Harrowing accounts from the Costa Concordia passengers who swam 100m back to shore

The tragic Costa Concordia disaster has been revisited in a new Netflix documentary, Shipwrecked: Nightmare at Sea, but it doesn’t share any details about the passengers who swam 100 metres to shore.

On 13th January, 2012, the Italian cruise ship crashed into some rocks near Giglio Island, which created a 53-metre gash in the hull. This flooded the engine room and cut off the ship’s power, and it took 48 minutes for the captain to sound the emergency alarm.

32 passengers sadly died as the cruise ship slowly filled up with water and the captain, Francesco Schettino, was convicted of manslaughter, causing a maritime accident, and abandoning ship, and sentenced to 16 years in jail. Five other workers were also convicted.

Most of the remaining 3,206 passengers and 1,023 crew members escaped in lifeboats, or were rescued by helicopter. Some of the passengers also chose to swim to the shore as the boat was only 100 metres off the coast of Giglio Island, but it was a harrowing swim in cold water.

Only a few passengers swam to shore as the lifeboats made round trips to pick up more people, but here are some accounts from some of the ones who made the swim.

Credit: Netflix

One of the ship’s singers swam after ‘running out of options’

Ian Fraser, who was working as a singer on the cruise ship, told the BBC he was forced to jump into the freezing cold water as he was “running out of options”.

“I was sitting in my cabin heard this terrible juddering sound. It was very clear something had gone wrong. It was a complete blackout, that’s when everyone screamed,” he recalled. “We were standing ankle-deep in water, and it was clear we were running out of options. When the lights came back on everyone said, ‘Right, go, now’. It was our window of opportunity.

“I was thinking ‘What am I doing here?’. Two hours ago I was sitting in my cabin, now I’m swimming away to save my life. It was dreadful and surreal.”

A Canadian couple had to jump out of a lifeboat filling with water

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A Canadian couple, Laurence and Andrea Davis, made it onto a lifeboat but it filled up to their knees with water, so they made the decision to jump into the sea and swim. Their son-in-law, David Hornstein, told the Vancouver Sun that Laurence swam backstroke to keep an eye on the ship, as he was worried it might tip over them.

“Laurence did a back crawl while Andy was doing front crawl. He said he couldn’t help but look back. The boat was tipping inward toward land, the way they were swimming. He was worried it was going to come down on them,” he said. “It was pretty traumatic, pretty frightening. They lost everything. They really just had the clothes they swam in.”

Credit: Netflix

Recalling the moment himself to CBC, Laurence said it was just after midnight that they started to panic as the lifeboats weren’t being lowered quick enough.

“I thought to myself, that’s it for us. Like what’s going to happen? We have to make a decision. I said to my wife Andrea, I said, ‘Come Andy, we’ve got to go’,” he remembered. “So I just held her with my one arm, and swimming with my other arm, and kicking, but I was just finding it very uncomfortable.

“I just said, ‘Kick Andy! Kick! Swim! We’ve got our children to look forward to!’ And I just pushed and pushed, and eventually I just saw the boat coming down and said ‘We’ve got to clear this or we’re going to drown’.” When they got to the shore, they had no strength left.

A British woman living on Giglio Island helped pull people from the sea

Lisa Cameron Smith, a British woman who lived on Giglio Island, saw the cruise ship from her bedroom and went down to help with her husband and six-year-old daughter. She was one of the first rescuers on the scene and helped pull people from the water after they swam to shore.

“After a few minutes, people started jumping from the ship and came to the rocks — very wet and desperate. It was very difficult to get out of the water. It was very slippery, especially in shoes,” she recalled to The Times. “We took our shoes off and starting taking people out of the water. People were really in panic. We helped. There was good moonlight. People had flashlights from their lifejackets.”