We Are Cruising Into A Hurricane

We must be crazy!

Becky and I booked an 11 day Southern Caribbean Cruise on Norwegian in January of this year (2022). Now 10 months later, we traveled to Cape Canaveral where we got off to an unexpected start.

The Plan

The plan was to embark on a dream vacation that would include island-hopping across the Southern Caribbean and experiencing breathtaking scenery.

Embarkation Day

Potential bad news threatened to cancel our cruise and leave us sitting in Florida with a pending natural disaster on the way. Subtropical storm Nicole was gaining strength and eventually turned into a category 1 hurricane that hit Canaveral a day after embarkation.

Before our departure, it was beautiful day and despite the coming weather, we walked the beaches and did some quick site-seeing around the Cape!

Getting on the ship was as we remembered from our previous cruise. The lines were long and slow, but moving. We presented our passports and they handed us two cruise cards.

The process is always the same after that. You enter the ship and head for a waiting area where you are eventually given the green light to head for your cabin. They subsequently run an emergency drill where you locate your reporting station within the ship. I think we took this part far more seriously than before with the storm heading right for us! After that, you are free to walk the ship.

As the ship headed for sea, it was made clear to us from the captain that we were going to throttle the engines and attempt to get in front of the storm. Looking back… we did get in front of the storm, but not before Nicole gifted us with 30ft swells that caused the ship to surge and sway with equal intensity. 

Around 8:00p, we attempted to visit the buffet as the storm began to surge. It was an experience that you could only laugh though. The boat was moving so violently, that passengers would wait for a pause in motion to sprint from station to station. Pans were falling, dishes we breaking, people were bumping into each other and faces were turning green everywhere, lol. We eventually gave up and headed back to the cabin to wait out the storm.

I slept like a baby but Becky almost left the ship for good at the next port. Thankfully, by the time we reached our first port, the seas had calmed down and the skies opening up to delivery the dream vacation we were hoping for.

Looking back, it was an extremely risky idea to attempt any part of the trip in the first place. Had we not made it out of port, we would have been sitting in our hotel in the middle of hurricane Nicole. Had the ship not been able to get in front of the storm, we would have been fearing for our lives for days. It was fitting of being called our crazy journey!