It's about 5:30 in the evening, you're napping on the NOORDAM ( a 5-star cruise ship of Holland America) after a long walking tour through Toaramina, a hill top town in Southern Italy. An hour later you are being thrown off the ship, into the Mediterranean. It is dark and you are being sent from the Noordam, asked to jump from a hole in the bowels of the ship, through the waves, onto a small boat run by 3 Italian men with whom you cannot communicate one word (they don't speak English and you don't speak Italian). You are at sea an hour in the small boat before you arrive in a remote section of Calabria. Again no one speaks English. You don't know where you are or where you are being taken. Think this could never happen? NO. A bad dream? NO. It happened to us, just a couple weeks ago.
Our cruise was billed as a twenty (20) day Mediterranean Adventure, sailing from Civitavecchia, Italy, on September 14, 2008, on the m.s. NOORDAM. We were thrown into the Mediterranean Sea by Holland America officers about 7p.m., September 26, 2008. We had sailed about an hour out of Sicily and were cruising the straights of Messina toward Turkey.
The story starts as my husband Barry had a cold. The runny nose made our walking tour of Touramina Sicily that day a little uncomfortable. Barry has high blood pressure and the ship's store did not have any over the counter cold pills he could take, so he went to the ship's doctor for something to stop a runny nose. The doctor gave him an "inhaler" that was much too strong. He had a severe allergic reaction. The nurse gave him the anti-dote and in about 2 minutes he was fine. The entire incident played out in about 15 minutes. That's when the nightmare began.