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Seattle Fishing Couple & Their Two Puppies Rescued From Storm By Cruise Ship

2009-11-16 VB - CruiseRescue
© Princess Cruises via KING 5 TV

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Seattle couple Christopher Miller and Brandy Meissner sold everything, bought a fishing boat, and were en route to Hawaii with their two dogs to start a commercial fishing business. That didn’t go exactly as planned, and instead of a placidly floating across the Pacific they hit a bit of a rough patch. And by “rough patch” we mean they encountered a storm that generated 40 foots waves, putting them and their 38 foot fishing boat in peril.

The upshot is that when the rescue team did appear on the horizon, it arrived in the form of Princess Cruises’s Golden Princess, one of the largest cruise ships on the planet. If we ever need to get plucked out of the ocean in the midst a bone chilling torrential downpour, we definitely want the ship doing the plucking to have a Lotus Spa, a gym, a fitness area and almost a dozen hot tubs. That just seems like good planning. Knowing how to prepare the dogs in preparation for a mid-sea water rescue – even better planning!

“You’d go up, up, up and then come crashing down,” said Meissner. They sent out a signal and the cruise ship “Golden Princess” came to the rescue. ‘They altered course and were on our position about 12 hours after the signal,” said Miller. The two got ready to abandon ship, but they weren’t the only ones on board. The couple’s two dogs, Romeo and Akilah, were with them. “We deployed our life raft, we put on our survival suits, the lifesaving equipment, put life vests on the dogs, taped up their paws really good,” said Miller.

The story is still ongoing, of course, since the couple still needs to track down what’s left of their boat. We’re given to understand that those things come equipped with all sorts of robust tracking devices, so fingers crossed.

In the meantime we know it’s the puppies you really want to see, so here’s another one. For more pictures you should go to the gallery that accompanied the writeup. All the pictures come courtesy of whoever was doing onboard photography for Princess Cruises, which is deservedly getting some earned media out of this.

2009-11-16 VB - CruiseRescue2
© Princess Cruises via KING 5 TV

Omri Ceren
Omri Ceren enjoys: solitary travel, magnificent ruins, ancient abodes, zoos, museums, urban photography, nature photography, plentiful wifi, vodka. He dislikes: people who talk on airplanes, people who are friendly in bars, people who strike up conversations at bus stops, people who stand too close in lines, people, people's children. He lives in downtown Los Angeles.

4 Comments

  1. Pingback: Tweets that mention Seattle Fishing Couple & Their Two Puppies Rescued From Storm By Cruise Ship -- Topsy.com

  2. What wasn’t mentioned in any of the rescue reports was that a 8-10 foot shark with 3-4 smaller ones followed the rescue pod as it was towed to the side of Golden Princess. The couple with their dogs had to jump from the fishing boat and swim to the rescue pod. They were lucky they weren’t fish bait.

    …and that’s the rest of the story.

    Reply

  3. We were on the cruise ship THE GOLDEN PRINCESS when the ship did the sea rescue of Christopher MIller, Brandy Meissner and their two dogs.

    We would like to know how they are doing after their rescue and if they were able to find and salvage their trawler, THE PACIFIC STAR.

    We got emotionally attached to this story as there was the search, rescue, ship interview televised to our room, and Captain David Calabreze”s crew rescue thank you and question and answer session in the main theater. We came home with the ship’s video copy of the rescue and rescue photos. We also took many photos ourselves.

    Our timeline of the rescue portion of our cruise is as follows. Just before midnight on November 12,2009 our chruise ship was notified by the Coast Guard that they needed to rescue people in a trawler boat at sea.
    We had just gone to bed at this time and our telephone began to make a series of soft beeping sounds, not a telephone ring. We found out the next moring that the phone beeps were a way to signal to all crew that sometning was happening and to be on alert. when we were a breakfast we noticed that the sun was shining on the starboard side of the ship and not on the port side. It was then that the Captain came on the intercom to inform us of the rescue that the ship need to perform. We had changed course at midnight and instead of going southwest to Hawaii from Los angeles we were now going northwest to rescue the boat. We got an update about every hour on the progress and the rescue was done after noon. The cruise ship dropped the couple off in Honolulu 2 days later, homeless. They had lost everything, the boat they were going to live on and make a tuna fishing living from and all their belongings.

    There was a full ship of people from all over the world who were touched by this rescue. Perhaps your newspaper could do a followup on this story and put it on the computer and send it to Associated Press for all-over publication.

    We have verification of all the info listed above if needed.

    Sincerely, Judi Strubbe

    Reply

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