Guard said it received a call Wednesday afternoon that a 32-year-old African American woman had fallen overboard from the Carnival Valor cruise ship about 150 miles offshore of Southwest ...
FBI LA investigating after Carnival cruise ship passenger goes
The passenger, who has been described only as a woman in her mid-20s, was aboard the Carnival Miracle cruise ship around 3:30 a.m. Saturday when she went overboard near Ensenada, Mexico.
Body of Guest Who Jumped Overboard From Carnival Cruise Ship Reportedly
The six-day cruise departed Miami this past Sunday and is expected to return Saturday. A search that was underway for a guest who jumped overboard Wednesday night from the Carnival Horizon ship ...
Carnival Cruise Surveillance Video Confirms Missing Passenger ...
Topline. Carnival Cruise Line has found surveillance video of a passenger who went missing Monday night, leading to a Coast Guard search of the Gulf of Mexico, according to Matt Lupoli, senior ...
Coast Guard ends search for woman who went overboard on cruise ship
The woman in her mid-20s was reported to have gone overboard early Saturday, Petty Officer First Class Adam Stanton said. The Carnival Miracle cruise ship was returning Sunday to the port in Long ...
Search underway for woman who jumped overboard
The U.S. Coast Guard is searching for a cruise ship passenger who had fallen overboard and is missing in the Gulf of Mexico, according to authorities.Full st...
Woman jumps overboard from Carnival cruise ship; Coast Guard ...
The U.S. Coast Guard is searching for a woman who went overboard off a Carnival Valor cruise ship in the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday. Officials say the 32-year-old jumped from her balcony about ...
Video shows woman scuffling with security before reportedly ...
Chaotic video shows a woman being detained aboard a Carnival cruise ship shortly before she reportedly jumped overboard from her balcony and vanished in the ...
FBI investigating 'suspicious death' on Carnival cruise ship, but
The FBI is investigating the "suspicious death" of a female passenger on board a Carnival Sunshine cruise ship, but the company said the death appears to be natural.
Passenger Overboard From the Carnival Miracle
Multiple news sources yesterday reported that a young woman in her 20's went overboard from a Carnival Cruise Line ship and into the Pacific Ocean early Saturday morning.. The Carnival Miracle was sailing around 35 miles west of the coast of Ensenada, Mexico, when the passenger went over the rails shortly after 3 a.m. The incident was captured on security footage, the U.S. Coast Guard said.
Watch: The rise and fall of the cruise industry
The US Coast Guard has stopped its search for a 30-year-old male passenger who went overboard from the Carnival Elation cruise ship on Sunday. The cruise ship was on a four-day Bahamas sailing and ...
Royal Caribbean Cruise: 'Drunk' Passenger Jumped From Ship in Front of
The Liberty of the Seas departed from South Florida and was 57 miles from Great Inagua in The Bahamas when the passenger jumped overboard. The cruise ship has 18 decks and can accommodate 3,634 ...
Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever
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