I spent about one and half years of my life when I was 23-25 years old working on an old cruise ship named the S/S Seabreeze, operated by the now gone Dolphin Cruise Lines.
Click here for information about the ship

Now what made this ship different than other ship I worked on, was that this ship was built in 1958, which means that when you were on board, you were pretty much cut off from the rest of the world. Of course back around 1994, ships did not have internet, but some had satellite TV. This ship only had a 4 mini-page news paper that the radio officer received every day of news from the outside world.

Ok, now on with the story. So we were doing our normal Eastern Caribbean cruise (going to Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands and St. Maarten) and were on our way back to Miami from our last port of call, which means we were on the Atlantic side of Puerto Rico and Cuba.

I was getting ready to go to dinner in the officers mess, when all of a sudden, the power went out. Now I had been at sea for about 4 years by this time, and I have gone through power outages before. The emergency lighting came on, and I finished getting into my tuxedo and headed out to see how everyone was handling the power outage.

The passengers and crew were taking it in stride and assuming the power would come back on any minute (as it usually does after too many hairdryers are going around the ship as the women get ready for dinner and the ships power can't handle it).

After about an hour we learned that the ships boiler (as I said, this was an old ship, hence the S/S in front of the name of the sihp that stands for "Steam Ship", just like the Titanic was a steam ship, hmmmmm). It was time for second seating dinner, and by the way, it was formal night and all the guests were dressed up in their Sunday best. With no power, the best the galley (kitchen), could do was sandwiches, oh the passengers loved that.

We soon learned that it was not going to be fixed anytime soon, so some of my fellow crewmembers did what one would think we should do -- Ok, so we did not do that -

Instead, we got out of our formal wear, which felt great as with no power you get no air conidtioning and it was the summer in the Caribbean, lets just we were feeling HOT HOT HOT (man I hate that song). We grabbed a bottle of Scotch and headed for the main show room and sat in the corner.

There we drank our Scotch, sweated in the hot lounge, listened to the comedian do an improv show with a crewmember using a ships light that looked something from World War II as a spotlight and sweated some more and drank some more. The highlight of the evening was from the psychic group on board (they will let just about any group of people cruise) wanted the whole ships passengers and crew to hold hands and "heal" the ship with mystic powers. We all just asked them if the were psychic's, why didn't they know this was going to happen?

Well the evening dragged on, and we put our under arm deodorant to the test for sure. Finally we were as drunk as we could be and had to decide how we were going to sleep in the heat.

Many of the passengers and crew slept out on deck in the lounge chairs to take advantage of the tropical breezes. Some even found ways to open their port holes and get the breeze in that way and slept in their cabins.

Me, well never been one to be that cleaver, I just went back to my cabin, stripped down and got in my bed with no covers over me. It was a hot night to say the least.

In the morning I awoke to the sounds of boiler starting and was glad for it as soon the air conditioning would be back on. I got dressed and went upstairs to check out what was going on.

There I saw some of the funniest sites I have ever seen. You see, when the boiler started, what seemed like tons of black soot came out of the smoke stack, and since there was no wind at that time, it just came back down and settled all over the ship.

Now this was early in the morning, so there were still all the people who slept out on deck in their loung chairs. They awoke being covered with black soot all over their body and faces (it looked like a bunch of Al Jolson impersonators, if you don't know who that is, click here).

The people who thought they were clever and opened up their port holes, well they awoke to a cabin filled with soot over everything they owned, including themselves.

So the story comes to an end as propulsion came back on, along with electricity and the sorely missed air conditioning and we continued on our journey to Miami to end this cruise and start the next one.

Speaking of the next cruise, it was a Lesbian cruise (yes, you read right, a cruise of all lesbians, but that is a story for another time) and we were of course late getting into Miami, so we had a dockside full of angry lesbians, but once again, that is another story.

Written by: Sean B. Halliday