Three days after enduring a wild ride in rough seas fired up by 125-mile-per-hour winds, the battered Royal Caribbean ship and its 6,000 people aboard docked in Bayonne, New Jersey.
Royal Caribbean, facing scrutiny after the ship sailed into a storm in the Atlantic, apologized to passengers in a statement sent shortly before the ship docked, saying "we have to do better."
For roughly 12 hours, passengers of the Anthem of the Seas had hunkered down in their rooms Sunday as the captain of the cruise ship battled rough seas off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.
"It was horrendous," passenger Maureen Peters of Southampton, Massachusetts, told CNN after disembarking. "At one point, I thought I wasn't going to see my family again. I held on to the mattress so I wouldn't fall off the bed."
She said it was her first and last cruise. "That boat should have never gone out," she said.
The nightmare included four hours when the 1,100-foot long ship was at a 45-degree angle, according to Justin Scerbo, another passenger who was leaving the ship.
Royal Caribbean said the ship suffered "superficial damage" to some public areas and cabins but has been repaired and will go back out on its scheduled itinerary next week.
The cruise line said the storm the ship encountered was much worse than predicted.
"If we knew that we were going to have those kinds of winds, the winds that we actually experienced with the ship, we would not have sailed into that. No. Absolutely we wouldn't have (left port)," Bill Baumgartner, the senior vice president of global marine operations, told CNN.
Four minor injuries were reported, the cruise line said.