The Guitarist, The Singer, and The Magician

Inspired by Max’s blog, ‘Old Steam Ships’ –
“MTS Oceanos: When the Entertainers Took
Command”. As in all my retellings of these
disasters, some events have been dramatized
but are based on facts I have researched.

The storm had been building all evening, the kind of winter swell the Wild Coast saves for ships that underestimate it. In the Oceanos lounge, Moss Hills bent over his guitar while Tracy sang beside him. Every time the floor tilted, the audience laughed a little too loudly. By the third song, half the chairs were empty.

Then the lights flickered and the engines died. In the sudden silence, Moss heard the sound of running feet. He caught Tracy’s eye across the microphone stand. They had spent years reading each other across crowded stages, and one look said everything. Stay here. I’ll find out.

Below deck, black water was climbing the stairwell, swallowing one step after another. Upstairs, cruise director Lorraine Betts told Moss the rest. The captain had ordered the ship abandoned, and some of the crew had already fled in a lifeboat. No alarm had sounded. Hundreds of passengers were still waiting for the band to start again.

Moss climbed to the bridge and found it deserted: chairs swinging, screens blinking at no one, rain lashing the glass. He lifted the radio phone and said the first word he thought of: MAYDAY! MAYDAY!

A voice crackled out of the dark. Who was this? What was his rank?

Moss looked at the empty post where a captain should have been standing.

“I’m the guitarist.”

While Moss begged for help, Tracy made the passengers believe help was coming. She moved through the crowd with blankets and a steady smile, tightening life-jacket straps on trembling grandparents and singing softly to children who couldn’t stop crying. Beside her worked Julian Butler, the English magician whose sleight of hand had dazzled the room the night before. Now he used that same easy patter to coax laughter out of terrified people. Comedian Robin Boltman and Lorraine’s team held the line too. For one long night, the entertainers were the crew.

At the stern, Moss found Captain Yiannis Avranas smoking a cigarette in the rain. “Two hours, maybe three; that’s all the time she has” the captain said. Beyond that, he was of no help.

Near dawn, the sky began to thunder as South African Air Force Pumas came in low over the waves, and navy divers dropped onto the slanting deck. The lifts began, one harness and one life at a time. The captain was the first lifted away to safety. So much for duty.

The ship leaned harder. People clung to railings on a deck that was becoming a slope, and below them the sea churned white. One slip, one fumbled harness, and someone would be gone. So Julian did something no magician had ever trained for. He led navy diver Gary Scoular to the Zodiac on the forward deck, and together they wrestled the little boat into a sea that wanted to smash it against the hull of the Oceanos. Gary took the tiller. Julian crouched in the bow, drenched and battered, scanning the waves for anyone who might fall.

Up on deck, Moss and Tracy ran the harness line. They calmed, buckled and lifted, then did it again and again for hours. Their hands were raw. Tracy’s voice was nearly gone.

At one point Moss pulled her close, rain streaming down both their faces. “Take the next one,” he said. “Please.”

Tracy shook her head. “We came aboard together.”

They stayed among the last dozen people on that dying ship. When their helicopter finally rose, they pressed against the window and watched the Oceanos tip onto her bow and slide beneath the waves. Far below, a small orange Zodiac rode the swell. Julian and Gary were still out there, still watching the water, and they would be the very last two lifted to safety.

All 571 people survived.

But the story doesn’t end there, at least not for Moss and Tracy. One shipwreck should be enough for any lifetime. It wasn’t.

In November 1994, Moss and Tracy were aboard the Achille Lauro (the same ship made infamous by the 1985 hijacking) when fire tore through her off the coast of Somalia. Once again they heard alarms in the dark and felt a deck that was no longer solid beneath their feet. Two days later, she sank too. That made two sinkings in just over three years. Most sailors never face even one.

And yet they went back to sea. Moss eventually became a cruise director himself, the man responsible for every soul aboard.

Sometimes the hero isn’t the captain at all.

Sometimes it’s the guitarist and the woman singing beside him.

NAR©2026

Nancy’s Notes: Captain Avranas and some of the crew were later convicted of negligence. Despite a Greek board of inquiry finding Avranas negligent in his handling of the disaster, he was never incarcerated and was given command of a ferry until his retirement. It’s by the grace of God that no one died.

This is “Oceanos” by Coast

This is “MTS Oceanos|Sleeping Sun” produced by Sinking Ships

^{Everything on The Elephant’s Trunk was created by me, unless otherwise indicated, and may not be used without permission. Thanks for your consideration. NAR©2017-present}