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Matthew Sudders has been on plenty of cruises, but he'd never seen anything like this.
The civil servant from Paris was aboard the Carnival Paradise on Tuesday when he noticed
the ship had started to slow down in the middle of the Caribbean Sea. Then an announcement
came over the public address system: The captain had spotted a small boat in the water, and
it appeared to be in distress. The Paradise would try to help.
It appeared to Sudders that the cruise ship's captain was trying to shelter the small boat
from the waves. Once they were close enough, ship staff lowered a platform down to the
water and threw a rope and life jackets to the stranded craft.
Eventually, the 24 passengers from the boat, all of Cuban nationality, were able to board
the Paradise. They had been stranded for five days, according to an announcement on the
ship's PA system, said Sudders, one of two passengers who posted accounts of the rescue
on CNN iReport. "There was a huge cheer for the people as
they came aboard," Sudders said from Grand Cayman Island on Wednesday. But he noticed
a few of the cruise passengers were hesitant. Some of the people he stood next to on deck
referenced Capt. Richard Phillips -- the American freighter captain whose 2009 hijacking by
Somali pirates inspired an Oscar-nominated film -- hoping that the new passengers were
not a risk. He says cruise officials later informed him
that the new passengers would have been subjected to security screening as they were brought
on board. The ship was en route to Grand Cayman from
Tampa, Florida, when it stopped to aid the stranded boat on the first day of the cruise.