The Cruise Ship’s Anchor Chain Started Racing Out on Its Own. Then Something Rolled Over in the Water
A cruise anchor chain story from the Bahamas: the chain roared out, the bow tipped forward, and something huge was swimming away with the ship.
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Brenda had been on the bow of the cruise ship for less than five minutes when the anchor chain beside her started screaming. Not rattling. Screaming. Heavy steel links were tearing out of the hull at full speed in a shower of rust and sparks, while the ship sat perfectly still in the turquoise water of the Bahamas. Within fifteen seconds, the bow was tipping forward, and Brenda’s phone camera caught the reason why.
A Perfect Morning at Anchor
Brenda, 58, a retired school secretary from Ohio, was on the cruise she had been saving for since before the pandemic. She wore a flowered sundress and a new straw hat, and she had gotten up early specifically to film the white-sand island off the bow before the tender boats started running passengers ashore.
The ship was anchored in shallow, glassy water. A few passengers were sipping coffee at a small table near the rail. The windlass, the giant machine that holds and hauls the anchor chain, sat quietly to her left. Brenda says she remembers thinking it looked like something from a museum.
Then, at the three-second mark of her video, it exploded into motion.
“Get Back From the Bow!”
The chain began roaring out of the hawse pipe, the opening where it runs down through the hull to the anchor. Each link is roughly the size of a dinner plate. They were moving so fast that they blurred, and the friction threw rust and sparks across the deck.
A crew member named Andre, in his thirties, wearing a white uniform and an orange safety vest, sprinted over from the other side of the deck and threw his weight onto the brake lever. You can see him lean on it with both arms. It doesn’t matter. The chain keeps racing, and Brenda’s video shakes because, she says, the whole deck was vibrating under her sandals.
Then the bow started to dip.
It’s subtle at first. Then the coffee cups on the nearby table slide off and smash. On the lower deck, passengers begin to shriek. Brenda leans over the rail and points her phone down at the water. The chain is pulled tight at a sharp angle, slicing through the water toward the open sea. Not straight down to the anchor. Sideways. As if something were pulling it.
In the last three seconds of the clip, out in the turquoise shallows, a massive dark body rolls over at the surface. The chain is wrapped around it. And it is swimming away with the ship.
“Get back from the bow, everybody back!” Andre yells, just before the video cuts.
What Happened to the Bow
Brenda didn’t stop filming because she wanted to. She stopped because Andre grabbed her by the arm and pulled her toward the door to the interior.
According to passengers who later described the next few minutes, the bow dipped far enough that the water line on the hull disappeared under the surface at the front of the ship. Deck chairs slid. A crew announcement came over the speakers telling all guests to move to the stern immediately. The ship’s horn kept sounding in long blasts.
On the bridge, the captain made a decision that probably saved the ship from serious damage. The brake couldn’t hold the chain, and the chain was attached to something that was not going to stop. So he ordered the crew to release the “bitter end,” the very last link of the chain, which is fixed inside a compartment deep in the bow called the chain locker.
Two crew members went down into the chain locker while the remaining chain was still thrashing through it. One of them later described it to a passenger as “standing inside a blender.” Using a sledgehammer, they knocked out the pin that held the final link to the ship.
The chain whipped out through the hawse pipe and was gone.
The bow sprang up so hard that passengers at the stern felt the entire ship rock backward. Glasses fell in the bars. People screamed again, and then, after a few seconds, everyone started to clap.
The Chain Was Never Found
The ship’s engines started, and the captain moved the vessel out of the shallows into deeper water, where it held position without an anchor for the rest of the day. Shore excursions were canceled. Passengers were told only that there had been “a mechanical issue with the starboard anchor.”
But hundreds of people had been on deck, and many of them had seen the same thing Brenda filmed.
The twist came three days later. A local fishing guide on the island told passengers from the next ship in port that a fisherman had found a long section of heavy anchor chain lying on a sandbar nearly six miles away from where the ship had been anchored. The anchor itself was missing. Several of the links, he said, were bent outward, as if they had been squeezed. And the paint on them had been scraped down to bare metal in wide, curving bands.
No one has offered an explanation for what could drag several hundred feet of ship’s chain six miles across open water.
“I Know What I Saw”
The only injury that morning was a sprained wrist suffered by Andre when he was thrown off the brake lever. Brenda later found him on the last night of the cruise and thanked him for pulling her inside. She says he only nodded and said, “I’ve worked on ships for eleven years. I’ve never seen anything like that. I don’t want to see it again.”
Back home in Ohio, Brenda says people keep asking whether it was a whale caught in the chain. She just shows them the last three seconds of the video and asks them how big the whale would have to be.
“It rolled over,” she says. “It was darker than the water and longer than the island looked. And it wasn’t panicking. It was just leaving. It took the ship’s anchor with it like a souvenir.”
She has already booked her next cruise. She says she plans to watch the island from the stern this time.
What do you think was on the other end of that chain? Would you ever stand on the bow of a ship again? Tell us in the comments.
