How to fall overboard from a cruise ship

Mainstream media has been agog the past few weeks about two bizarre man-overboard incidents, with some breathless coverage insinuating that taking a wrong turn on the way to dinner could land you in the drink. But in fact, getting over high cruise-ship railings takes work, frequently in combination with booze and imprudence.

The first of these oddball cases involved Michael Mankamyer, 35, who, following a an argument with his godson onboard Carnival Glory March 16, decided in an apparent fit of pique to disembark via a flying leap off a 60-foot-high ship’s balcony 30 miles from the coast of Florida.

Mankamyer turned up on Good Morning America last week and said he had been "ready to let loose and party," combined unspecified medicine and lots of alcohol, and didn't remember going overboard. Once in the water, he said he looked for dolphins to save him, but instead needed to wait eight hours, after drifting 20 miles, for the Coast Guard cutter Chandeleur. A Coast Guard helicopter dropped a rescue swimmer to assist Mankamyer into a basket for hoisting into the chopper. This guy should be playing the lottery with luck like that.

Wondering how the Coast Guard stumbled across this needle in a haystack 20 miles from the jump site? The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported that a new computer system called SAROPS helped the Coast Guard successfully predict where the winds and tides had taken Mankamyer to narrow their search.

Some wags have theorized that Mankamyer, not a skinny guy, was protected from hypothermia, and helped to float, by his girth.

The second incident unfolded last weekend when a 22-year-old man and 20-year-old woman went over a Grand Princess balcony railing 150 miles off Galveston, Texas, in circumstances they've asked Princess not to publicize. The pair, who reportedly didn't know each other prior to the cruise, were fished out of the water naked over four hours later by the ship's rescue craft. After onboard medical treatment, the man continued on with his cruise, but the woman decided to cut her vacation short at the next port of call.

The happy endings of these cases are a testament to the sophisticated man-overboard procedures followed by cruise lines, and the search-and-rescue techniques implemented by the Coast Guard.

Meanwhile, what should somebody considering a cruise take away from all this ridiculousness? The answer is simple. Treat railings on a ship with the same care as a hotel balcony, and don't goof around near them. Maybe consider not overindulging in booze... or stay inside if you do. It takes work to fall overboard.

In the unlikely event you see somebody go overboard while on a cruise ship, notify a crew member or dial the emergency phone number noted on every phone so the bridge officers can mark the location, and toss some lifejackets or liferings overboard, since they dramatically increase an individual's visibility in the water.

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Bogus bomb threat delays departure of Carnival's Sensation

Demonstrating that idiots don't only target phony bomb threats against airlines, Carnival's Sensation delayed its departure Thursday from Port Canaveral, Florida, after a threatening call was received by the Coast Guard during passenger boarding.

The nearly 3,000 passengers and crew were taken off the ship, and Coast Guard and Brevard County sheriff's officers spent two hours searching it before concluding the call was bogus.

Scheduled to sail at 4pm, the vessel's departure was delayed until 8pm.

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Bullets found onboard Carnival vessel

Two .22 caliber bullets were found in the Carnival Celebration's lobby by a passenger debarking Thursday morning. The passenger turned over the ammo to the information desk, who told the ship's security officer, who informed Customs and Border Protection, who involved the Coast Guard. Embarkation was then delayed by an hour while authorities searched the vessel from stem to stern--finding nothing else out of order.

The incident occurred in the ship's homeport of Jacksonville, Florida, and authorities verified that all metal detectors there were operating properly.

The question of metal-detector sensitivity is a recurring one wherever they're deployed, whether in airports or cruise ports. It's a subjective judgement. They can't be set to detect any metal at all, else the rivets in jeans would cause delays and screening would take forever. So does it surprise us that two bullets could slip through? Not really. Just so long as whatever gun they go with didn't come along with them.

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Senior citizens from cruise fight off would-be muggers, kill one

A group of Caribbean-cruising senior citizens, including a former Marine, turned the tables on three armed attackers Wednesday, scaring two off and killing the third.

