Early this morning, a passenger reportedly went overboard from a cruise ship sailing in the Adriatic Sea, according to several passengers who contacted us today. The Explorer of the Seas was sailing on a seven day Greece-Croatia cruise when what is described as a young man went overboard around 4:30 to 5:00 a.m. (Another passenger stated on Twitter that the announcement of the overboard was around 3:40 a.m.) There is no description of how the passenger went overboard or from what location. There reportedly was a public announcement on the ship of the incident.
AIS data shows the cruise ship changing direction several times as the Royal Caribbean ship began initiating search and rescue efforts.
At least one passenger is tweeting information about this incident:
A newspaper in Croatia is reporting that the man went overboard around 5:30 a.m. this morning.
On August 3rd, the Explorer of the Seas departed from Ravenna, Italy and sailed to Dubrovnik, Croatia, and then to Piraeus-Athens, Greece, Santorini, Greece, and was heading to Zadar, Croatia today before returning to Ravenna.
The Explorer of the Seas is not equipped with a man overboard (MOB) system with state of the art sensors with motion detection / infrared / radar systems, which would have automatically sent a signal to the bridge of the ship and then tracked the overboard person in the water.
This is at least the 414th person to go overboard from a cruise ship or large ferry in the last 25 years according to leading cruise expert Dr. Ross Klein who keeps track of such events and shares the data online.
It appears that the ship is still conducting search and rescue efforts at this time.
We will update this article as more information becomes available.
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Image credit: Explorer of the Seas (in Greece) Kefalonitis94 – CC0 commons / wikimedia; AIS data – cruisemapper.
Update:
As usual, Royal Caribbean has not released an official statement of the incident, nor disclosed the identity, age or nationality of the overboard guest.
One newspaper in Croatia, Slobodna Dalmacija, announced that the missing guest is a “young citizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.