Some sailors go a whole career without a real scare. I haven’t been that lucky — or maybe I have, depending on how you look at it. Every close call ended the same way: I disembarked, told the story, and went back for more. Here’s the weather that has chased me around the globe since 1979.
Hurricane David, Caribbean, 1979
It started on the Cunard Princess, my first ship, my first hurricane. I was employed as an Assistant Food Manager, and we were doing weekly Caribbean voyages. In August 1979, Hurricane David seemed to have booked the same itinerary — it stayed near almost every island on our schedule, eventually strengthening into a Category 5 before slamming into Dominica and the surrounding ports of call.
Ships don’t ride out hurricanes in port; the damage risk is too high. So we pulled out ahead of it, and then did something almost stranger: we sailed back in as the first ship to reach Barbados and St. Lucia the morning after. The hurricane was already many miles away by then, but you’d never have known it from the deck. The swells it left behind rocked us hard enough that half my crew — all islanders, all supposedly used to this — got seasick. So did plenty of passengers. When we finally went ashore in Barbados to check on our favorite beaches, they were unrecognizable. Just gone.
The Encore’s Rough Debut, North Atlantic, 2019
Not every storm needs a name to be memorable. The inaugural transatlantic crossing of NCL’s Encore gave me one of my roughest nights ever, and it started before we’d even left the dock.
Southampton was drowning in torrential rain the afternoon before departure — bad enough that getting a few blocks to the pier meant calling an Uber. We didn’t sail until past midnight, hours behind schedule. Then the real test began. Winds climbed to around 40 knots. Waves stacked up to 20 and 30 feet. It was rough enough that the crew closed the outer decks, and word went around that a balcony window had blown out somewhere on the ship’s forward upper decks. This was a brand-new vessel getting thrown into the deep end on its very first voyage.
A few days later, as if none of it had happened, the seas went glassy calm. We slid into New York Harbor to the usual inaugural welcome — fireboats spraying arcs of water into the Big Apple sky.
The Quiet Crossings — South America and the Tasman Sea
Not every story is a near-disaster, and I’ll take the quiet ones when I can get them. My South Atlantic crossing on a later South American voyage was almost suspiciously calm.
New Zealand and Australia, January 2023, threatened to be different. The night before we boarded in Auckland, a powerful weather system rolled in — torrential rain, flooding warnings stacking up for days. We slipped out just ahead of the worst of it, though we still had to scrap a planned port call, and the seas that followed weren’t gentle. There was real concern heading in: our route meant crossing the Tasman Sea multiple times, from Melbourne to Tasmania and back to Eden, Australia. In the end, every one of those crossings turned out pleasant. The Tasman had a reputation to live up to, and it didn’t.
Antarctica and the Drake Passage, December 2023
If there’s one stretch of water sailors talk about in hushed tones, it’s the Drake Passage. I went in braced for the worst on my first trip to Antarctica. What I got instead, sailing from South America down and back up to the Falkland Islands, was the most pleasant cruising of my life.
One of our onboard Antarctica experts — a man who’d made this crossing over a hundred times — said he’d never seen the water and weather this calm and serene. When the expert is surprised, you know you got lucky.
Typhoon Garance, Off Madagascar, 2025
Last year, cruising around Africa, Madagascar handed me Typhoon Garance — and this one refused to follow a predictable script. There was no clearly defined path, which meant our planned stops in Réunion and Mauritius were both up in the air.
The storm had formed on February 24th, off Madagascar’s east coast, a little over 500 km northwest of Réunion. Two days later, it strengthened into a tropical cyclone and turned toward Réunion Island. By the next morning, it was a Category 3, making landfall on the island’s northern coast and ultimately causing an estimated $1.05 billion in damage.
Our captain spent those days negotiating, watching data, adjusting course, and managing to thread a safe route into Mauritius. Réunion wasn’t so fortunate — a stop there was simply off the table. We escaped the islands unscathed, but not untouched: 20-foot seas found us anyway, out where the shelter of land ran out.
Winter Storm Gianna, North Atlantic, January 2026
My most recent brush with the weather gods came just this past January, on a run of New York–to-Caribbean cruises. The first two legs — a Bahamas round trip, then a Caribbean round trip — were completely uneventful. Cruise number three broke that streak.
A nor’easter was building: Winter Storm Gianna. As a precaution, the captain skipped our last scheduled stop in St. Thomas and turned us toward New York a day early, hoping to outrun it.
The first day at sea felt routine. Then, as we closed in on the coast, everything changed. I watched the numbers climb on the cabin’s TV monitor — wave heights, wind speeds, both ticking upward like a countdown I didn’t want to see finish. My cabin sat at the very front of the ship on deck 9, which meant I felt every crest the hull carved through. By nightfall, waves were running 30 to 40 feet, and the wind hit 90 knots.
I have never been more afraid on a ship. It genuinely felt like we were airborne, launching off the top of one wave straight into the next.
Morning brought calmer water and no word from the bridge that anything had gone wrong, which, after a night like that, felt like its own kind of miracle. By the time we reached New York, the Hudson River had frozen solid, and the city itself had dodged the worst of it, though the Carolinas were left digging out of 15 inches of snow. An icebreaker escorted us on the final stretch into the Manhattan terminal.
Later, I learned the storm we’d sailed straight into rated a Category 2. We never should have been anywhere near it. The decision to leave early, made to beat the weather, had instead put us right in its path — and it could easily have ended very differently. I disembarked that morning with plenty of time to sit with what the night before had actually been.
Do not forget to check out my other blogs about my cruises around the world!
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