Real Survival Stories - Sinking Cruise Ship: Unlikely Heroes (Part 2 of 2)

Episode Date: March 28, 2024

We return to the MTS Oceanos for the second part of Moss Hills’s extraordinary tale. With time running out on the sinking ship, and in the absence of senior officers, the heroic on-board entertainment crew must step up to the plate. They will save the lives of the remaining passengers… or die trying… A Noiser production, written by Joe Viner. For ad-free listening, bonus material and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Click the Noiser+ banner to get started. Or, if you’re on Spotify or Android, go to noiser.com/subscriptions If you have an amazing survival story of your own that you’d like to put forward for the show, let us know. Drop us an email at [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn Ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's B-O-B at L-I-B-S-Y-N dot com. It's close to midnight on Saturday, August the 3rd, 1991. A tempest rages along South Africa's eastern cape. Three miles offshore, almost invisible in the darkness,

a luxury cruise ship lies half-capsized in the water. With the power out, the MTS Oceanus is illuminated only by her emergency lights. Hazy red beacons rise and fall with a monstrous swell. In the churning water below the ship, smaller flashes of white flicker and fade. Distress signals from the four lifeboats carrying 350 of her passengers adrift at the mercy of the storm. Though no one has seen it, somewhere out here is a fifth lifeboat. The first to leave, the only one with a motor, the one carrying many of the ship's senior crew.

Back on board the stricken liner, over 200 souls remain. The vessel is rolling too far to starboard to launch any more lifeboats, leaving them with little hope of escape. Most are huddled inside the lounge on the main deck, clutching blankets clad in lifejackets. In the absence of any senior crew to guide them, they must look to their unlikely saviors, a ragtag group of onboard musicians and children's entertainers. Bursting into the lounge comes 35-year-old guitarist Moss Hills. He has just been below deck. In one trembling hand, he clutches his video camera. His face is grave. He rejoins his colleagues, his wife Tracy, his boss Lorraine, and a pair of magicians, Robin and Julian.

He reports back what he has seen, what he has recorded. Just a few metres below them, there is water everywhere, flooding every passageway, filling every stairwell. The water's there, and you can see it coming down the corridors and underneath the doors of the cabins. And this is one of the passenger decks. Not only were we sinking, but we were already pretty much half sunk. Silence descends. What do they do now? pretty much half sunk. It's time for some answers. But when they get there, they're met by yet another horrifying revelation. Electronic charts flicker and lights blink on the control panel.

Instruments ping and a radio winds with static. But the bridge is completely deserted. The captain's chair is empty. The captain, the senior officers have abandoned us. There's nobody on the bridge. It's just us left. The severity of the situation and imminent danger does descend on you and you think, oh my word, how on earth are we going to get out of this? Ever wondered what you would do when disaster strikes? If your life depended on your next decision,

could you make the right choice? Welcome to Real Survival Stories. These are the astonishing tales of ordinary people thrown into extraordinary situations. People suddenly forced to fight for their lives. In this episode, we return to the Oceanus as she founders at sea. The race is on for Moss and his colleagues to find another way off the ship and save the passengers still on board. They'll have to risk life and limb, doing jobs they never dreamt of,

let alone trained for, if any of them are to survive the night. I'm John Hopkins from Noisa. This is Real Survival Stories. It's just after midnight. Moss, Tracy, Lorraine, Julian and Robin stare in utter bewilderment around the ship's abandoned bridge. I have never been on a ship where there's nobody on the bridge. It just doesn't happen. Even when you're in port, there's always an officer of the watch on the bridge, and usually more than one person. And we were really quite shocked. And you could still see

there's emergency power on the bridge. So you could still see the radars were going and you could see various electronic things all happening and little lights flashing and things going on. But we didn't have any idea what to do. All of us just suddenly realised, that's it. It's just us. We are now in charge of this rescue. Moss looks through the spray-flecked window of the slanting foredeck below. How long do they have until they're underwater?

