There's more of everything on Royal Caribbean's Oasis of the Seas - the biggest cruise ship ever built - including a lot more problems for the crew to work through. On June 2, Discovery Channel's Mighty Ships documentary series leaves the warships, freighters and fishing trawlers behind to sail with Oasis of the Seas on its maiden voyage last December. The documentary goes below decks of the five-star hotel that floats and that can carry about 6,000 passengers.
No wonder the crew is stressed out. Cameras capture the traffic jam of food and supplies (such as 47,000 bottle of booze, 10,000 rolls of toilet paper) that the Fort Lauderdale deckhands are trying to get on board, and quickly. The stevedores are harassing them - they need time to load the 15,000 bags of luggage before the ship sets sail.
Once Oasis -five times bigger than the Titanic - is at sea, cameras spend more time on the bridge, where Captain William Wright brags about the propeller power, the extra nine metres of width to his ship that keeps it on a very even keel. "This is the most stable ship - not just cruise ship - the most stable ship that I have ever been on board. She has amazed us," he says. We watch him manoeuvre the mothership in and out of some tricky docking situations, and then deal with the potential disaster of engine failure en route. He keeps his cool in every situation but one: When passengers are late getting back on board after a day in Nassau. A ship that cost $1.4-billion to put into service can't afford to be off schedule - It has thousands of passengers waiting to get on board for its next sailing.
Mighty Ships airs the Oasis of the Seas episode on June 2 at 8 p.m.ET, 10 p.m. PT on Discovery Channel.