NASSAU, The Bahamas — What started as a blissful vacation turned into a nightmare for former Houstonians who booked a five-day cruise on a Royal Caribbean ship.
Emma Hess and her husband decided to take their two sons on a Royal Caribbean cruise after having such a good time on the boat for their honeymoon.
"On our first cruise, we went to Nassau and thought it was just so much fun so we thought we bring the boys out and give them the experience of a lifetime," Hess said.
It was instead a traumatic experience they would never forget after their excursion to a private island turned deadly.
Hess said she and her family joined a group of about 144 people onboard a catamaran to the private island. She said everyone was having a good time checking out the views of nearby celebrity homes and the boats in the marina when all of a sudden, the captain made his way into muddy waters.
"I would say we were about 2 or 300 yards from Blue Lagoon, the Paradise Island, and the captain started steering into large waves," Hess said. "We started taking on a little bit of water."
Hess, who is a Navy veteran, and her husband, who is active-duty Navy, didn't think too much of the water onboard the ship -- that was until water started making its way to the back of the boat.
"Then we started seeing people put on lifejackets, and everyone was panicking, and still in my mind with all of the training me and my husband have had, we were not freaking out yet because it didn't register that the captain didn't know what he was doing," Hess said.
She said when more people started to grab life jackets, her husband grabbed a few for her and their boys and then he started assisting other people onboard.
"There were a lot of elderly people sitting on the front of the boat and their families weren't helping them," Hess said. "So my husband goes to the front of the boat and he's pulling these older women toward the back of the boat and I'm screaming at everyone to move to the back of the left side of the boat because that's the side that was dipped up the most."
Hess said her husband described the incident like a scene in Titanic where the windows were completely underwater.
One of the people Hess' husband helped happened to be a 74-year-old Broomfield, Colorado woman who later died after the boat sank, though it wasn’t immediately clear how she died.
Hess, her family and the rest of the passengers and crew members were rescued. Two other unidentified people were taken to a medical facility, police said, but their conditions were not immediately known.
The cause of the sinking ship is still being investigated.