Cruise passenger who fell off ship shares what it was like to spend 20 hours at sea

A Carnival cruise ship passenger has shared his experience of treading water for 20 hours in the gulf of Mexico in a new tell-all interview.

James Michael Grimes, from Alabama, US, went missing on 24 November, the night before Thanksgiving, after falling from the Carnival Valor cruise ship into the ocean.

During the five-day cruise from Cozumel to Mexico, Mr Grimes left the bar to use the toilet. In an interview with ABC News on Friday 2 December, he said he woke up in the ocean, and could no longer see the ship.

Grimes explained that surviving the fall felt like he had been “given a chance”, and that it forced him to try and “stay positive”. He said to himself: “All you got to do now is swim and survive.”

He described telling himself that “they will start looking for me…they will find me eventually,” while he tried to stay afloat in the water.

Mr Grimes was rescued by a US Coast Guard just before 8.30pm the next day, 20 miles from the Southwest Pass in the Mississippi River. When he was found, he had been treading water for 20 hours to stay alive.

“I wanted to see my family and I was dead set on making it out of there. I was never accepting that this is it,” he said. “I’m 28 years old. I’m too young. This is not going to be it.”

The cruise ship passenger told ABC News he had had a few drinks but was not drunk when he disappeared.

Mr Grimes said he sang songs to himself in the water to keep his spirits high, watched the sun rise, and swam through jellyfish. He described being “determined to swim until my arms and legs could not hold my body up anymore”, and lost 20 pounds during the experience.

US Coast Guard Richard Hoefle said when he found Mr Grimes in the water, he was exhausted, and had only about a minute and 30 seconds left to live. Mr Hoefle noted: “Mr. Grimes had nothing left. He had no energy. He had nothing left to give.

“My best guess is that he had between a minute and 30 seconds left before we lost him completely.”

He added that Grimes’ “last couple of minutes of waving, swinging a sock around, anything to make himself more visible to us” was true “survival”.

“He just had an incredible will to survive,” he explained. “And he did whatever he had to do."

There are safety barriers on cruise ships to stop people falling, and it is unclear how Grimes fell from the ship. The Coast Guard told ABC News in a statement: “Gests should never ever climb up on the rails. The only way to go overboard is to purposefully climb up and over the safety barriers.”