Emerald Princess Chases a Ghost Lifeboat Off Alaska
An orange shape bobbing alone at sea, no crew aboard, straight out of a maritime ghost story — except the ending actually makes sense.
Picture it: 8 p.m., July 18, the Alaskan coast, the light doing that eerie thing it does up there. The 3,090-guest Emerald Princess, mid seven-day round-trip out of Vancouver, is steaming from Endicott Arm Fjord toward Ketchikan when someone spots an orange object floating alone about 13 nautical miles southeast of Port Alexander. Then the captain comes on the PA to announce the ship is turning around to go investigate. Nothing says relaxing Alaska cruise like a sudden detour toward the unknown.
Enter the ghost lifeboat
The object was a lone lifeboat, listing on its side, caked in grime, the words “lifeboat” and “rescue boat” still legible on the hull. No people. No parent ship anywhere in sight. Guests — doing what guests do — promptly christened it the “ghost lifeboat” and started theorizing. Emerald Princess circled it for about an hour while the crew coordinated with the U.S. Coast Guard.
Why bother stopping at all? Because of SOLAS — the Safety of Life at Sea convention, born out of the Titanic disaster — which obligates every ship to check on any vessel that might be in distress. It's the same rule that had Carnival's Mardi Gras pulling nine people from a disabled boat off Florida back in May. Turns out the maritime version of “mind your business” is legally the opposite.
Mystery, solved
The Coast Guard eventually cleared the ship to continue. The lifeboat, it emerged, was a leftover from Morning Midas, a 46,800-gross-ton car carrier that sank in June 2025 after a fire — suspected to have started among the roughly 750 electric and hybrid vehicles aboard. All 22 crew evacuated safely into lifeboats exactly like this one and were picked up by a passing merchant ship. No ghosts, then. Just a very patient piece of safety equipment that outlived its ship by more than a year.
Emerald Princess docked in Ketchikan on schedule and was due back in Vancouver on July 21. File this one under “reasons the SpeakPipe line exists” — Tim in Australia, I need to know if a ghost lifeboat counts toward your ports-visited tally.