The Truth About Cruising During a Storm (7 Days at Sea)

When I embarked a 12-night cruise sailing from the UK in December I knew that I was taking a risk. I don't normally do cruises that include more than a couple of sea days because I do get seasick but this cruise was scheduled to spend six days at sea. We actually ended up having more than that because of the bad weather and I was not prepared for how rough the seas could be. Our cruise was meant to start with three days at sea and we were sailing through the Bay of Biscay. The Bay of Biscay is notorious for bad weather but if you're cruising from the UK to the Canary this is pretty much the only way you could go. I really just hoped that our sailing would be calm. I asked you guys recently if you'd cruised through the Bay of Biscay and the weather had been bad. 57% of you said that yes you had experienced bad weather there which may sound like a lot but that means that 43% of you didn't have any bad weather. I've cruised through there before and the weather's been fine. I was quietly confident that it would be fine. Too confident. When we set sail we very quickly settled into life on board. We ate a lot of good food. We watched some good shows. I drank a lot of Pepsi Max and for the first couple of days the seas were relatively calm. I've been at dinner on cruise ships before where we have sailed away during dinner and none of us have noticed. I used to cruise as a child and we would often play bar billiards in the pub. It was very very very occasionally that the ball may roll slightly to the side. We never put it down to the movement of the ship though. We would just say it was a ghost or something like that. I was 11 on my first cruise. When we woke up on the third sea day of our cruise we really just expected it to be like the first two sea days. The captain did make an announcement quite early in the day saying that we would be encountering some bad weather. As soon as I heard that I took my travel sickness pills. I've cruised enough to know how magical those travel sickness pills are. There's a couple of brands that I like and they do make me feel a bit sleepy but apart from that I don't have any other side effects. My seasickness definitely comes from my dad and he suffered a lot more than me on this cruise. Me my mum and my brother went off in the morning. We went to a lecture in the theatre and then we went on to lunch. Unfortunately dad was not feeling well so he spent a lot of time in his cabin. Our cabins were located at the front of deck 15 and you really could feel the movement in our cabins a lot more than the rest of the ship. My plan was to just dose myself up with the travel sickness pills and then stay as far down in the ship as I could. My dad's been on plenty of cruises and he said this was the first cruise where he's ever been repeatedly physically sick. Not nice. Another family member was also feeling seasick so only half of us made it to dinner that day. It was formal night but I decided not to wear heels. It was getting quite difficult walking around the ship. It wasn't as if you would be walking along the corridor at 45 degrees. That's what I think some people think cruise ships are like. It wasn't like that but when you were walking along the corridor you would occasionally get a bit of a power up and then it would be harder to walk. When you're walking up the stairs sometimes it would be super easy and sometimes it would feel like you were climbing up. It was a strange feeling. Our cabin was on the same deck as the buffet so we would often walk across and pick up some bread rolls and plain foods for our seasick family members. We would also while we were there often pick up a second pudding. Your Britishism of the week is the word pudding. Here in the UK pudding and dessert are pretty much interchangeable. I have used it that way in past videos and received a few confused comments. I would always say what are you having for pudding instead of what are you having for dessert. Pudding doesn't have to be a traditional pudding. It could be chocolate cake. It could be ice cream. Anything you'd have for dessert that's pudding. One thing that I never got used to was the way that the doors would sometimes swing open and swing closed. This happened a lot in the public toilets. Of course not if you're using the toilet and you've locked the door but if the door is just between open and closed it would sometimes just creak open and then bang shut. A very common cruise complaint that you'll hear from cruisers who cruise during bad weather is that they heard things crashing around. They heard doors banging. Luckily we didn't really hear anything like that during our cruise. I did spend quite a lot of this cruise asleep. My travel sickness pills do make me feel sleepy and if you're feeling seasick being asleep is better than being awake and feeling seasick most of the time. The swimming pools were closed because the movement of the water did make it very dangerous. If you think about a swimming pool inside a cruise ship even the slightest movement gets multiplied and it can make big splashes. That's why cruise ships have these kind of overflow areas. They kind of expect the water to slosh around a bit. We were cruising on P&O's Ventura who is the sister ship to a lot of the princess ships. One of the reasons I love P&O and princess cruise ships is because they have a lot of swimming pools and I do like to swim when I cruise. I think about 50% of the time during this cruise the swimming pools were closed and I never did get to go swimming. If the cruise ship had water slides if it had ropes courses those things would have been closed too. It's not uncommon for a lot of the outside spaces to be closed off when it is rainy when it is windy. They don't want people slipping or being blown over. During our cruise the promenade deck was often closed off and some of the higher decks. The main smoking area was right beside the main pool so there's no way that they could close off that area but this part by the pool is kind of enclosed so it was fine to be there. We were meant to see the theater team perform but it wouldn't have been safe for them to dance and sing on the stage so this was substituted with a lady called Laura who was singing. Laura had the most amazing dress on and underneath her dress she had trainers. Another British isn't for you, their trainers are sneakers. It wouldn't have been safe for her to try and sing in heels so I think it's very sensible that she did wear trainers. The day wasn't ideal but we knew that we were scheduled to dock the next day. You can deal with one day of seasickness on a cruise but we would say to each other oh well at least we'll be on dry land tomorrow. How wrong we were. At this point in our cruise two of the six of us were bed bound feeling really seasick. I was not feeling fantastic but I was feeling okay and three of us, three people, were feeling completely fine. It's