The Cruise Ship Incident

By Nicholas Ueng

“Please report to the main deck with your life vest and warm clothes immediately!” blasted the intercom and as we put on our life jackets a klaxon horn sounded and it felt like I was back at school and there was a fire drill but the horn wasn’t as loud. So we put on our jackets and then filed outside to our lifeboat stations. We walked for a while and behind me I could hear my brothers and sisters cracking jokes. We filed along and saw many other people and we found our spot. We got into line and deck officers as well as instructors were patrolling the area, even the stewards were chatting on radios.

We stood and waited for a while with our jackets and then a man came by and adjusted our life jackets, then it went back into waiting and then… finally one of the deck officers started to take roll call by calling the number on our life vests and we were all the #7 since we were one group. We again waited listening to a dozen ‘Here’s and then we heard #7 and all shouted “HERE!!” and we listened to another fifty ‘here’s and the intercom blasted with a somewhat Swedish/Norwegian Accent, “Thank you for a brief, safe lifeboat drill and you may now return to your cabin and enjoy the cruise.”

We walked back to our cabin to find out it was just a drill we sat down and pulled off our life vest and I had an especially hard time because they thought I was a “kid” and gave me a small life vest. We all were, of course, relieved that it was only a drill and nothing was really happening but what was really weird was that they never taught us how to actually get into a lifeboat. We all laid down for a while and thought what an exciting first fifteen minutes of a cruise!!!