Two People Survive Fall From Cruise Ship

March 26, 2007 — -- The distress call came around 2:30 a.m.: A man and a woman had fallen over the balcony of a cabin on the cruise ship Grand Princess, and into the Gulf of Mexico.

Coast Guard Lt. Sean O'Brien is used to working in challenging conditions. He pilots helicopter rescue missions under sometimes difficult conditions, searching the gulf for people from boats that have sunk, and evacuating injured workers from offshore oil platforms.

When he checked the weather early Sunday morning after getting the call from the Grand Princess cruise ship, he knew it would be a particularly challenging rescue.

"The call said a 20-year-old male and a 20-year-old female fell off a balcony of the Grand Princess cruise ship," he said. "We calculated their distance, and they were about 180 miles off the coast of Texas. Just on the edge of our range."

The ship, which was just hours into a seven-day cruise, had left Galveston, Texas, late Saturday afternoon, for a tour of the Caribbean.

The odds of a successful rescue were slim. Weather was quite bad, according to O'Brien.

"It was dark. It was foggy and we had very low visibility. Once we got offshore, there was no visibility. At one point it looked like we would have to turn back, but the crew decided we would go another 40 or 50 miles, and then it started to clear up," he said.

The Coast Guard rescue helicopter stopped on a nearby oil drilling platform to refuel, which gave it the range needed to proceed to the Grand Princess.

Once the helicopter crew reached the rescue site, they discovered the crew of the Grand Princess had lowered lifeboats into the water, and were searching for the couple. They had already found the woman, and were looking for her companion.

The Coast Guard helicopter dropped down to about 50 feet above the water, and the crew started scanning the gulf with a searchlight.