Sail Into The Sunset

Back in February everyone was captivated when the Carnival Cruise ship Triumph became disabled at sea and its passengers spent several days slowly being towed back to port without electricity or working bathrooms. It pretty much sounded like every person's idea of a vacation from hell and a huge embarrassment to not only Carnival but the cruise industry as a whole. Still, at least people who rely on cruise ships to make their living could take comfort in the fact that once the boat was back in a harbor and everyone got off successfully America would get quickly forget about it and move on, probably already sick of hearing about how awful it was from the person in their office who was on the cruise. (We get it, it was terrible. Seriously, hearing the story once was enough. It's partly your fault for going on the cheapest cruise imaginable.) But, even as Carnival tries to put the ugly incident in the rearview mirror the Triumph will not go quietly into the night. Last week it broke free from its moorings and began drifting back out to see, but not before running into and damaging other ships, injuring some of the people trying to repair it and causing one worker to go missing, presumed to be dead.

Look, I am not an overly-spiritual person and I don't believe in things like ghosts. That being said, this ship is cursed. Seriously, I don't know if Carnival brought this upon themselves by renaming the ship at one point (a big no-no in the boating industry) or if this thing is just possessed, but there is no way Carnival can send this boat back out into the open waters with a clear conscious. It has a taste for blood now, there is no telling what it will do. (I'm just saying that if it was a dog they would have put it down already.) It was already an iffy proposition to put the ship back in service because no right-thinking person was getting back on that boat, regardless of the deal offered. Carnival's only hope was that people booking the cruise had either forgotten the name of the ship which became a floating toilet or they never learned it in the first place. That's hard to do in this day and age because infamy lives forever online. Thus, I say they just sink it. It would be cheaper than dismantling it and better PR, because you can always turn it into one of those man-made reefs like they do with World War II aircraft carriers. Hell, tow it to the middle of the Atlantic where it can meet the Italian cruise ship which ran aground last year, maybe get a deal on demolition. The only problem is that word travels so fast I'm not even sure the fish would touch it.