After arriving in Limon, Costa Rica, onboard Carnival Liberty, the twelve seniors set out together to tour the area with a van driver they had hired independently. After one of the would-be robbers, reported as Wagner Segura, 20, pulled a gun on the group, the seniors jumped on him and--according to conflicting reports--either asphyxiated him, broke his neck, or both. The other two muggers fled.

Then the plucky seniors put Segura's body on their tour bus, and delivered him to the authorities. Police didn't detain the cruisers, concluding that they acted in self-defense, noting that Segura was a known criminal.

Carnival Cruise Line reports that, after learning of the incident, they dispatched a ship's officer to assist their guests and escort them back to the ship. The cruise passengers all elected to continue on with their vacation.

Carnival also pointed out that this group was not on a ship-sponsored tour.

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Port of Miami security false alarms: two in two days

Two days in a row blaring headlines trumpeted possible terrorist activity at the Port of Miami, yet each case turned out to be much ado about nothing.

The cause of the first case? "Just miscommunication," say the authorities. And the cause of the second? A box of garden-variety sprinkler-system parts misidentified as plastic explosive by an electronic sensor.

On Sunday morning a man driving a tractor-trailer into the port, which handles cargo as well as cruise passengers, aroused suspicion when due to a language barrier, authorities thought he said he was alone, when in fact there were two other men with him. Did we mention that two of these men were Iraqi, and one was Lebanese?

In the end it turned out that the three are in the country quite legally and proceedings against them have been dismissed, but in the meanwhile the FBI, Immigration, Customs, Coast Guard, and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement were all alerted. Authorities peeked inside the trio's container using a high-tech device and concluded it contained what the manifest said it did: car parts. End of story.

Monday, a pallet bound for Royal Caribbean's Majesty of the Seas triggered a plastic explosives alert after being tested by an electronic device. The ship was evacuated, the suspect box was taken away and blown up by authorities, but in the end this too was a false alarm. The sprinkler-system parts in the box had meant no harm to anyone.

Given that we're all 46 times more likely to drop dead as a result of falling down than from a terrorist attack, according to Wired, we really wish that cooler heads would prevail at mainstream media outlets to wait for confirmation of suspected security risks like these--before going crazy scaring everybody with "terrorist alerts" as the press did this week with these incidents.

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Unnecessary security evacuation on Star Princess in Canada

Those sailing on the 2500-passenger Star Princess were forced to evacuate the cruise ship on October 4 while the crew and security officials searched the ship. The evacuation, which took place in the port of St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada, was called for after three suspicious packages and an unidentified man were seen aboard the vessel. But, nothing harmful was found on board and the ship departed after a three-hour delay.

The officials in St. John's do have past events to make them suspicious, though. In 2005, six Chinese citizens were found hidden oboard Star Princess when it docked at St. John's. In that case, the ringleader, Lin Zhou Zhang was sentenced to a year in jail for smuggling himself and the others into Canada with fake passports.

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Carnival Sensation detained briefly due to safety problems

Getting ready to cruise from Port Canaveral, Florida, on its first trip since housing Hurricane Katrina aid and government workers, Carnival's Sensation was delayed by seven hours to fix mechanical problems found during a U. S. Coast Guard inspection on Thursday.

The Coasties presumably gave the ship an extra-thorough going-over after the vessel's six months tied up to a pier on hotel duty in New Orleans. They discovered problems, for example, with some fire doors and watertight doors. The fire doors are located throughout the ship to slow the spread of a blaze and can be shut automatically from the ship's bridge. The watertight doors, much heavier and sturdier, are located only on the ship's lower decks and can also be closed automatically in the event of an emergency.

On the one hand, the problems were quickly correctable and the ship did sail on its planned itinerary. On the other hand, we can imagine heads may roll onboard Sensation due to the deficiencies discovered by the Coast Guard, as Carnival takes safety and security matters onboard its ships very seriously.

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