This article has some amazing photos of schools of gigantic cruise ships milling around in the Caribbean. It reminds me of photos of breeding grounds/nursery areas of sharks.
Can we get a David Attenborough voiceover, here?
Probably more like the ancient cruise ship graveyard where the wounded animals go to die.
I just read that the cruise lines have stopped paying the non-sailing crew who are trapped on the ships.
Notice that ship hiding under that cloud in the first picture?
Huh, something Steven King never wrote a book about.
I’m wondering if it made the cloud, with exaust? The ship to the right has a bright obvious trail of smoke, and several more have subtle light areas that could be smoke.
But something kinda similar happens in Superman III.
Maybe they should go over to the Pacific and… ah… fraternize with all the oil tankers off the coast of LA. Or would that be considered miscegenation?
Life aboard these ships must be bordering on the bizarre, by now. What do people do all they? Are some still working? At first, taking advantage of the facilities without passengers might have provided a diversion, but I can’t imagine anybody wanting to expend great effort to maintain them… Is anybody preparing food?
Some of them still have to work, just to keep the ships sailing, and to keep them from deteriorating. I’ve been on several cruises, organized by friends who do this for a living, and so sometimes we have extra access to the “backstage” aspects of the industry. I recall one cruise where they got talking to the ship’s painting crew. This crew basically just paints the ship. Every day, they set up in a new area to strip and re-paint all the exposed metal, to keep rust at bay. They had a year-long schedule they followed so that every part of the ship got re-painted once a year, and they just kept rerunning that cycle, year after year.
That still needs to be done, or the ships will look like crap if and when they start cruising again.
Now think about that for every other system on the ship. Engines, air conditioning, plumbing, electrical, you name it. It all needs routine maintenance to stay functional.
One of the reasons that cruise ships are congregating is to swap crews. They are putting everybody of one nationality on one ship, and plan to sail the crews back to their home countries – since nobody else will have them, even on a straight-swap basis.
And the passenger-service crew aren’t getting paid tips, so they are on not much more than food & accommodation, if they are still in contract at all.
Personally, I think that the way my country has treated foreign crews sucks, but it appears that is a minority opinion.
There is a very strong moral obligation to aid those in peril on the sea. we have turned our back on these people and we ought to be ashamed of ourselves.
Its almost getting close to kidnapping and slavery because they stopped paying the crews and they are just stuck in their rooms. So they cannot send money home to their families and cant go work anywhere else.
All the while the billionaire owners are sitting pretty.
Are cruise ships equipped to re-fuel at sea?