Man Falls Off Royal Caribbean Cruise and Was Rescued by a Disney Cruise

January 13, 2015

Oasis of the Seas // Photo by skip61 via flickr

Natalie Paris, The Daily Telegraph, January 13, 2015

A man who fell off a cruise ship had a narrow escape when he was picked up out of the sea by another cruise ship.

The 22-year-old man was a guest on Oasis of the Seas, a Royal Caribbean ship and the world’s largest cruise ship, when he fell overboard just outside of Cozumel in Mexico on Thursday morning.

Luckily the man was spotted by staff on a Disney Magic ship approaching the port, Disney Cruise Line said.

Disney said a combination of passengers and crew from the Magic worked together to keep an eye on the man. They then lowered a life boat into the water and he was eventualy able to climb into it. The man was then transported to shore for treatment.

Royal Caribbean confirmed that the man “went overboard” and said: “We are grateful for the other ship's assistance.”

The incident has raised questions about whether Oasis of the Seas’ staff knew that the man was overboard and also about what sort of tracking equipment would have been available to locate him.

A video, posted by David Hearn on YouTube, shows the man bobbing about in rough waves to the left of the lifeboat.

Jim Walker, a maritime lawyer, said on his Cruise Law News website that better monitoring systems for detecting when someone falls off a ship should be used.

Oasis of the Seas, which is 40 percent larger than any other cruise ship in the world, was on a seven-night cruise to the Western Caribbean at the time.

At 1,187 feet it is longer than the Shard is tall and, at 208 feet wide, is larger than the wingspan of a Boeing 747.

It can accommodate more than 5,400 guests and has 2,394 crew on-board, which between them use 2,350,000 litres of water every day.

This article was written by Natalie Paris from The Daily Telegraph and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

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