Cruise Ship Slams Into Pier Due To High Winds [PHOTOS]

As I mentioned yesterday, our family vacation was loaded with fun, but we also dealt with some chaos.

On the second morning of our cruise, the ship was scheduled to dock in Nassau at 6:30am.  Due to extremely high winds, the crew was unable to complete this task until closer to 8:30am.

As the ship was in the process of docking something went horribly wrong.

Keep in mind that this was the ship's second cruise following a complete renovation.  There's nothing more enraging than scratching the paint and denting a new car.  This was basically what happened.

At 6:30am, myself and several other passengers on board woke to a loud crashing sound and found ourselves violently rocking back and forth.

Apparently, as we were churning in the 70 MPH winds, the line at the back of the ship (pictured above) snapped.  The back end floated across and slammed into the other side of the pier causing extensive damage to the Nassau port as well as our cruise liner.

Above you can see what the cleats at the Nassau pier are supposed to look like.  Below, check out a few pictures of the damage our ship did when we collided with the pier.

Typically, cruise liners can dock completely unassisted.  They can maneuver forward, backward and even sideways to properly line itself up.  After our disastrous docking attempt, tugboats were called in to assist us and our sister ship as it docked just hours later.  The winds were so bad that another cruise liner got stuck on a sand bar trying to dock.  The tugboats had to push it off the sandbar to allow it to finally dock after a long and tedious three hour struggle.

This was just the beginning of our second full day on the cruise.  Because not one, but twelve Fenechs were on board for this family vacation, you can be sure that much more craziness is on the way!