Hours? Minutes? Turning their focus to the dashboard, the five entertainers try to make sense of the equipment, that they could just figure out how to use the radio. We don't know how any of this equipment works, but I guess we need to try and find out so we can start trying to make radio calls. Let's try and figure that out. And so that's exactly what we did. We didn't know what

frequencies we were on and we didn't know how to change any of the frequencies. So we just thought if we just call on the radios and just keep calling Mayday Mayday, eventually somebody will answer us. Moss and the others take turns firing out calls, praying somebody hears them. The minutes pass as they await a response. And then suddenly, a voice crackles through the static. It's a nearby freight ship. Moments later, a second ship responds. We tell the person on the end of the call that, look, we've got an emergency situation. And one of the times when I was on the radio, they'd ask me, OK, how many hours do you think you've got left to float? And we didn't know how long. We were just saying, well, look, the starboard railings are almost in the water now

and we know that all of the lower decks are completely flooded. So we could have, you know, 30 minutes. We could have five hours. We just don't know. And then they asked, well, you know, whereabouts are you? What's your position?

And we'd said, well, we're about halfway between the port of east london and durban and the person on the radio one of the captains of the other ships had said no no no i need your coordinates and and i'd said well i don't know what our coordinates are and he was sort of saying well what rank are you and i said well i'm not a rank i'm a guitarist there is a stunned pause as the freight ship skipper digests this information moss tries to explain there's no sign of their captain and senior officers have already abandoned ship there are nearly 230 people still on board and another 350 on the water in lifeboats. The radio falls silent again.

When the freight captain does finally respond, he says he'll contact other ships in the area immediately to come to their aid. They should be able to deploy their own lifeboats to collect the Oceanus' remaining passengers. But before he can do anything, he needs to know the sinking liner's exact location. Moss looks helplessly at the others. The ships that we were in contact with were asking questions that we just didn't quite know how to answer. And although they understood now that it was just entertainers on the bridge they were saying you know go and get the captain most likely the captain is still somewhere on board

moss hurries off to look he flinches from the lashing spray as he navigates the slick sloping decks he grabs hold of whatever anchor points he can find. The stanchion here, the guardrail there. The liner is rolling a little less now, but she's listing at a steeper angle to starboard. More and more water must be pouring in, pulling her down. Moss checks with the passengers and crew sheltering in the lounge. Nothing. There's only one other place the captain could be.

The pool deck at the aft of the ship. But when he gets there, all Moss finds is a jumble of toppled sun lounges and deck chairs. He's just about to head back in when he notices a pair of dim orange lights flaring in the gloom. He looks closer. There, under a stairwell, he sees a faint puff of smoke. I found the captain there with one of the other officers and they were sort of underneath kind of an outdoor stairway that goes up to a slightly higher deck that looks above the pool. They were sort of underneath that, in the dark, in the shadows, smoking.

And initially I was quite relieved and I thought, OK, I've found the captain. And I said to him, look, Captain, we've got some rescue ships on the radio. Can you come to the bridge and help us? And he was sort of just smoking, looking at me with this blank kind of vacant stare. And he was just saying, it's not necessary. Moss looks at him in disbelief. Not necessary.

But the skipper just stares out into the void, still puffing away. Moss looks at him in disbelief. Not necessary. But the skipper just stares out into the void, still puffing away. Moss tries to reason with him. I was saying, well, can you just come there and we'll talk on the radio, you tell us what to say. And he was just smoking and looking at me with this this blank stare and just saying no it's not necessary and I realized then that I think he just the sheer weight of responsibility and he just become overwhelmed by the situation and I think he just lost it. In spite of everything, Moss feels sympathy for him. The captain's lack of action is not deliberate, he is simply paralysed with shock.

And you know you can't sort of blame someone for that really because until you're faced with that situation you don't know how you'll react and I think he's an example of what can happen if you do let the situation overwhelm you because he was incapable of doing anything he was just sitting there and just whatever happened would happen he just was incapable of being able to deal with it i remember thinking then that's it he's of no use to us whatsoever we are definitely in charge and we're just going to have to do what we can moss returns to the bridge without the captain but there is some good news the others have managed to figure out their g GPS location and have transmitted their coordinates. The freight ship captain on the radio has connected them with two other vessels in the area.

Moss looks out of the window. Red navigation lights blink distantly on the horizon. Help is finally at hand. The idea is that these rescue ships will send over their own lifeboats to help finish the evacuation. But still, without the requisite expertise on board the Oceanus, nothing is going to be straightforward. Those captains on the bridge of those ships tuned to the same frequency we were on

so that we could sort of all communicate. And they were saying, we'll send you the lifeboats. Which side of the ship do you want us to send them to? And then you'll have to winch them up so you can put people into them. And we said, well, we don't know how to work the winches. What do you mean winch them up? And they were saying, well, that's the only way you can get into them. You can't jump off the side of the ship.

