Cruise Ship Destroys Marina… Was This On Purpose?

We’ve seen before what happens when a massive cruise ship gets a little too close to, well, anything. It tends to leave a path of destruction in its wake, even when it’s simply trying to maneuver itself in tight quarters. In the video below, we get a great look at exactly what happens when one of these hulking vessels gets a little too close to a small marina while trying to ease through the tight quarters around the docking area.

While the boats below look very much like toys from the perspective of the guy who shot the video from high atop the cruise ship, rest assured these are very real boats that are docked in the marina. As the cruise ship approaches at an awkward angle, you can tell the guy with the camera is a bit uneasy with the whole situation as soon as the video starts. You can hear the wind noise pretty clearly throughout the video, and I’ve learned that it really doesn’t take a lot of wind to affect these huge ships due to their imposing vertical sides that catch the winds can be pushed sideways by even the slightest breeze.

Whether or not that’s what happened here, I can’t say, but it’s a theory to explain why the ship would be approaching the marina at such an odd angle, leaving the captain with no option but to stab the throttle and turn the engines away from the docked boats. Although it doesn’t look like that big a deal at first, the churning wash created by the cruise ship’s propellers quite literally washes away one wall of the marina, leading the boats freed to slam into one another. After a few seconds, our cameraman exclaims that one of them is even flipped upside down, leaving at least one boat owner without a craft to enjoy. From what we can tell, nobody was injured in the incident, so if there’s a silver lining to a cruise ship wiping out half a marina, I guess that would be it.