It could be one of the worst-case scenarios you could imagine on a cruise ship. A little girl falls off a 4,000-passenger Disney cruise liner and into the ocean. Luckily for the little one, her dad wasn’t far away, and he jumped into action to handle the emergency. Literally.

A father leaped off a Disney cruise ship into the ocean to rescue his daughter after she fell off the ship’s fourth deck

He jumped off the Disney cruise ship right after his daughter. Fortunately, the Disney Dream was equipped with an “overboard detection system,” which alerted the crew and stopped the ship’s engines. Even with the early detection system, the Dream’s trip was turning into a nightmare. “The ship was moving quickly, so quickly, it’s crazy how quickly the people became tiny dots in the sea, and then you lost sight of them,” one passenger said.  

Still, emergency crews were able to rescue the father and daughter from the water without any loss of life. According to the BBC, a Disney Cruise Line spokesperson commended the crew for the rescue. “The Crew aboard the Disney Dream swiftly rescued two guests from the water,” the spokesperson said. 

However, while the spokesperson said the crew members rescued the duo “within minutes,” witnesses say it took a bit longer. Specifically, a handful of witnesses claim that it took the rescue crew as much as 20 minutes to pluck the two overboard passengers from the ocean. 

Things could have been much, much worse

“Wow, what a dad,” an onlooker said on camera as the rescue boat fished the duo out of the sea. “God bless his heart,” one woman spectator said. “How did he survive that long?”

It’s a question that brings us to the “how” of it all. For starters, the father was hell-bent on saving his young child. There’s no telling how far a parent will go to protect their children. Beyond the impetus of a determined parent, the man had a few things working in his favor.

Now, I worked on a water survival cadre during my time in the military, and it taught me a few things. For starters, the young girl fell from the fourth deck of the ship, roughly 30 to 40 feet above the surface of the water. With proper form, a jump from that height is manageable and may not knock the wind out of a person. In this case, it didn’t keep him from reaching his daughter.

What’s more, the incident happened on the return leg of a Bahamas-to-Fort Lauderdale cruise. The waters off the coast of Florida typically sit around the mid-80s (Fahrenheit). Fortunately, that lowers the likelihood of hypothermia significantly compared to temperatures off, say, the mid-Pacific coast of the US.

So, what can you do in this scenario? If you’re ever unfortunate enough to be an overboard passenger, remember the acronym “SAFE.”