It's many meters. You can't jump into the lifeboat. You'll just be killed. You need to do something. And we said, well, we don't know how to operate any of the equipment. And they would say, well, then we can't send you the lifeboats. It's agonizing. They can see the lights of their would-be rescuers. They can hear their foghorns

blaring in the dark. But in these conditions, the vessels can't come any closer without risking a collision. And the lifeboats are useless if they can't be winched up. They'll need to find another way. Then a question comes through the radio that seems to echo around the bridge like a gunshot. How long does the Oceanus have before she goes under? Well, there's only one man on board who can answer that. Moss sighs and heads back to the pool deck. He finds the captain where he left him.

Moss asks him the same question. The captain takes a drag, slowly exhales and shrugs. Finally, he says, two hours, maybe three. Moss rushes back up to the bridge to share his findings. And then they said they're going to try and organise for helicopters to come and get us, but the helicopters have to come from a far distance. So they had to organise helicopters to fly from towards Cape Town area. So it's several hundred miles away from where we were.

They had to fly up to where we were in the dark. And we just had to sit and wait for the helicopters to come. And that was a difficult time. There was literally nothing we could do. We just had to hope the ship would hold on and not sink underneath us. It's almost four o'clock in the morning. It's hard to tell in the pre-dawn gloom, but it feels like the storm is abating. For those in the lifeboats on the water, it must be a blessed relief. But for those still on board, the grim fact remains.

In mere hours, it will be at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. While Lorraine goes down to update the passengers, Moss and Tracy head out onto the bridge wing, an exposed platform that overlooks the foredeck. It is a rare moment of calm amid the chaos, and the first chance husband and wife have had to take stock together. Tracy and I go onto the bridge wing and we're just sitting there, huddled together on the

bridge wing, and there's nothing to do. Your mind is playing now and we're just thinking to ourselves and talking quietly and realizing the ship is sinking we could go down with this ship and that would mean that our daughter Amber will be without parents we'll be gone lost at sea and she'll be orphaned on her own and we're kind of talking quite intensely but just very quietly to each other there and just saying, look, at least one of us has got to survive. Tracy and I have an incredible bond. She's an amazing woman. And we just decide there's no half measure.

So we're not having one of us survive. We are both surviving. We are getting through this. And, you know, there's no way Tracy will leave me and there's no way I'll leave her. We're going to stick this through to the end and we're getting off this ship. with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn Ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's B-O-B at L-I-B-S-Y-N dot com.

6.30am. Still on the bridge wing, Moss and Tracy watch as a ribbon of pink appears at the base of the horizon. Dawn has arrived. And with it, salvation.

The first sort of bits of sunlight, the kind of fingers of dawn are starting to come on the horizon and we see the helicopters coming towards us and they're silhouetted against that early dawn glow and we're thinking, fantastic, this is it. Here come the people to rescue us. And not a moment too soon.

The ship has continued its slow, angled descent underwater. The starboard railing is now completely submerged, with waves breaking fully across the slanted foredeck. The port side sticks into the air at a 45-degree angle. They can't have much time left. An hour? Less? Within minutes, three Navy choppers are hovering directly above them. A figure is lowered from the first, a diver,

his black wetsuit boldly outlined against the morning sky. But as he gets closer to the deck, it's clear something is wrong. The lower he gets, the longer the cable gets, the more the effect of the wind is blowing and he starts to sway from side to side, swings out and then it's like a pendulum swinging back and then the wind blows him back out again, he swings back. So that as they're lowering him, as he gets closer to the deck, he's swinging so far and so fast, he just can't land.

The storm isn't done with him yet. He needs help. I left the bridge wing and went down to the foredeck down there and found some rope. I tied it around my waist, and I tied it around the port side railing so that I could then hang on the rope and go out onto the open deck. Because if I did it without the rope, I would just slide down the deck and into the starboard railings and over the side because the water's washing over the starboard railings.

Like a mountaineer scaling a ridge line moss edges sideways along the raised side of the deck he gives the rope a couple of firm tugs and then planting his feet against the wood he lunges for the legs of the diver he can't reach moss signals for the chopper to lower him, but there's another problem. An overhead cable runs from the bridge to the bow. It's blocking the diver's descent. I remember looking up at the helicopter and then out of one of the side doors, I see a head come out looking down at me

and a guy sticks his arms out and he's holding a big pair of bolt cutters. And he's looking down at me and he's moving the bolt cutters, opening and closing them, opening and closing them. And then he's pointing to the cable and I'm thinking, okay, he wants me to cut the cable with the bolt cutters.

