Child Fell Overboard Disney Cruise Ship: What to Do, How to Survive

If you fall from a cruise ship, there are a few things you can do to boost your chances of surviving and of being found, according to a survival expert.

Two people were rescued after going overboard on a Disney Cruise Lines ship as it traveled from Fort Lauderdale to the Bahamas on Sunday, Disney confirmed.

Details about how the pair went overboard have not been confirmed by Disney, but several media outlets have reported that passengers said a father jumped in the water to save his child, who fell overboard first.

Disney said in a statement that the crew aboard the Disney Dream, a cruise liner that holds up to 4,000 passengers, quickly recovered the two passengers from the water.

While it’s rare for passengers to go overboard on cruise ships, it does happen. Many passengers who go overboard are never rescued, but others have survived the falls and, in some cases, long stretches of time in the water.

In June 2023, a woman survived after going overboard a Royal Caribbean cruise ship more than 30 miles off the coast of the Dominican Republic and was rescued about 45 minutes after she went overboard.

In November 2022, Carnival Valor cruise ship passenger James Michael Grimes survived after going overboard, unbeknownst to anyone on board, and spending 20 hours in the water in what he described as a fight for his life.

He described treading water, fending off jellyfish and at least one finned creature, and trying to eat objects that floated by, including a piece of bamboo. He was finally spotted and rescued by the US Coast Guard.

There are some practical things a person who falls into the open ocean can do in order to increase their chances of surviving, according to Cat Bigney, a survival expert who has consulted for Bear Grylls and National Geographic.

Don’t panic

There are many things working against a person who goes overboard. First, they have to avoid injury during the fall and when they hit the water. Calling for help or actually finding help in the open ocean is just about impossible. There could be blazing sun, potentially hungry predators, and rough water. Hypothermia and dehydration are also major risks.

“All of these factors make it very difficult for people to survive if they’re adrift,” Bigney, who has taught at the Boulder Outdoor Survival School for decades, told BI.

Going overboard on a cruise ship is extremely rare, but the vast majority of those who do are never rescued. Between 2009 and 2019, there were 212 overboard incidents on cruise ships, according to data compiled by Cruise Lines International Association. Only 48 of those people were rescued.

But the first thing a person in an overboard situation needs to remember is? Don’t panic.

“When people enter into a body of water, they usually damage their lungs right away, because they gasp,” Bigney explained. “We have such a panic instinct to get air, and when people do that they bring water into their lungs.”

Keeping your cool in life-or-death situations is key, as panicking is “the biggest thing that will kill you in a survival situation,” according to Bigney.

Find anything that floats

Once you’re in open water, your next priority is to stay above the surface. Some people may have a natural advantage and float more easily, depending on their body composition, including body fat percentage and muscle mass.

Though Grimes was in the water for around 20 hours, it’s unlikely he was treading water for that entire time, according to Bigney. A combination of floating, treading, and swimming would be ideal, although it would still be exhausting, especially in rough waters. But treading water periodically is still much more doable than constantly.

There are also ways to make floating easier. For instance, Grimes said he had taken off all of his clothes, in order to make himself more buoyant.

“Even a small buoyant device will help you — something you can use with your arms around or your neck over just to help relieve some of the stress if you’re not a great swimmer or you’re having a hard time staying afloat,” Bigney said.

Grimes had said he tried chewing on some bamboo, which Bigney said is extremely buoyant. Even collecting small bits of bamboo or driftwood could help a person stay afloat, she said. In a best-case scenario, you could collect enough that would allow you to make a pile or raft that you could get up on top of and out of the water, which would also make you safer from any potential predators. 

Water would be a concern, food not so much

It’s unlikely Grimes was able to get significant energy from chewing on bamboo, but food would not be a primary concern in the amount of time he was at sea.

“Our bodies are perfectly, evolutionarily adapted to have this ability to fast for a long period of time, so he should have been fine as far as food,” Bigney said, adding that “psychologically,” it may have helped him, but “physiologically” his body was probably OK without eating.

Calories are needed to regulate core body temperatures, but she said most bodies would be able to do that for a couple of days with reserves, including from fat and the liver. Grimes was treated for hypothermia after he was rescued, as the 70-degree water temperature was significantly colder than humans’ baseline core body temperature, but moving around and swimming for much of the time he was stranded — as well as factors like what he had recently eaten and his body fat content — may have helped him avoid the worst of it.

Dehydration would be of much greater immediate concern than food, according to Bigney.

“You don’t want to drink any salt water,” she said, adding that you’d want to try to conserve whatever water you already had. One way to do that would be to try and use your clothing to create shelter from the sun, such as by wrapping it over your head.

Make a signal however you can — including with trash

Ultimately, if you fall from a cruise ship many miles from shore, it’s a waiting game to be rescued, and making a signal is one way to improve your chances of being found.

“There’s a lot of trash in our great oceans, unfortunately,” Bigney said, adding that collecting any floating garbage into a large pile could potentially form a signal that could be spotted by rescuers.

When an overboard situation is reported, the US Coast Guard uses a program to estimate where a floating object might be, Gross told Insider. The Search and Rescue Optimal Planning System factors in the person’s weight, clothing, body fat percentage, and whether or not they have a flotation device, as well as weather and ocean patterns.

For Grimes, the system returned over 7,000 square nautical miles of ocean where he could be, which is about the size of Massachusetts — so anything you can do to increase the chances of being spotted can help.

“In the end, it’s kind of a grim situation, but people have survived,” Bigney said, adding: “And people sometimes just die.”

Editor’s note: This story was originally published in December 2022 and was last updated in June 2025.

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