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Have you ever been on a cruise? I am sure that many of you have. And if you have, can you imagine falling off the ship into the ocean? Now, how about falling off the ship into the ocean and being stranded in the water for 10 hours before being rescued? Sounds awful, right? Well, that’s exactly what happened to 46-year-old British air hostess Kay Longstaff this past Saturday night.
Although, according to an Italian source told The Sun Online that cops are working on the theory Longstaff “most likely jumped,” which, if true, makes this story somehow even more bizarre.
Longstaff was a passenger on a Norwegian Cruise Line ship when around midnight on Saturday she somehow ended up floating in the Adriatic Sea near the coast of Croatia.
@theJeremyVine the back of the Norwegian star where Kay Longstaff fell from, we had a similar cruise a few weeks back. Flabbergasted how she managed to fall or where from? pic.twitter.com/WSsqoy9JgV
— Andy Flaherty (@Chromedome1) August 20, 2018
According to USA Today…
She told Croatian news channel HRT that she was sitting at the back of the deck before the fall. She was roughly 60 miles away from the Croatian coast.
Longstaff floated and sang to stay awake, rescuers said. The Croatian Coast Guard launched an air and sea search early Sunday morning.
One of those involved in the rescue effort, Lovro Oreskovic told Glas Istre that the search crews were not very optimistic that they would find Longstaff alive.
But alive she was, as the Croatian coastguard ended up finding her about a mile from where she fell.
The Sun Online reports that an Italian source said, “The footage has been viewed and you can clearly see she was there on her own when she fell. She was not pushed. The theory we are working on is that she most likely jumped. A file is being prepared for the local prosecutor who will decide what to do but at the moment it looks like an individual lone action.”
“The boyfriend said they had been drinking and they had quarrelled. He went back to his cabin and left her. The next thing he knew he was woken by the crew to say they thought she was missing as they had found her bag and belongings.”
Several passengers who spoke to The Sun Online, agreed with that assessment of the situation, including American Bern Love.
“She didn’t fall, she jumped after rowing with her boyfriend,” said Love. “There is no way she could have fallen — that railing at the back of the ship is almost six feet high. If you want to go over you have to climb it and that’s what she must have done.”
Regardless of how she ended up in the sea, Longstaff is far from the first person to have to be rescued after falling off a cruise ship, however. According to CruiseJunkie.com (there really is a website for everything), more than 300 people have gone overboard while traveling on a cruise ship since 1995.