So he kind of signals me to move out of the way the cable with the bolt cutters. So he kind of signals me to move out of the way. He drops the bolt cutters from the helicopter and I quickly slide down my rope, grab the bolt cutters as they're sliding down the deck before they slide over the side and into the water. More members of the entertainment crew have gathered around the port side railing. As Moss hauls himself back up the rope rope he hands the bolt cutters to a colleague another brave soul called into action by circumstance we gave the bolt cutters to the boutique manager a guy called ronan who was managing the the shop on board he climbed up onto the roof of the bridge and went to cut the cable and get that out of the way

and finally got that done and then climbed back down again. Unfortunately, he really badly hurt his ankle. I think he broke his ankle on the way down because he was in real pain and basically couldn't do anything else after that. But Ronan has more than played his part. With the cable out of the way, the helicopter can finally lower the diver

to the deck. He is swiftly followed by a second. And eventually the two Navy divers get down. And I remember just a few minutes of, it was really quite strange, just we're hanging on the port railing, looking over at the waves crashing there and the navy divers are asking me right what's the situation over the roar of the wind and the rotors moss spells it out there are 228 people sheltering in the lounge and on the pool deck water is already two meters high in the dining room, just one deck below them. The diver nods, calmly considering this, before delivering a devastating response.

And the Navy diver said, right, we don't think we can get everybody off. And that was a little bit of a shock, and they said, we're just going to get as many off as we can, but there's so many people there's over 200, we can only take 12 in each helicopter and then we have to fly to the shore

offload them, turn around fly back get in position and load the next ones this is a very slow process time is one thing they do not have. If the captain's prediction was accurate, then they'll be under within the hour.

People are going to die. They can only do their best. They decide to run two airlifts at once. One at the front of the ship, the other at the back. The third helicopter will step in each time the others return to land. But they also need a backup plan. If anything goes wrong, people will end up in the water. It's clear that the divers can't manage all this alone.

One of them, Paul Wiley, said he will run the aft airlift. And the other Navy diver, Gary, said he could see a small, rigid, inflatable boat, a Zodiac, in the bow. He said, I'll launch that boat and I'll go in the water and keep in that boat so that if anybody falls out of the helicopter harness or if people start to panic and jump off the side of the ship, I can pick them up and quickly take them out to the waiting lifeboats. Julian, one of the magicians, went with him and the two of them launched that and got into it.

So now we had a Navy diver in the boat and Julian there, but that meant nobody to run the forward helicopter airlift except me. It's 7am and the sun is shining on the sinking cruise ship. After a mere five-minute tutorial on how to run a helicopter airlift, Moss stands in position. Tracy shepherds a hundred or so of the remaining passengers to the forward end of the ship, or what remains of it. Moss signals to the circling chopper, they're ready. The helicopter doors swing open and two ropes slither down. Moss reaches out and grabs them.

He beckons for Tracy to send over the first two passengers, a young couple. Moss helps them into the harnesses just as he was shown. He makes sure the straps are high under the armpits and flat across the back. Then he flashes the signal to the pilot, bring them up. Two down, 112 to go. Moss sends up another 10 before the pilot signals that the helicopter is full. The doors slide shut and it swoops off towards the mainland. As the next helicopter gets into position, Moss waves to Tracy, keep them coming.

He is beyond exhausted, and he's in charge of a highly technical operation of which he has zero experience or training. It's a miracle no one's been hurt yet. It's all a question of timing. As the ship lists from side to side, Moss must signal the chopper to reel in the lines at precisely the right moment. Get it wrong and the passengers will crash into the metal railings and stanchions above. Tracy sends forward two elderly ladies. Moss straps them into their harnesses, and he signals above. I mistimed it, and as I signalled the helicopter to pull these ladies up, as they pulled it up, the wave hit the ship, and the railings hit the legs of these ladies and made them start the pendulum swing immediately.

