"I was playing on a cruise ship in Alaska and we were getting
towards the end of the set. The ocean was completely beautiful and very,
very calm; the water was like marshmallow.
We were playing some nice quiet jazz ballads and all of the sudden,
without any sort of warning the whole cruise ship tilted over by 10 to 15
degrees. I was playing a pink baby grand piano and the
whole stage, including the piano, started rolling down towards the end of the
window and I thought I was going to fall out of it! Basically the whole cruise ship was a complete
wreck because everything started falling over.
It was quite bizarre. There were
no waves at all, completely tranquil ocean, you couldn’t imagine a flatter sea
and then all of the sudden the piano started sliding over while I was playing
it. I thought, shock horror! What’s going on? We’re all going to die! We’d all had a few cocktails by then as well,
it was really late. Most of the audience
had already gone to bed, but there were a couple of people left and they
started screaming. It was tilting like
this for fifteen minutes. We didn’t find
out til the next day what had happened. As
it turned out an engineer had had too much to drink and had pressed the wrong
button. He’d turned the stabilisers off.
They’re meant to keep the ship horizontal, it was so ironic because it’s one of
those moments you just couldn’t believe, we’d actually been commenting on how calm
the sea was and then that happened!" (Craig Stallwood)
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