Cruise Ship Stuck In St. Lawrence River Ice

What would you do if your cruise ship got stuck in the ice on the St. Lawrence? Well according to one passenger, they are trying to make the best of a bad situation: "It's a 24-hour party on board."

Under normal circumstances, when a boat gets stuck in the ice on the St. Lawrence River, the Canadian Coast Guard sends in an ice-breaker. After the CTMA-Vacancier cruise ship got trapped on Monday afternoon in what is being described as "a massive blanket of ice", the Coast Guard sent in their ice breaker the CGCS Terry Fox. Now it appears that the Coast Guard's ice breaker experienced trouble moving around in the ice and it too is stuck. There is a third ship, a freighter called the George Alexandre Lebel, that has been stuck since Sunday afternoon as well. All told, there are approximately 500 people on board the three ships stuck in the St. Lawrence ice just outside of Matane, Quebec. The passengers on the cruise ship were sailing from Montreal to the Gaspe Peninsula where they were planning on cross-country skiing in the Chic-Choc mountains. James Gray is a documentary filmmaker who is stuck on the ship, says the vista around them is "stunningly beautiful" and is shooting lots of video of the passengers adventures.

This morning I was up just to see the sun coming up over the ice. And now there's this fog coming up and there are cracks in the ice right now which are just starting to form and there's this mist coming up and it's backlit by the sun. It's beautiful really,

It's absolutely an incredible experience. I think it's a historic moment to be on a passenger ship stuck in the ice on the St. Lawrence in the middle of winter. It's about -40 Celsius outside right now.