mts Daphne Costa Cruise Line

Does anyone know what happen to the mts Daphne which was a Costa Cruise Line ship? We sailed on her in the late eighties.

She has bounced around, once named Switzerland, but now sailing as Ocean Monarch for Monarch Classic Cruises. EM

Received news earlier that she will be demolished in early July. Here is more info if anyone would like to read:

http://maritimematters.com/2014/06/demolishing-daphne/

She caught fire on an Alaska cruise, somewhere off Juneau, in July of what I believe was 1987.

I was on that cruise. The crew came pounding on our cabin doors about 11:30 pm, about five days into a seven-day cruise. They hustled everybody outside to our lifeboat stations. We waited out there a few hours, many people in their nightclothes. It was about 55 degrees, and drizzling. We could see the lights of other cruise ship standing by to pick us up if we had to abandon ship. At one point they started doing something with the lifeboats, getting them ready to deploy, but they never actually lowered them. We got minimal information or reassurance from the crew. The cocktail waitress/aerobics instructor who was in charge of our little section of the deck was more scared than any of us.

Finally, about 4 am, they let the passengers with outside cabins on the upper decks go back to their rooms. The rest of us, in the cheap accommodations, couldn't do that--our part of the ship was full of smoke, and they had no way to vent it, or to light the way down there. The fire had been in the engine room. It had knocked out the generator, meaning the ship had no electrical power--no ventilation, no lights, and no running water.

They herded the rest of us into the lounges on the higher decks. I ended up sleeping on the floor there, while my mother sat up in a chair. The crew didn't have much that they could feed us without electricity to cook it, but they did open up the bars, and write off everyone's entire bar tab! There were several hundred passengers using the few public restrooms on those decks--and without running water, of course, they wouldn't flush. That wasn't pretty.

But it could have been much, much worse, of course! We limped into Juneau about noon the next day. They unloaded us all and took us to the local convention center, where they had a hot meal waiting. While we ate, they started calling names and putting people on buses to the airport. We were home by that evening.

Costa offered us 50% of our fares back, or 100% credit on another cruise. I wanted to take the credit, but my mother flatly refused to ever get on another Costa ship--so we took the refund. It took six months to get it. The next thing I heard was that the Daphne was dry-docked, and the rest of that season's cruises were cancelled. Not long after, I heard that Costa had declared bankruptcy. I didn't follow their story for a while, until I heard that they were back on the seas again, and now owned by Carnival.

I did feel even more lucky, but I can't say I was all that surprised, when I heard about the Costa Allegra and the Costa Concordiaand their respective disasters. I later met a guy whose father was a cruise ship pilot in Ketchikan, and when I told him about our adventure, he said his father had told him even before our cruise that the Costa ships were disasters waiting to happen. I do have some lovely memories of the first part of our cruise, but of the Daphne, not so much!!