Three months after the start of a three-year voyage, this cruise ship has still not set sail

Villa Vie Residences' ship Odyssey was scheduled to embark on the first voyage of a three-year round-the-world cruise on May 30, but instead was stuck in rainy Belfast for the past three months while the crew attempted to resolve mechanical issues.

The cruise line was “shocked by the scale of the effort required to bring a 30-year-old ship back into service after a four-year layup,” Sebastian Stokkendal, marketing manager of Villa Rie Residences, said in a statement to the Associated Press.

While work continues to secure the ship, activities and meals will be offered on board during the day, but passengers in the Odyssey's 509 cabins will be disembarked each evening and taken to local hotels.

Those who paid six-figure sums for the experience (many of whom intended to live on board), Full-time for the ship's expected lifespan of 15 years, at least if they can actually set sail) have kept themselves busy in the meantime. Self-proclaimed “cruise addict” Holly Hennessey has visited the Irish sights – again and again: “I've been to the Giant's Causeway twice,” she said The Daily Mail“but the best part of the trip was the stop in Bushmills,” by which he meant the Irish whiskey distillery.

Hennessey, who was also interviewed by the BBC, travels with her cat, Captain the Cruising Kitty. She did not say how Captain deals with the delays, but we all know that cats are very particular about schedules.

As well as visiting the city's many pubs and making friends with locals, others have used their free time to visit destinations near and far, from Greenland to the Canary Islands – some of these trips are organised by the cruise line. One passenger has even found time to return home to Australia (twice) while waiting.

Mikael Petterson, CEO of Villa Vie Residences, told the BBC he expected the Odyssey – whose name is becoming more ironic by the day – to set sail soon. “When you're the first to do something, there are always problems,” he said. “But we're definitely making progress and even though we're late, we're going to launch.”

(Petterson was previously CEO of Life at Sea, a cruise line that last year canceled plans for a similar, multi-year round-the-world voyage.)