Students on Battered Ship Reach Shore
A Semester at Sea research vessel with about 700 college students aboard limped into Honolulu Harbor on Monday, five days after a 50-foot wave tossed the ship around in heavy seas, damaging three of its four engines and injuring two crew members.
The wave broke furniture and computers on the ship, and students were forced to sit on the floor for classes for several days after the incident Wednesday morning.
“Everyone’s calmed down,” Becca Leonard, a 21-year-old junior at USC, said Monday after the ship pulled into port. “Most people have been happy it’s finally sunny and are glad to be going to Hawaii.”
The 591-foot Explorer, with 990 people aboard, was about 650 miles south of Adak, Alaska, when the wave struck around 5 a.m. Wednesday. Adak is in the Aleutian Islands about 1,300 miles southwest of Anchorage.
“Everyone was in their rooms when it happened,” Leonard said. “No one had slept a lot because of all the waves. We were falling all over the place.”
Semester at Sea is a University of Pittsburgh-sponsored study-abroad program for undergraduate students. It is designed to give them a more global perspective.
Students from about 250 colleges and universities were on board.
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