Passengers Were Lookouts

A woman survived a fall off the 10th deck of a Royal Caribbean ship on Sunday.
One witness told Insider passengers took to their balconies to try and help as the rescue played out.
“It was really cool just to see everyone trying to pitch in and help in any way that they could,” he said.
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A woman-overboard incident on a Royal Caribbean cruise ship culminated in a rare happy ending after passengers onboard the vessel helped direct rescue crew toward the woman’s location more than 30 miles off the coast of the Dominican Republic, a witness told Insider.
Matthew Kuhn, 44, of Michigan, was onboard the Mariner of the Seas with his family when the high-stakes rescue unfolded Sunday. He and his wife were in their room when they heard a message play over the ship’s loudspeakers, he recounted in a phone call from the middle of the ocean Wednesday.
The couple initially didn’t know what to make of the “Oscar Oscar Oscar” code echoing through the vessel; it was only after they Google searched the emergency signal that they discovered a passenger had gone overboard from the 15-deck ship.
The United States Coast Guard confirmed this week that a 42-year-old woman was ultimately saved after falling off the 10th deck of the Mariner of the Seas on Sunday as the ship was bound for the island of Curaçao.
Soon after the man-overboard code played across the boat, Kuhn said he felt the vessel make a dramatic 180-degree turn.
“There’s this huge wake in the water,” he said. “It turned on a dime for a huge boat like this.”
As Kuhn and other passengers rushed to the main deck, he said he saw a smoke signal in the water, presumably meant to identify where the woman was located in the vast ocean. As the boat kept moving toward the smoke, Kuhn said he clocked two empty life rings floating in the open water.
“I thought after that we were going to be here trying to recover a body,” he said. He was thinking, “There’s no way someone can survive that fall.”
As a lifeboat set off to search for the missing woman, Kuhn returned to his 8th-floor balcony room where his wife was beckoning him: “Come here, we see her, we see her,” she told him.
While he failed to locate the woman’s location amid the “glaring” sun and wide open ocean, Kuhn said scores of people soon took to their balconies and quickly banded together to try and guide the lifeboat as they scanned the water for signs of the woman.
“Pretty much everyone was on their balcony,” he said. “I think there was a majority of people that saw something and that’s really where it took over.”
Kuhn said the deck-bound passengers were adamant in their efforts trying to direct the rescue boat, gesticulating and yelling, “Send them that way!” as some onlookers communicated with the cruise ship’s bridge crew.
“They’re trying to yell at her: ‘Hang on, hang on.’ It was really like everyone coming together, trying to help this lady live and get back,” Kuhn said.
A spokesperson for Royal Caribbean did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
After approximately 45 minutes, the crew onboard the rescue boat was able to locate the woman and bring her safely back to the cruise ship. A spokesperson for the US Coast Guard told Insider that the passenger was reported to be in good health after the fall.
“When it hit for me it was when she got on the boat,” Kuhn said. “I can’t even describe like just going from super somber to wow, I can’t believe this just happened.”
Despite the headline-grabbing tales of murky seas and foul play, overboard incidents remain a real rarity on cruise ships, Insider previously reported.
“It’s impossible to just fall off the boat,” Kuhn said of the Mariner of the Seas. “The railings are four and a half feet high.”
According to a report from the Cruise Lines International Association, there were 212 overboard incidents between 2009 and 2019 and only 48, or 28.2%, of victims were successfully rescued.
Sunday’s incident was one such lucky break.
“Everyone was just trying to work together and help,” Kuhn said. “It was really cool just to see everyone trying to pitch in and help in any way that they could.”