And they swung out over the water, The wind grabbed them and they started swinging again. And then they started swinging back towards the ship. And the waiting people waiting to get rescued could see this. And these two ladies were just helplessly hanging on this long cable, swung out over the water. And then the wind just blew them back straight into the bridge wing. And they just smacked into the side of the bridge wing. And they just hung there sort of limply in the harnesses and I just thought I just don't know if I can do this because I think

I might have just killed two people and I remember just sitting down on the deck and with my back to the port railing and just looking down that steep deck into the water which was kind of washing over the starboard railings and just feeling this kind of swell of of sort of conflicting emotions kind of panic in a way of oh my god you know if if i kill someone you know this is this is serious over where the passengers are assembled, you can hear cries of alarm and then distant splashes. In their panic, some people have started jumping overboard. Moss is paralysed. He doesn't know what to do.

Then he hears his name being called from somewhere overhead. We still had one of the magicians on the bridge, Robin, and I remember him coming onto the bridge wing and shouting down to me, Mars, Mars! And I looked up at him and he had a small carton of fresh orange juice signalling he was going to throw it down to me. So he threw it down to me and I remember just stopping,

opening it up and just drinking it and just calming myself and thinking, right, fine, I'm okay. And remember just, you know, after that five-minute break or whatever, just getting back up again and thinking, right, let's get back into this. I have a job to finish. As the sun rises high in the sky, the rescue continues at pace. Nearly half of the Oceanus is underwater now.

A mast, funnel and antenna protrude diagonally from the surging waves. Their precious minutes are dwindling. But somehow, they've almost done the impossible. Two by two, the passengers are lifted to safety, while those that leap or fall into the water are quickly retrieved by Gary, the Navy diver. They're now down to their last 12 passengers. We were almost at the end, and filled up a helicopter, it left,

and another helicopter did not come in to replace it. There was no helicopter and we thought, now what's happening? We've still got people left. And we waited and sort of minutes ticked past and there was just no helicopters anywhere around the ship. And we were thinking, I wonder if they've made a mistake and they think that everyone's gone. And we were really quite concerned and thought,

what on earth is happening? Fresh waves of panic spread among those left on deck. While Tracy does her best to keep everyone calm, Moss scans the cloudless sky. Where are they? The ship's bridge is still above water, just. But most of the bow is gone, leaving the aft deck sticking up out of the sea. The sound of groaning metal and rushing water grows louder as the final moments approach.

Surely, after all they've done, this can't be how it ends. Then Moss hears it. The helicopter circles overhead, but no harness drops down. Moss squints up at the rescuer on board. He's trying to tell him something. They were giving me a new signal. The guy was holding his hand out and putting his fingers up one at a time, sort of, you know, one finger after the other.

And I didn't know what that signal meant, but I figured maybe he wants me to count everybody because he was putting one finger and then the next, then the next. So we counted everybody. We had 12 passengers, plus Tracy and me and Robin on the bridge. Moss holds his fingers up to the chopper. Message received. The rescuer gestures frantically towards the rear of the ship. The Oceanus is almost entirely under.

In the very last stages of her slow-motion nosedive into the waves, Moss and Tracy take the remaining twelve passengers and climb up to the ship's stern. The helicopter winches up the last guests to safety. Soon, only one passenger is left. Pete Neiman, who has been helping with the evacuation, stays back with Moss and the last of the crew to await the final pass. Very quickly, we got those 12 people off.

Then the next helicopter came. And then it was just us rescuers left. It was just me Tracy Robin the magician and the Navy diver and that was it and Pete Niemann so then we put the harness on ourselves we got hoisted up and that was it. You know, and suddenly we thought, it's over. Moss feels his feet leave solid ground. And he is airborne. Safely stowed inside the helicopter,

he turns for one final look at the Oceanus. And then looking down at that ship, the enormity of that situation and the seriousness of it, I can remember it just kind of engulfing me. I was thinking, I can't believe how this ship is almost gone. And as the helicopter flew away, it flew across the side of the ship, and I remember looking down at that ship and thinking that's my home that's where we live you know our our cabins there my guitars my saxophone

keyboards everything is there my video equipment our life is there and it's under the water. The helicopter approaches the shoreline. As they come into land, a stirring sight reveals itself below. The rescued passengers are sitting in rows on the grassy headland. They're wrapped in thermal blankets, heads resting on the shoulders of loved ones. Naval officers stride amongst them with clipboards, checking everyone's present. Even the two ladies who collided with the bridge wing

are safe and sound, though a little shaken up. When Moss, Tracy and the others emerge from the helicopter, they are given a hero's welcome. They did it. Somebody must have told them it was the last helicopter because as it landed and we started getting out, people started getting up and just running towards us and they were all kind of waving and shouting and just smiling

and they all started singing, he's a jolly good fellow and this sort of thing and it was really emotionally overwhelming. You know, and I remember somebody saying to me, is everybody off? And I was saying, yes, everybody's off. It's finished. And at that point, I just don't know why, but my legs just gave up. I just collapsed.

