The Truth About What Happens When a Guest Jumps off a Cruise Ship

in an average year around 25 people will fall overboard from cruise ships that might sound like a lot but given the almost 30 million people that cruise per year if you're taking a cruise your chances of falling overboard are less than one in a million it does happen though so cruise lines have to have processes in place to deal with it i experienced the processes first hand in 2009 i was taking a cruise on the norwegian sky and a man fell overboard it was around 3am that we were woken up by the captain making an announcement into all of the cabins and all of the public areas onboard the ship the announcement initially just said oscar oscar man overboard it definitely isn't normal for a captain to make an announcement in the middle of the night into the cabins but they were hoping that anybody who could may look outside and hopefully increase the chances of finding the man many cruise ships do have detectors that show if somebody has fallen overboard automatically the norwegian sky didn't have any detectors like that but fellow guests did see him fall overboard we found out later who that was and what had happened that led up to the man falling overboard the captain also mentioned that we would be doing a sharp turn and we would be doing a kind of zigzag pattern to look for the man usually if you're on a cruise ship at night you won't feel much movement you may feel a slight vibration sometimes things will creak or clatter slightly but you wouldn't expect to feel a cruise ship turning in the middle of the night we were sailing to the bahamas from miami at the time we were only taking a really short cruise so there were four of us in an inside cabin i have to admit when i heard the announcement at three in the morning it really didn't sink into me everybody who was on their balconies went straight out to have a look for this man but i was left in a kind of weird dreamlike state i wasn't really sure if it was real or if i had dreamt this the chances of being found alive after falling off a cruise ship are around 25 we knew that the fact that he had fallen off at night made it less likely the chances of finding him were slim but not impossible in 2008 a woman fell overboard from a cruise near croatia and she was in the water for 10 hours before she was rescued this isn't a normal situation but it does go to show that you can find somebody alive even if they've fallen off a cruise ship hours ago that's why they searched for so long the first thing that happens when the crew gets a report of a man overboard is that they log the exact location where that has happened cruise ships are normally sailing around 20 knots which is around 25 miles per hour and cruise ships aren't like cars you can't just stop them and turn them around it takes a long time for a cruise ship to slow down and turn around fair enough the man may have moved due to different tides but it gave norwegian a good place to start looking cruise lines do complete man overboard drills pretty regularly i've been on cruises before where i've seen them go off in a lifeboat to collect a fake person who they're practicing rescuing sometimes they will actually throw down dummies but they'll normally tell you when this is happening because it can be quite worrying to be on a balcony or be in a lounge and see what you think is a person falling down into the water it's just a dummy they're doing a test and if they're doing that they will let you know ahead of time so that you don't panic your britishism of the week is the word dummy the word dummy not only means a model of a person like this but it is also what you guys in the u.s call a pacifier as far as i know the australians also agree with us that this is a dummy we don't use the word pacifier here these are dummies believe it or not there were people that were unhappy at the fact that they had been woken up to look for this man personally i think there should be some sort of embarkation question that says do you mind being woken up to try and save somebody's life and then we can just weed out the people who say no i would imagine that the people who complained that they were woken up to look for the man overboard would hope that other people would look for them if they fell overboard or somebody they knew fell overboard but it happens everywhere there's always going to be someone who just thinks of themselves norwegian informed the local authorities and the coast guard and the coast guard sent a boat to help with the rescue they also sent a helicopter but the helicopter didn't come until i think early morning it was definitely light by the time the helicopter arrived we were cruising on board the norwegian sky but we weren't alone in looking for this passenger the norwegian jewel the monarch of the seas and i'm pretty sure one of the disney ships also joined in the search we would circle and we would see each other over and over again which was really strange i'm used to seeing cruise ships go by and thinking oh that's the norwegian breakaway but to see the same ships going round and round in circles was really odd it was really surreal there were also some smaller boats and some private fishing boats that came to help with the search at this point we had no idea who had fallen overboard or what had happened it is almost impossible to fall off cruise ships everywhere you go there will be barriers that are roughly to chest height even if you were seven foot tall and you were running full force at these barriers you would really struggle to fall overboard a friend of mine morgan put together this hilarious video that demonstrates how tricky it would be to fall off a cruise ship he showed the safety barriers on the top decks and what would happen if you came back to your cabin after too many drinks there is some great acting from morgan in this video and it very much proves my point i always say that if cruise ships were dangerous we would see children falling overboard not adults but it is almost always adults that fall overboard one exception to this is the terrible story of the grandfather who dropped his granddaughter off deck 11 of grandeur of the seas she died instantly and it was a horrific incident but thankfully things like this are almost unheard of it is a large proportion of people who fall overboard who are at the time under the influence of drink i did wonder in this situation if that had happened due to the fact that this happened at three in the morning most of the people on board like us were asleep at 3 a.m and the people who were out were out partying norwegian cruise line are quite a lively young cruise line and you'll often find all-inclusive drinks as part of their promotions so it seemed reasonable to me that somebody may have had too many drinks and fallen overboard i didn't find out what had actually happened until i came back home and i read news stories about the cruise i'd just been on the next day we were supposed to visit norwegian's private island and that port stop was cancelled so that we could continue looking for the man of course there were some people on board who complained about the fact that we missed visiting an island to try and save a man's life but it is what it is cruise lines change their itineraries all of the time in this situation we weren't entitled to any compensation if you do have a good travel insurance policy often they'll have missed cruise port cover and you'll get a fixed amount per missed cruise port which can be quite nice but the cruise line doesn't owe you anything the priority for them is to keep everybody safe and enjoyment and visiting things like the private island has to be second to safety if you'd like to find a travel insurance policy that has miss cruise port cover click on the travel insurance button on my website this is my guide for everything you need to know about cruise travel insurance it was around 3 p.m the next day that norwegian decided to cool off the search we'd been searching for around 12 hours at that point with all of the other ships and at some point the cruise line has to move on with its schedule even if the person hasn't been found the man involved was 39 years old and by all accounts he had had quite a lot to drink when he went overboard it was his girlfriend and his brother who actually saw him go overboard and raise the alarm it just goes to show how a few seconds of madness can turn into an absolute disaster if you are taking a cruise please be careful and don't put yourself in any unnecessarily risky situations unfortunately situations like this still do happen within the last week a woman fell overboard from a carnival cruise sailing in california fortunately situations like this are very rare they're very far and few between but even one person falling overboard from a cruise ship is too many watch this video next to find out what these people did to get banned from cruise lines for life including a couple of things that definitely could have ended up with man overboard incidents

Channel: Emma Cruises

Views: 1,471,144

Keywords: cruise, cruise tips, emma cruises

Id: Oe42Srd77Ks

Length: 7min 50sec (470 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 15 2021