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Tempting Fate
Paisola began to tremble. "Hearing that alarm," she says, "I just knew that I was going to die." Re-creating Shackleton's voyage suddenly seemed like tempting fate. In 1915 his ship, the Endurance, had been crushed by ice in the Southern Ocean, and his team, marooned on Elephant Island, wasn't rescued for almost two years.Major cruise ship disasters are rare today. Medical crises, men overboard and petty crime occur, but the risk of a modern liner sinking is extremely low. Still, last April, the luxurious MS Sea Diamond went down after running aground off Santorini, Greece. Two of its nearly 1,200 passengers are missing and believed to have drowned. The Explorer was about to make news in much colder waters.
Paisola and Van Horne pulled on their polar gear and rushed to the lounge. Seeing that a few passengers were still in their pajamas, Paisola dashed back to her cabin to fetch a large bag of winter wear. "I brought extra because I don't like to be cold," she says.
She set the bag of long underwear, gloves and socks in the middle of the room so that anybody who needed them could take them. The captain quickly explained that the ship had hit submerged ice and, despite a reinforced hull, sustained a fist-size tear. Several crew members were attempting to repair the leak, but, the captain admitted, flood-control efforts didn't appear to be working. Water was seeping up through the toilets, a sign the ship was going down.
Paisola took a seat at the lounge computer and dashed off e-mails to family members, saying she loved them and attaching a rough copy of her will. Then she offered her e-mail account to her shipmates, but none came forward. "Everybody was sitting there in shock," she says. "They couldn't believe we were sinking."
Wiman announced that he had put out a distress call and that three ships in the area had offered help, but the closest was six hours away. A little after 1 a.m., with the Explorer listing dramatically, he came over the intercom once more. "Abandon ship!" he repeated three times. They would have to ride out the night in lifeboats.
Linking arms as they made their way to the now steeply pitched deck, Paisola and Van Horne looked down on a black sea, roiling with whitecaps. Ever optimistic, Van Horne quipped, "At least there are enough lifeboats." She watched crew members hurriedly assemble rescue equipment. "We had to believe we would survive," she says, "or we'd have torn our hair out."
To break the tension, a couple broke out in the Monty Python song "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life." All Paisola could think about, she admits, was the orchestra playing for the doomed passengers on the Titanic.
Thirty-one people, including two crew members, squeezed into lifeboat No. 3 with Paisola and Van Horne. With a screech, their small craft swung away from the ship. "We held our breath," recalls Van Horne, "hoping we wouldn't tumble out."
Seconds later, the boat dropped into the sea. The crew members struggled unsuccessfully to start the engine as the next lifeboat descended overhead, its propellers spinning. "They can't see us!" shouted one passenger, Andy White. "We've got to get away from the ship or we'll be crushed!"
A naval architect from Essex, England, White, 51, had been a champion rower. He grabbed an oar to push off from the Explorer. When it snapped in two, he found another. This time, he and a passenger next to him were able to maneuver the boat far enough away to start rowing, only to find they were headed directly into a seven-foot-high block of pack ice. The winds made navigating impossible; with no engine, they were at the mercy of the waves. White figured they'd slam into the huge mass within minutes.
Spotting an ax mounted on the lifeboat's forward bulkhead, he got an idea. "I decided that if we came alongside the pack, I could cut some steps," he says, "and lead people onto the ice." They had a chance.
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