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Bar-fly

Members
  • Posts

    38
  • Joined

About Me

  • Location
    Palatine of Lancashire, England
  • Interests
    fishing & anything that floats fly & has wheels, or steams, & fishing
  • Favorite Cruise Line(s)
    Fred Olsen
  • Favorite Cruise Destination Or Port of Call
    Costa Rica

Bar-fly's Achievements

Cool Cruiser

Cool Cruiser (2/15)

  1. Hi Two T's, Fred Olsen is playing the incident well down, it all stems from the Captain's decision to sail with only one propeller shaft working into the worst predicted gale in 70 years, as the gale grew in strength we were going nowhere fast and the Captain decided to run for lexos then changed to Gatxo in the Bay of Biscay unfortunately, during the turn there were several deck 4 cabins flooded including the companionway, as the ship listed my wife and I had our life preservers to hand but in retrospect they would have been useless in such seas, while there were several injuries and one passenger told me he stayed seated as instructed but with one big crash was catapulted off his chair and underneath the adjacent table receiving obvious damage to his nose and forehead, the ship had so much list that the waves hit my deck 5 cabin just like a sledgehammer, both of the ship's searchlights were on and searching the wave patterns in order to turn and in my view it was with luck that we completed the turn, and with the wind and waves behind us the ship picked up speed to Gatxo where I was told that 40+ passengers had left the ship, and where the technical engineer came aboard to fix the software which then allowed the two propeller shafts to work together. All in all, we had just one good day of sun and two ports where the weather was hazy sun with clouds, in fact we were glad to get home, I received an email in answer to my letter asking for my money back stating that they were looking into it, I do wonder what is there to look into?
  2. Hi Trevor, I now see your point, and as people pick their cruises by port or destination I foolishly thought that after payment we had a contract of sorts, having cruised for many years I do know that things don't always go to plan and it's another reason why we should read the small print 🙂 I still feel that the on time arrival at Madera for the company PR stunt took presedence over other decisions and why we sailed into the teeth of a massive storm
  3. The captain announced that we had an intermittent engine fault, so we did not have the power to clear the well-publicised approaching storm. Should we have gone to sea with this fault? in my view certainly not!! So we were caught and battered by the worst storm for over 70 years, the ship took on an unnatural list which I believe was righted by pumping water ballast from one side of the ship to the other which righted the ship, in this manoeuvre deck 4 windows were shattered and water ingress also flooded inside cabins, we limped to Gatxo which was cold and wet and although unfortunately after making repairs we did not go the Canaries where we were contracted to go but to Madera, for the Fred Olsen PR exercise which it seemed that the captain thought was more important, in total we had just one day on deck in the sun, therefore, it was not a cruise having had just two contracted ports, should we get our money back? you bet we should so let's see if FO can match Saga without any quibbling.
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