Overboard passenger on Royal Carribean Bahamas cruise ship

The Coast Guard received a call at 7.17pm about the passenger, who fell off the vessel around 200km east of Charleston, South Carolina, Petty Officer Vincent Moreno told The Post and Courier.

“A guest went overboard from Vision of the Seas. The ship and crew immediately reported the incident to local authorities and launched a search and rescue mission,” a company rep told the New York Post in an email on Monday.

“Out of privacy for the guest and their family, we have no additional details to share,” the statement added.

The Coast Guard deployed a C-130 Hercules plane from Elizabeth City, North Carolina, and another C-130 crew responded from Clearwater, Florida, to relieve the first.

But on Monday morning, the agency announced it had suspended the search after scouring more than 1,625 square miles for eight hours, WCBD reported.

The missing man was aboard Royal Caribbean’s “8 Night Bahamas & Perfect Day Holiday Cruise,” which left from Baltimore on Friday, passengers told the Post and Courier.

Jake Utzinger, a 21-year-old film student from New Jersey who was vacationing with his girlfriend’s family, said that he was lying in bed around 7.45pm when the captain announced that a passenger had fallen overboard.

“I instantly felt sick to my stomach knowing that one of our fellow travelers had been lost at sea,” Utzinger told the paper.

He said he, his girlfriend and other passengers rushed to the pool deck to provide an “extra pairs of eyes” in the search-and-rescue effort.

Another passenger, Colin Schappi, told WCBD that he heard the announcement “Oscar! Oscar! Oscar! Starboard! — a call to the crew signifying an overboard emergency — about 7:15 p.m.

“We were wondering what was going on with that,” he said.

Crews stopped the ship, dropped a strobe lamp and searched for the passenger for six hours before resuming the trip around 2am.

“It’s definitely going to be rough continuing this voyage knowing that a family is missing their loved one,” Utzinger told the news outlet.

The Vision of the Seas’ next stop is Port Canaveral, Florida, after which will sail throughout the Bahamas before returning to Baltimore on Saturday.

The 915-foot-long ship, which has a total capacity of 2000 guests and 700 crew members, made its first voyage in 1988, according to the Royal Caribbean website.

In August, a Royal Caribbean passenger went overboard the Wonder of the Seas, the largest cruise ship in the world, while it was off the coast of Cuba during a voyage from Florida.

The passenger was identified as 19-year-old Sigmund Ropich, a college student from Washington state known to his loved ones as “boiboi.” He had been vacationing with friends at the time.

Earlier that month, an Indian woman died after she apparently jumped off the company’s Spectrum of the Seas.

Reeta Sahani, 64, was reported missing after her husband, Jakesh Sahani, 70, woke up in the middle of the night and noticed she was not in their cabin.

In June, a 42-year-old woman was rescued after she fell off Royal Caribbean’s Mariner of the Seas about 25 miles south of Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic during its voyage from Florida.

Other recent incidents occurred on the cruise ships Carnival Magic, Carnival Elation and Emerald Princess.

On average, 19 people go overboard on cruise ships every year — and of those, only about four are rescued, according to a 2020 study commissioned by the industry trade group Cruise Lines International Association.

This story originally appeared on the New York Post and is republished here with permission.