Norwegian cruise ship loses ability to navigate after rogue wave hits

[VySky]

I have never been on a cruise. I spent enough time underway at work so last thing I ever wanted to do was pay to cruise.

We had Sea State 5's. This rouge wave the cruise ship encountered was massive.

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A Norwegian cruise ship lost the ability to navigate after a rogue wave crashed into it Thursday, the cruise company HX said.

The MS Maud lost power after the wave hit as the ship was sailing toward Tilbury, England, from Florø, Norway, HX, a unit of Norway’s Hurtigruten Group, said in a statement.


None of the 266 passengers or 131 crew members were seriously injured, HX said.

"The situation is stable, the ship has propulsion and they are able to navigate the ship manually via emergency systems," the Danish Joint Rescue Coordination Centre said in a statement Friday local time.

The rogue wave shattered windows on the ship's bridge, which caused water to enter the vessel and resulted in a power outage, Reuters reported.

The ship was in the North Sea at the time, in an area hit by a storm late Thursday with hurricane-force gusts forecast to continue Friday, the Danish Meteorological Institute said according to Reuters.

One passenger posted a video on Facebook showing the view from her room's window Thursday with the cruise ship bobbing up and down and creaking in the throes of high waves.

Norwegian cruise ship loses ability to navigate after rogue wave hits

All 266 passengers and 131 crew members are safe, and no serious injuries were reported.

www.nbcnews.com

 

[VySky]

Video of the encounter

 

[Sweden]

I have never been on a cruise. I spent enough time underway at work so last thing I ever wanted to do was pay to cruise.

We had Sea State 5's. This rouge wave the cruise ship encountered was massive.

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Norwegian cruise ship loses ability to navigate after rogue wave hits

All 266 passengers and 131 crew members are safe, and no serious injuries were reported.

www.nbcnews.com

I spent many years on de luxe cruises organised by the Grey Funnel Line, sometime known as the RN. Visited many ports and saw not a few waves, though never a rouge one.

 

[Ishm]

Rogue waves are scary beasts. Over the past 25 years I have covered around ~40,000NM in my Sport fishers fishing offshore. I have twice encountered what were for my size of boat 'rogue waves'. They wouldn't have bothered a cruise liner, but for a ~50ft vessel they were definitely rogue waves that might have sunk the boat. The first one was when fishing over a large undersea ridge that came up to 70ft from 5000ft. Wind was only ~15knts and maybe 3ft to 4ft seas, but a lot of current. I was helming us off the edge of the plateau as we were heading back across the deep water to a nearby island to anchor for the evening. Sitting on the flybridge, feet up, enjoying the sunny afternoon. I look back over my shoulder to check the lure pattern and there is the vertical face of a wave 10ft higher than my flybridge racing towards the stern of the boat. The boat is not square to the wave face so we are about to either get rolled or possibly have the wave dump into the boat and probably sink us. I grab a handful of throttle and a lot of rudder to help square up the stern of the boat to the wave, plus increase our speed. The wave doesn't break, and by applying throttle and rudder I get the wave to roll through underneath us with us staying square to the wave and not broaching. Made it a relative non event. My fishing buddies from downstairs call out to ask if I had seen a fish or something as they heard the engine rpms change. They hadn't felt the wave enough to realize what had happened. I told them to bring me new underwear.

A second time I was bringing a boat back from a distant port after basing it in a remote area for part of the fishing season. Just me and a mate, but of course we had the lures in and were fishing as we travelled at 8knts. We were in the aftermath of a large storm event and while there was little wind nor waves, there were big long interval rolling swells of 10ft to 12ft. Really a non event as they were such a long interval. We are sitting on the flybridge together enjoying a couple of fresh coffees when I see that the next swell we were about to climb was closer to 40ft than 10ft. Maybe even more than 40ft. I wasn't stopping to measure it, but it was the tallest 'wave' I had ever pointed a boat at. This time we are driving straight into the swell. The bow starts rising and it feels just like that classic shot of the boat in the Perfect Storm movie as it starts riding up the unrideable wave that rolled the boat. Grab the throttles with one hand and the helm with the other. Boat starts to feel like it is standing on it's tail when suddenly an engine alarm goes off. Scary AF. Engine failure on one side right now might be terminal. Both engines keep running and we make it over the swell with no damage other than to our underwear. After that one rogue swell the sea is back to gentle again. Once we were settled down again and with no more rogues visible I downloaded the engine alarm history. Starboard engine had lost oil pressure. The boat had been so vertical that we had exceeded the dynamic engine pitch angle and all the oil had run so far back in the engine that for a brief second or two the oil pump wasn't picking it up. No permanent damage, but scary, scary event. A few years later I was arriving at an offshore under water seamount where I could see ~25ft swells rising out of almost flat calm water deep water around the seamount. I drove us to a different part of the mount where the currents were tamer before crossing into the shallower water. That previous experience had been scary enough that I didn't want to risk a repeat thank you!