Atlanta-based band Radio Birds performs on the pool deck stage of the Norwegian Pearl.

On a music cruise, could there be anything better than discovering a great band you hadn’t heard before? Yes, helping that band annihilate a rival rock group in a shipboard soccer game in front of a cheering crowd.

That is where I found myself last month on the delightfully delirious Rock Boat XIV, which for this year’s edition conducted a daring experiment on the high seas. The excursion, a four-nighter from Miami to the Bahamas and back, sought to answer a question with implications for the entire travel industry: How many themes can you cram onto one cruise ship?

The Rock Boat is, of course, a music cruise first and foremost, but this year its organizers, the Atlanta company Sixthman, shook things up by also giving it a summer-camp theme. Passengers were divided into tribes — red, blue, green, orange, depending on cabin location — that accumulated points in goofy competitions. There was a door-decorating contest. There was a Battleshots tournament, similar to the game Battleship except that shots of alcohol were involved. There was a session of bingo renamed BRR-ingo because the number-calling was done by members of the Hartford band Bronze Radio Return.

And there was that soccer game, in which two bands from Britain, where they know something about soccer, squared off. It was the Dunwells, from Leeds, against Scars on 45, from Bradford, with a few lucky passengers chosen by lottery filling out the musicians’ teams. The game was played on the sports court on Deck 13 under a hot sun.

I got word by email that I’d be playing on the Scars on 45 team the morning I left New York for Miami, which gave me just enough time to catch up on the group’s music. It turns out that the band hits my sweet spot, playing smart indie rock built around the voices of Danny Bemrose and Aimee Driver, which blend perfectly. It also turns out that the members are darn good soccer players. (Bemrose and the bassist, Stuart Nichols, once played professionally.) We fell behind early, then scored four or maybe it was five unanswered goals. When I say “we,” I mean “people on our team other than me.” My contribution was to get through my time in the game without kicking the ball into our own net.

Scars on 45 was one of 32 bands on the ship, the Norwegian Pearl. The Rock Boat is among the more established of the many music cruises now available to vacationers, and XIV ran amazingly smoothly considering the logistics involved: 2,200 passengers, six performance stages, three bands playing simultaneously for much of the trip. The host band is Sister Hazel — veteran, versatile rockers from Gainesville, Fla. — and its members led by example, instilling a relaxed spirit of congeniality and exploration.

There weren’t many prima donnas among these artists. In an age when even midlevel celebrities hide behind entourages of security personnel and publicists, it was startling to be standing in the buffet line beside a guitarist from Collective Soul or hip-checking the drummer for Radio Birds in an effort to snag a vacant chair in a game of Boozical — yes, Boozical — Chairs. It was also startling to be in the mosh pit at one band’s show shoulder-to-shoulder with members of other bands. This cruise was an exercise in music appreciation, whether you were an ordinary passenger or a performer.

It should come as no surprise that the passengers on the Rock Boat, who paid $600 to $10,500, plus fees, included some gray heads; rock has been around for a long while, and people who were at Woodstock are now eligible for Social Security. But the age range on the ship — plenty of passengers in their 20s, the bulk in their 30s and 40s — was refreshing to see, as was the way the music melted away the age barriers of the everyday world.

My favorite discovery was Michael Bernard Fitzgerald, a distinctive young singer-songwriter from Calgary who seemed to have brought nothing more with him than an acoustic guitar and two sidekicks, Andrew Ball and Katie Stanton, to sing harmonies and provide eclectic percussive accompaniment. On the cruise’s second morning, I found myself trying the ship’s rock-wall climb under a 75-degree sun alongside Ball, and took the opportunity to ask him what draws an artist all the way from Alberta to a music cruise out of Florida. “It’s minus 20 in Calgary right now,” he said. Duh.

Anyway, we arrived back in Miami in a haze of good vibrations, which, unfortunately, didn’t last long for a lot of us. As we were disembarking, radiation emitted by a vintage compass in someone’s luggage — might have been from our ship, might have been from another, or from an incoming passenger — led to a shutdown of the Port of Miami terminal we were trying to unload into. We stood on the ship for three hours waiting to get off, and people went from being giddy from the cruise to frantically trying to reschedule their flights home. It would have been nice to hang onto the blissful cruise aura a while longer but, to borrow the title of a Sister Hazel song, life got in the way.