After Cruise Passenger Goes Overboard, Questions Arise About Who Is Searching and for How Long

After a passenger went overboard while on the Wonder of the Seas cruise ship near Cuba earlier this week, a maritime lawyer has raised questions about the search efforts to find the missing person.

The incident played out onboard the world's largest cruise ship on Tuesday, two days into its seven-day trip from Florida's Port Canaveral.

According to Cruise Radio, passengers on the ship said the captain launched a search operation following the report of a person overboard.

"The ship’s crew immediately launched a search-and-rescue operation and is working closely with local authorities," the spokesman for Royal Caribbean told Click Orlando.

But Jim Walker, a Florida-based maritime attorney who authors the blog Cruise Law News, has questioned whether Cuban authorities are properly equipped to handle the search effort after U.S. Coast Guard officials told Click Orlando they were not involved in the operation.

Walker, who often represents passengers and crew members who are injured or assaulted while onboard cruise ships, wrote in a post Wednesday he has "never heard of Royal Caribbean or any other cruise line working with Cuba to locate a cruise guest missing from a U.S. based cruise ship."

"It is highly unlikely, in my opinion, that Cuba will devote any of its limited Coast Guard resources to search for a U.S. cruise passenger," Walker wrote on his blog.

"It’s unknown whether the Cuban Coast Guard, known as 'Tropas Guardafronteras,' has access to any C-130 type of aircraft to conduct search at sea," he added.

Passengers onboard the ship said on social media the vessel stopped for several hours to search for the missing person, but then left the area.

In a series of videos posted to TikTok, a passenger with the handle brunausaflorida_official, said crews searched for three and a half hours to no avail.

The ship then had to leave as another passenger who was sick needed to be brought to the Cayman Islands for medical treatment, the woman said in the video.

On the online message board, Cruise Critic, another passenger wrote the ship stopped for about two and a half hours "when another emergency happened on board and now we are headed as fast as possible to Grand Cayman which was not one of our stops.”

According to Walker, passengers who went overboard on several other cruises in recent years had been rescued after treading water for much longer periods of time.

In November, for instance, a 28-year-old man who fell off a Carnival Valor cruise ship was rescued at the mouth of the Mississippi River after he was stranded for over 20 hours.

"It seems outrageous if it is true that the crew of the Wonder of the Seas searched for less than three hours and then left their guest in the water at night, knowing that the USCG would not be dispatching cutters and helicopters to continue search and rescue operations," Walker wrote on his blog.

Royal Caribbean did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Messenger on Friday.

The cruise line did not identity the passenger in its statement earlier this week.

In a Facebook post on Wednesday, however, Savannah Ropich said the missing person is her 19-year-old brother, Sigmund, of Texas.

Ropich, who was not on the cruise, wrote in another post on Thursday the search for her brother had been extended and urged friends and family to "apply pressure" for authorities to keep up the effort.

"Tell them how you know Sigmund Ropich and ask them to keep searching until they find him," she wrote.