According to Cruise Industry News, Spain Based Pullmantur Cruises’s Atlantic Star has been sold. The buyer at this time is undisclosed, but what is known is the ships new name: Mona Lisa II. The Laid up vessel has had its fair share of incidents in the past. Most of these stem from faulty machinery. See the list from our CruiseWiki after the break.
January 2005 – Pacific Sky was due to begin a scheduled cruise off the Indian coast, but could not sail after a swarm of jellyfish blocked a cooling water intake. The engines had automatically shut down, leaving the vessel stuck fast at its Brisbane River berth. The shutdown also triggered the automatic dumping of vast quantities of distilled water used by the ship’s boilers – and a fresh supply had to be trucked.
April 1, 2005 – P&O Cruises was forced to cancel another two Pacific Sky cruises to allow extended work on the ship’s troublesome starboard gearbox. P&O Cruises said the two-month layoff would lead to the cancellation of five cruises but was confident problems would have been fixed in time for its scheduled June 4 cruise.
March 7, 2006 – Hundreds of passengers on a seven night cruise were left stranded for about 30 hours after the vessel broke down in the Malacca Strait near Singapore. About five hours after leaving Singapore the ship experienced problems with its starboard engine and came to a halt with more than 1300 passengers on board. Crew tried to fix the problem but were unsuccessful.
January 18, 2007 – Early in the morning, the Sky Wonder with 1600 passengers ran aground on a sandbar in the Rio Plata, 3 kilometres from the port of Buenos Aires, Argentina. There were no injuries other than a heart problem suffered by a 50 year old male passenger, who was treated ashore. The ship was freed by tugboats at high tide several hours later, so she could reach her destination of Punta Del Este, Uruguay.
March 25, 2008 – Sky Wonder once again ran aground whilst attempting to berth in the Turkish resort of Kusadasi. The port was experiencing moderately high winds and choppy seas at the time. One of the tugs in attendance malfunctioned, and subsequently control was lost, allowing the vessel to drift towards the shore. According to unverified rumours, Sky Wonder’s reverse gear was out of order at the time. Shortly after drifting, she grounded at the entrance to the adjacent marina. The local tugs were unable to move her, with one almost capsizing and throwing a number of her crew into the water in the process. Assistance was requested from the nearby ports of Izmir and Bodrum. Help arrived the next day in the form of two similar tugs, however, these too proved insufficient, with all attempts at recovery being unproductive. After lying in a precarious position for more than three days, only some fifty metres from the rocks at the entrance to the marina and one-hundred metres from the shore, the Sky Wonder was eventually pulled to safety in the early hours of Saturday March 29, 2008.