Lelitza Ford stepped off the Norwegian Dawn cruise ship yesterday to sing the praises of concrete.

“I’m about to kiss the ground,” she said. “Thank you, Jesus.”

Ms. Ford, 24, had been with her church group aboard the Norwegian Dawn when a wave 70 feet in height slammed into the bow of the 965-foot ocean liner early Saturday morning, less than 200 miles off the Carolina coast. The ship had been rocked at sea all day.

Ceiling tiles fell. Signs went askew. The tops of tables came off their bases and slid across the seventh-floor restaurant where Ms. Ford and a friend, stomachs lined with steel, grabbed a late night snack. Nothing stayed on shelves. Hot tubs on the 10th floor at the bow splintered, the shredded parts cascading onto the decks below. Their windows shattered, 62 cabins flooded. Four passengers were injured. At least one fight broke out.

The stories did not give confidence to Brian Mahoney, 34, and Debbie Trombetta, 41, of Monroe, Conn., who entered the terminal for their maiden voyage on a cruise ship just as the boat’s passengers were leaving. Ms. Ford offered a few reassuring words.

“It’s put a little fear into us,” Ms. Trombetta said. “We didn’t cancel. We’ve waited too long for this.”

The act of nature that caught up the Norwegian Dawn is called a rogue or freak wave, because it rises out of the water without warning. It was no more mysterious for Ms. Ford and her fellow congregants than it was for oceanographers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The underlying conditions, the combination of northward gulf stream and a southward air current, contributed to the rough weather and relatively small waves of between 25 and 50 feet.

“The wave is what we would consider a freak or rogue wave because it was outside the expected range. What caused it is under-studied,” the chief of operations at NOAA’s Ocean Prediction Center, David Feit, said. “Five years ago, we wouldn’t talk about rogue waves, we’d just say they are part of folklore.”

Ms. Ford and the 2,000 other passengers who traveled on the Norwegian Dawn can attest to the reality of freak waves, as a consortium of European scientists did last year. In a study of the little-known natural phenomenon, the group, the European Space Agency, calculated that such waves occur fewer than 10 times a month throughout the world.

Since nearly 70% of the earth’s surface is covered by oceans, the chances of being hit by one eludes quantification, Mr. Feit said.

“What we’ve learned is that this certainly deserves a lot of study,” Mr. Feit said. “As of now, it’s just not forecastable. It’s not the sort of thing we have the capability of talking about.”

A travel agent specializing in cruises, Robert Burke, who owns Red Sails, a Manhattan-based agency, can count on two fingers the times when such freak waves hit cruise ships in the past: The SS United States was hit by a 60-foot wave during a 1960 trans-Atlantic crossing and the Queen Elizabeth II was struck in 1992.

“They got whacked with a 90-foot wave,” Mr. Burke, who has been on 300 cruises without incident, said. He calls cruises the safest form of travel.

An editor at the Web-based magazine and online forum CruiseCritic, Carolyn Spencer Brown, counts three victims this year alone, including the Norwegian Dawn. A rogue wave sent a ship headed toward Japan back to Hawaii in January. A few weeks later, a cruise ship got hit in the Mediterranean.

“I don’t care if you’re 200 miles from the coast of Carolina, you are out on the sea and you absolutely cannot control the weather conditions,” Ms. Brown said. “And if you’re not comfortable with that, you shouldn’t be on a cruise ship.”

After speaking of the awful time she once spent at sea in the midst of a hurricane, Ms. Brown, who said she has been on 90 cruises, vowed: “I’ll always go back.”

For better or for worse, the wave has drummed up interest. One Web posting, written by a guest on the ship hours after the wave struck, attracted 32,000 hits.

Other Internet habitues posted their concerns, including skepticism that the crew could so quickly clean the flooded cabins.

About 300 passengers got off the cruise ship when it pulled in for an emergency docking at Charleston, S.C. The other passengers continued northward Sunday, buoyed by free drinks and promises of 50% off the cost of last week’s and their next cruise.

Calm waters awaited them in New York Harbor when the ship pulled into its slip on the Hudson River yesterday morning.

Standing outside the boat terminal off the West Side Highway and 55th Street, passengers relished the telling of stories that would make many a classmate or colleague green – with seasickness for most, with envy for a thrill-seeking few.

“It was like being on a rollercoaster,” one passenger, Ann Augusta, said. “The captain handled it perfectly.”

An executive vice president of fleet operations for the Norwegian Cruise Line, William Hamlin, praised the actions of the crew and the captain, who told him he hadn’t seen a wave like this in his 17 years’ experience.

The cruise line is assessing the cost of the damage, and a Coast Guard investigation – standard procedure when a ship gets damaged at sea – is under way.

Another passenger, Jennifer Gandolfio, 21, was in bed on the ninth level, where the wave hit and blew out the windows of cabins a few doors to the fore. She watched the wall of water on a TV monitor in her cabin. In the lobby of the ship, passengers vomited and grabbed their life preservers, though they were not told to do so by the captain.

In the rooms where the wave crashed, the water’s force bent beds out of shape and swept passengers to the door. One passenger, Jimmy Cina, 14, said a woman staying in one of the hard-hit cabins saw the flooding in her cabin and thought her husband had broken the toilet.

For some, unscathed, the experience was an adventure money couldn’t buy.

“I had a blast,” another passenger, Cindy Spohn, 36, said. “In fact, I booked another cruise.”

Emboldened by the safety of shore, the tales at sea had already begun to look tall.

A 9-year-old, Joshua Johnson, stood next to a 5-foot-tall fish that bore a close resemblance to Nemo from the animated film “Finding Nemo.” Rumor had it that Joshua had won the toy animal at Universal Studios during the ship’s docking, pre-wave, at Port Canaveral, Fla., a short drive due east of Orlando.

His mother, Marcella DeSandies, 52, had another version that explained the fish’s presence. “It came over with the wave,” she said.