so strange how seasickness just doesn't affect some people and if that is you I'm very very envious. You have a superpower. Sleeping definitely was difficult that night. When you were laying in bed you could feel yourself kind of rolling side to side in some ways and I imagine if you're not seasick that is quite nice being rocked to sleep. But for me who does get seasick I just wanted to close my eyes and be asleep and wake up when it wasn't moving anymore. It was around 3am but I saw lightning from our cabin. I pulled back the curtains and sat and watched it for a while. There is something amazing but very very terrifying about storms at sea. Storms at sea in the middle of the night unlike anything else. I am not a morning person at all so I wasn't awake when we tried to dock in Madeira. The first I heard of it was when the captain did an announcement into all of the cabins saying that he had tried to dock, he couldn't do it, it wasn't safe to do and that we would just be sailing for the day. Some of my family members were awake so they did see us try and dock in Madeira. We got incredibly close to Madeira before they decided that it wasn't safe. I've been on cruises before where we've missed ports due to bad weather but normally this is a few hours at least, maybe a day in advance. I've never got right there and then left before. The interesting thing with this storm was that it wasn't in the Bay of Biscay. We cruised fine through the Bay of Biscay and then hit the storm as we came out of it which I think just goes to show that bad weather can happen anywhere. This is another reason why it's very important to get cruise travel insurance. My travel insurance gives me a fixed cash lump sum for every port that we miss so although we missed the port and I did want to get off, at least I had that to look forward to. I haven't got it yet, the claim is submitted but fingers crossed I'll be getting that soon. If you need to know anything about travel insurance including how to get a policy with this cover, check out the guide on my website. It has step-by-step screenshots, all of my recommendations, everything about travel insurance. I started my C&A by trying to film some footage in the cabin. It was quite difficult when the doors of the wardrobe would open and close as I stepped away from them. All of my clothes in the wardrobe were clinking around, the curtains were swaying. I'm not too sure that I'll be able to use any of this footage because the cabin just looks haunted. Next we went on to the theatre to watch the movie Elf which is the best Christmas movie of all time. We were on a Christmas cruise and we were spending Christmas day at sea. I hoped that Christmas day wouldn't be a rough day. I can't really think of much worse than feeling seasick on Christmas. You're supposed to eat a lot and drink a lot and be merry on Christmas, not be in bed feeling seasick. The ship was decorated with these amazing Christmas decorations and Christmas trees. You would see the decorations kind of swaying back and forth, sometimes vibrating with the movement of the ship. Anything that's on the cruise ship that is big and heavy will be securely fastened to the wall and sometimes they'll have extra things like these little chains just to make sure things don't fall over. The next day we did dock and it felt amazing to be back on dry land. I knew though that we had the sea day on Christmas and also that we would have to go back up where we came from. There's only one way to get back to the UK and that was cruising through the Bay of Biscay again. On Christmas day we were sailing between Lanzarote and Lisbon and I was still taking my seasickness pills because I didn't want to risk feeling seasick on Christmas day. We did actually run out of seasickness pills on this cruise which is something I've never considered before. Normally if I get seasick it is for a day, if a bat, but we had many many days where lots of us were taking seasickness pills. We ended up buying them from a place that you may not expect which was the reception desk. Sometimes on cruises they'll give out seasickness pills for free at reception. On P&O they cost £3 for 10 and it was more than worth it. I'm very happy to report that Christmas day wasn't anywhere near as rough as the days before it. I did go outside briefly to take these photos but apart from that it was very much an indoor Christmas. I didn't know it then but at this point of our cruise we had seen the last of our sunshine but we hadn't seen the last of the storms. We spent boxing day in Lisbon and then had two sea days to get back to the UK. Stopping in Lisbon meant that we didn't need the three sea days that we needed coming down so I hoped that two sea days would be all right. When we were in Lisbon the captain did an announcement and he mentioned the storm that was brewing in the Bay of Biscay so of course I was thinking here we go again. The captain said that we would delay our departure just to try and miss the storm and kind of sail behind it. We originally meant to leave Lisbon around 6pm but this was postponed until 11pm to try and miss that storm. We did then have a medical emergency so we didn't end up sailing away until around 2.30 in the morning. We were out on the balcony waiting for the sail away and kept thinking it'll be another 10 minutes, another 15 minutes. 2.30 in the morning we sailed away. Never seen anything like it. I hoped that our late departure would mean that we would miss most of the bad weather. We actually didn't book this itinerary, we didn't book this cruise and I don't think that I would have. The original cruise that we booked was a northern Europe cruise that didn't have more than a couple of sea days but that cruise was cancelled and it was replaced by this itinerary. We thought Christmas in the Canary Islands, that sounds absolutely amazing, let's do it and I'm glad we did but I don't think I would pick an itinerary like this again. My dad did start to feel a bit better during the last sea days. I took my mum and my brother to the specialty restaurant Sindhu but dad still wasn't feeling well enough to join. If you are feeling seasick it's definitely a good idea to avoid big meals or anything that's too greasy. Avoiding alcohol definitely helps too if you can. I had a glass of champagne on the first day on my cruise and then I didn't drink any more alcohol again. I definitely think that's one of the reasons why I felt better on this cruise than I have on other cruises. I have been more seasick on other cruises in the past even though this was by far the worst weather I've had on a cruise. Green apples and ginger are supposed to help too. The green apples just kind of take that sicky feeling out of your mouth and ginger is just nice especially if it is in kind of a biscuit form. Despite the bad weather we did have a brilliant Christmas cruise so find out how that went and what we had for Christmas dinner. Check out this video next.