It was awful. And I couldn't get up. I just couldn't get up. I just couldn't get up. Not only were all the remaining passengers safely airlifted from the Oceanus, but all 350 who fled in lifeboats also made it to dry land. They were collected by the waiting freight vessels and carried to shore. That there were no casualties is truly remarkable. But in the days and weeks that follow the sinking,

a different kind of storm develops. As headlines emerge about the unlikely heroes of the story, it doesn't take long for rumors about the captain and his senior crew to surface. They quickly become cast as the villains there was this brewing scandal if you like of people talking to the press and saying well we didn't see the captain doing anything oh we the magician was doing this and the cruise director was doing that and the guitarist and moss and tracy and and the cruise director was doing that, and the guitarist, and Moss, and Tracy, and...

and the press were asking people, well, who are these people? Oh, these are just... this is the entertainers. And they were saying, but where was the captain? And it started to then gain momentum, and it was in the press quite a lot, well, what's happening? There's a lot of negative press about the captain and the officers abandoning us, and eventually this culminated quite quickly in an outcry for a proper inquiry in the course of the investigation the truth comes out about the captain's whereabouts during the sinking after leaving the bridge unattended, it transpires it was also one of the first to be airlifted from the ship.

In fact, one of the Navy divers testifies that the captain insisted on being prioritized over his passengers. The captain himself maintains that this was so he could help coordinate the evacuation from land. The government inquiry eventually rules that the captain and his senior officers were guilty of negligence. Moss also comes to learn of the circumstances that led to the sinking. A series of freak waves had caused a leak in the liner's sea chest, a vital cavity that takes in seawater used for cooling and ballast. A safety valve would ordinarily be shut off to prevent the engine room from flooding. But, as misfortune would have it, an engineer had recently removed that valve for repairs.

From there, water slowly, inevitably, breached the bulkheads and spread throughout the ship. You couldn't close off the safety valve because it wasn't there, and there was just water would flow down that pipe and into the big water holding tanks, which are right in the front of the ship in the bow on the starboard side, which is why the ship started to pull over to the starboard and eventually nosedived and went down vertically, bow first, because of that huge weight of water that was in there. And the more the water came in, the heavier the ship got, which caused more pressure, and even more water came in.

Eventually it started to come up through all of the crew basins and showers, and it was just unstoppable. Why those crucial repairs were being done while at sea, during a storm, is another bone of contention and another topic of debate. Moss and Tracy are just happy to move on with their lives. With the help of their loved ones, they soon get back on their feet. A friend organises a fundraiser. With the proceeds, the couple buy new instruments, new clothes.

Before long, they are back at sea, performing. Whilst I believe I'm a very positive person, I'm also an incredibly logical person and to me there is no logic in thinking I can't work on a ship again, you know it's too dangerous. No that's not the case. There was an incident that we were involved with but ships fundamentally is probably the safest form of transport on the whole planet. Certainly safer than driving around in a car. You compartmentalize it and think, okay, that happened there. We dealt with it.

Now we move on. I'm not going to change my whole life because of one incident. I'm going to carry on. I'm going to live my life the way I want to live it. And I like working as an entertainer on cruise ships. And so we carried on. More than 30 years on from the disaster, Moss is more involved with the seafaring industry than ever.

He's a cruise director. It's his job to keep the guests happy and entertained while on board, a role he's well suited to, whatever the weather. None of us are invincible, and I don't think I'm invincible. And for sure, things can happen that you can't control. But I think the key thing is, in your own mind, just think positive. Think, I'm going to do my best. I'm not going to give up. If I fail, it's not going to be because I didn't try. I'm going to try my best to get through everything

that this world and this life throws at me. In the next episode, we meet Ted Porter. Descending a remote glacier, a whirlwind of an accident leaves him severely injured and trapped inside a deep fissure in the ice. With no hope of rescue, there's only one way out. He'll have to climb. Ted is about to discover an inner strength he never knew he had. That's next time on Real Survival Stories.

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