Passengers home from the Anthem of the Seas said waves as high as their windows are not what they were expecting.
Veteran cruise ship passenger Deena Abbate said, "I like the calmness of the water, the rocking, gentle rocking."
There was nothing gentle about the rocking aboard the Anthem of the Seas, with 4500 passengers aboard the Royal Caribbean cruise ship when it hit the storm Sunday. Passengers had been ordered confined to cabins but that was wild too.
"The suitcases came out from underneath the bed," she said. "All we could do was sit or lie down on the bed, because you really couldn't even stand up. It was quite rocky, quite harrowing."
She said the damage was primarily cosmetic. The toppled furniture and broken glass was cleaned up but she never did get to warmer weather.
The ship came under the Verrazano Narrows Bridge Wednesday night, back to Bayonne.
That was the end of the line for William Gibbs and his wife. They didn't wait til morning to go home to New Haven. She went to the doctor she was so nervous and stressed.
"I really thought that was it," he said. "I've never seen anything like that."
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" I would get on a boat again," said Cris Digovanni. "I'm just not sure with young children at this point in time...."
He and his wife Lauren and son Josh were in an elevator when the storm rocked it to a stop. They had to crawl through a three-foot-wide space to get to their cabin, where relatives had their three-year-old daughter.
"Cece took a nap during the longest and most hard part of the storm and Josh for the most part was very very upbeat through the whole process," he said.
Digovanni said the ship's captain was doing damage control, talking with passengers, on the last day of the trip to the Bahamas turned trip to nowhere.
"He saved us once we were in that situation but I think the consensus among passengers on board was, should we have been in that situation?," he said.
"I would probably get on a boat again at this point."
Royal Caribbean is giving passengers their money back plus fifty percent of what they spent will be good toward another cruise, within a year.
