Jimmy Buffet has a great song entitled "Stranded on a Sandbar", check out the lyrics, I believe everyone can relate to this song, but I digress, this story is about being stuck on a sandbar off of Nantucket, Maine.

Now when I say I was stuck, it was not like I was snorkeling and got my body stuck, the cruise ship I was working on ran aground at night on this Nantucket sandbar.

Here is how I remember it:

I had just gone to bed in my cabin, as the next day was "turnaround day", the day the cruise ends and new one begins. All of a sudden, I hear the bow thrusters of the ship start up, I sat up in bed thinking, that is funny, we can't be in port yet (they always start up the bow thrusters just before coming into port).

I looked out my porthole and saw that we were not moving and I could see some lights off in the distance. Then over my cabin speaker, I heard the cruise director say, "good evening everyone, this is your cruise directory here to inform you that the Royal Majesty has run aground and that we are in no danger......etc.....

So I get my suit on (that was the dress for the evening), and head to the bridge. Why would I go to the bridge you may be wondering, well, I was the "diver" on the ship. Policy was that in a situation such as this, I was to make myself available to the captain if she should need to me to dive under the ship. Of course there is no way I wanted to dive on a ship off Nantucket where the water is freezing and all I have is a shorty wetsuit made for tropical warm gin clear and 80 degree water.

I knocked on the door to the bridge, and to my surprise (and dismay), they quickly opened the door, told me to come in and have a seat on the couch on the bridge. The captain of the ship was pacing up and down in his sandals and socks (wish I would have had a camera for that), screaming in Greek. This was a Greek registered ship will all Greek officers.

Now I don't speak Greek, so it was all "Greek" to me (sorry for that, but I could not resist :)

After about 20 minutes, no one offered me coffee, so I decided it was time to leave. I told them to page me if they needed me, I was going to check on my dive equipment in case it was needed (I did not check on my equipment just in case you were wondering).

Out on deck, the passengers were all milling about, looking over the side. Luckily, it was a calm, beautiful moon filled evening. One passenger came running up on deck with his life jacket on, another passenger looked at him and said, "we are aground, we couldn't sink if we wanted to, take that life jacket off and go get yourself a drink". You have to love it when someone tells another person exactly how it is and you don't have to do it.

Not wanting to answer any questions from the passengers, I went down to the officers bar to have a drink (what else would you do when stuck on a sandbar and can't go anywhere).

Here is where something I thought was funny happened, I was looking at the TV with CNN on, there on the TV was my ship, all lit up in its glory, and stuck out in the ocean. I wandered over to the port hole, looked up, and wouldn't you know it, there was the helicopter that was filming us live on CNN.

I can't tell you how funny that was to look at the helicopter, then glance over to the TV and see my ship.

Then I thought about my family, so I went back to my cabin, pulled out the cel phone my company had given me for work (this was back in the mid-90's, and the cel phone must have weighed about 5 pounds). I put my ear/cel phone to my port hole, and dialed my family back in California.

They answered the phone and I told them not to worry if they see my ship on CNN, and told them we were fine and just hanging out on the sandbar.

Now I could go on about the details of the next 24 hours and the ships attempts to get the passengers off the ship, and the ship off the sandbar, but that would make this story way too long, so e-mail me if you would me to add that story.

In short, tugs finally got us off the sandbar a day later, and we headed into Boston with the media all over the ship wanting to know about our ordeal and how we cheated death (most of the people drank during this time, so not too sure how passengers thought it was time for them to meet their maker).

The ship had to go to drydock to repair the hull, that took about 2 weeks, which is another story in itself.

Oh yeah, I guess you want to know how in the world a modern cruise ship could run aground on a sandbar on a clear night, with lighted buoys marking it, and the sandbar being the nautical charts since the 1800's.

All I can tell you is what I was told by many knowledgeable sources, and that is the on our way to the Bermuda, the GPS system made a beeping noise and no one could figure out what is was saying (they even got out the manual I've been told). So they checked the GPS to the old Loran system (old bouy navigation now obsolete thanks to GPS), and they were pretty close.

After we left Bermuda and headed back to Boston, they checked it again, and it was close for the first few hours, so they turned off the alarm and "assumed" everything was ok.

Well, here is apparently what the alarm was trying to tell the bridge officers that it had lost connection with the antenna and was not receiving satellite information (the wire in the back of the unit had come out is what I was told). Instead of it just shutting down, it was trying to do a "best guess" based on information from the ships other systems (like compass and speed information).

Over the couple days it takes to get from Bermuda to Boston, it was going more and more off course, and when the ship ran aground, it was the officer on duty on the bridge first night by himself. As I was told, the old Pilipino Quartermaster who was on the bridge who had spent decades at sea, told the young officer the ship was getting into shallow waters, but the young officer told him he was not an "officer" and did not know what he was talking about.

'Lesson here is, you can trust your electronic instruments only so much, sometimes you have to look at other information (like the depth gauge, and ships position compared with a paper chart) to make a good decision. Or just look out the window and you might see a navigation bouy trying to warn you of danger.

Story by: Sean B. Halliday