In the next six months, ~~four~~ three electronic music cruises—Holy Ship!, The Groove Cruise and the Mad Decent Boat Party (sadly ~~All Gone to Sea~~ just announced the trip is cancelled)—are heading into open water for extended runs of dancing and debauchery. But which party would prevail (if in fact the Brits didn’t pull out), should each ship hit rough waters? Let’s find out.

THE CONTENDERS

Mad Decent Boat Party

New this year, this event is the progeny of Diplo’s Mad Decent label, meaning that it will be a fully hedonistic pleasure cruise of yoked neon bros raging to moombahton and hordes of mostly naked women expressing themselves against any available sturdy surface. The bass-oriented Boat Party sails from Miami to the Bahamas November 12-16 and features a lineup including Big Gigantic, Flosstradamus, Dillon Francis, GTA, Major Lazer and, for extra flavor, Riff Raff.

Holy Ship!!!!

Produced by L.A.’s HARD events and now in its fourth year, this boat party takes a ship full of dedicated party people from, again, Miami to the Bahamas. Onboard, there are endless opportunities to rage insanely hard via a variety of themed events that go from dusk to dawn, as well as daytime beach parties that get super loose and hella sweaty. (We can personally attest that everyone onboard is a haggard disco zombie by the time this operation returns to shore.) The cruise is going out twice in 2015—in January and February—with two separate lineups featuring Skrillex, A-Trak, Knife Party, Baauer and many of the other usual HARD-world suspects.

All Gone to Sea

Dance world OG Pete Tong attempted to climb aboard the rave boat trend with All Gone to Sea, the would-be inaugural cruise incarnation of his popular All Gone Parties. Originally set to sail to Turks and Caicos for four days in November, the lineup was to feature Tong, Calvin Harris, Steve Angello, Nervo, Above & Beyond, and a host of other deep house and techno-oriented artists. Sadly, the tour has been cancelled. But for the purposes of this fantasy, we’re keeping them in the running!

The Groove Cruise

The original electronic music festival at sea, The Groove Cruise has hosted more than 15,000 people during its 10-year existence. The party sails from L.A. to Mexico on October 2 with a lineup featuring Morgan Page, Erick Morillo, Lee Burridge, and a crowd composed of (as The Groove Cruise website humbly states) “thousands of the most incredibly beautiful people on the planet.” These people will presumably be at least slightly drunk for the duration of the trip.

So, if all these parties were to compete in a variety of common cruise scenarios, who would sink and who would swim? Let us hypothesize:

Scenario One: Pirate Attack

The Pete Tong crew is immediately thrown overboard just off the coast of Grand Turk after refusing to hand over their expensive leather jackets and upscale luggage. (Steve Angello manages to get one final Instagram selfie out before he hits the water. It gets upwards of 300,000 likes.) The Holy Ship people are too hungover to put up a fight, and The Groove Cruise crew declares themselves too incredibly beautiful to be treated so poorly and are forced to walk the plank for being annoying.

Meanwhile, the Mad Decent posse has a natural affinity for their captors, themselves being fundamentally pirate-ish in nature. They join forces with the pirates, creating a beat-dropping band of marauders that plunders major booty in every port town it drops anchor in, which for Borgore is not that different from being on tour. Dillon Francis happily hosts a parrot on his shoulder while Riff Raff, who looked a bit like a pirate to begin with, seizes the opportunity to continue drinking copious amounts of rum.
The Victor: Mad Decent

Scenario Two: Bermuda Triangle

Holy Ship, All Gone to Sea and Mad Decent are all sailing through the fabled area of the Caribbean in which ships and planes have been known to go missing. Some theorize that these waters are populated by extraterrestrials. No one on Mad Decent, The Groove Cruise or all Gone to Sea are ever heard from again, leaving major holes in the DJ Mag top 100 and rendering Twitter virtually silent. Meanwhile on Holy Ship, Skrillex drops an especially aggressive set that exposes dubstep to actually be a sophisticated device for interstellar communication, at which point it is also revealed that Skrilly has been an alien among us all along. The party continues with no interruption.
The Victor: Holy Ship!!!!

Scenario Three: Stranded on a Desert Island

Much like the characters on Lost, The Groove Cruise crew immediately disappears into the forest, their perfect bodies and gorgeous faces evaporating into thin air, smoke monster style. Holy Ship attendees misconstrue the situation for another beach party and continue raging until all of the DJs’ computers run out of juice and a team led by Gary Richards and Busy P are forced to send up smoke signals in the shape of A-Trak’s fedora. The Mad Decent crew goes tribal, doing a massive twerk-off around a pile of burning CDJs, and Pete Tong is airlifted out via private jet and flown directly to his residency in Ibiza, leaving Calvin Harris to rule the island, Lord of the Flies style.
The Victor: All Gone to Sea

Scenario Four: Iceberg

Just like the string quartet that played as the Titanic went down, the folks on All Gone to Sea stay true to their hardcore club roots and play an extended set of deep house cuts as the ship sinks. There are no survivors. Diplo instructs DJ Snake to “commandeer his dingy” and escapes the situation with a gaggle of groupies in tow. The Groove Cruise folks alert the party photographer to get some shots of them in their life vests as the water rises around them and are all eventually found floating off the coast of Catalina Island. Ultimately, the only people left on Holy Ship are Pretty Lights and RL Grime, who cling to the back of the boat Kate-and-Leo-style before getting rescued by the Coast Guard and doing a trap remix of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On,” which immediately hits #1 on Beatport, with all proceeds benefitting the victims of the wreck.
The Victor: Holy Ship!!!!

Scenario Five: Viral Outbreak

Gastrointestinal bugs (read: debilitating diarrhea + vomiting) strike cruise ships on the regular. The Mad Decent people just assume that they’re especially hungover and carry on partying, although Flosstradamus’ set is cut short when both guys are forced to urgently flee to the bathroom. (Based off of this experience, they will create a subgenre called “crap trap.”) On Holy Ship, Laidback Luke, who has avoided the virus after sequestering himself in his cabin, goes to play his set and finds everyone vomiting off the side of the ship. Believing this to be a response to his sound, he gets very, very sad. On All Gone to Sea, Eats Everything laments eating whatever made him so damn sick, while The Groove Cruise crew is just stoked that the illness-induced weight loss has delivered them back to shore even slimmer and more incredibly beautiful than when they left.
The Victor: The Groove Cruise