ScribesWtr

Hi. We've been to CGB several times. Always very crowded when a ship is in and usually has waves breaking so don't be too disappointed if it isn't possible to snorkel. When we were in Tortolla last February, we went on a trip to 'Treasure Island' and the snorkelling there was great. Alan

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Hi Tartanexile81

In reply to your question "Where did you hear there was a fire in the engine room? We were told it was a fault in the electrical motor driving the propellor." , that was exactly what I was referring to.

During the early evening, the captain made a broadcast in which he mentioned that there was a problem with the port propulsion with smoke coming from the machinery. This was continuing despite the motor being turned off so presumably the crew had to deal with some sort of fire? As the propulsion is located in the general area of the engine room, that was what my previous comment referred to. Later on, he made another announcement to say that the windings on the electric motor had been partly replaced by the engineers, presumably because the originals had bunt away, but that the motor would only run at a lower power output. Hope that clarifies and confirms that we are largely on the same page?

For anyone reading this who is not aware of how the ships are propelled, Oceana and indeed most other ships are driven by electric motors which are supplied with their power by diesel oil type generators. These also supply all other electrical power to the ship.

I understand that the affected equipment was being replaced during the turn around in Southampton so hopefully, there will be no further recurrence in the near future. As I said in an earlier post, the ships are on the go continuously so in the end, technical problems will inevitably occur.

The chaotic boarding which I was referring to in my previous post occurred on 8th February. Oceana was not late in on that occasion although the weather was a bit rough. The problem on that occasion was definitely due to the 'new system' introduced last October, which was pretty abysmal when we boarded Arcadia on 10th October 2015 and no better this February. I have contacted P&O about this direct as the letter sent out by the Director of P&O stating how good the new system is, bears no resemblance to what has been my recent experience. It was much better under the old system whereby people were boarded as they arrived at the cruise terminal.

Oceana did arrive back much later than scheduled on 14th March but this was due to an engine room fire and the loss of the port engine for about 6 hours on the previous Saturday night in the South West Approaches. Because of this, those boarding for the cruise to the Canaries last Monday were all very much delayed as the arriving passengers didn't disembark until nearly 1330 on Monday (14 March). That was not the fault of the Southampton terminal but down to a fairly major technical problem, which as it turned out seemed to have been handles very well by P&O.

We returned from a 35 night cruise on Oceana last Monday (14 March 2016). The main issue we had from P&O was:

a. the very chaotic boarding experienced at Southampton at the start of the cruise which was delayed by over two hours for no apparent reason other than a very inefficient system.

b. our itinerary was changed with one of the overnight stops in the USA being reduced to a single day without any apparent effort by P&O to provide an alternative port call. This was put down to an administrative problem. Having booked the trip nearly two years before, this seemed to us to be a rather lame excuse.

The ship is indeed in need of some serious extra maintenance work as she, like most other cruise ships, is run continuously without any breaks for remedial work. There was lots of work being undertaken during the trip which did restrict passenger movement around the upper decks quite a bit.

The food, whilst not of a standard that you might expect at the Ritz, was generally very acceptable to us although there were plenty of people who seemed discontented with what was put in front of them. We prefer to use the dinning rooms rather than the cafeteria so can't comment on the latter.

However the thing which had the greatest negative impact on our cruise was the amazingly large number of passengers who continued to moan about most things to anyone who they could pin into a corner for a good ear bending. I think there are probably some of those on this forum as well!