Amesbury Couple On Cruise Ship Helps Rescue Men Stranded At Sea
BOSTON (CBS) - A luxury cruise turned into a life-saving operation for an Amesbury couple. Roy Nagy thinks fate had something to do with his wife waking up in the middle of their first night at sea, and opening the sliding glass door in their cabin. They were en route from San Juan, Puerto Rico to St. Martin on a Royal Caribbean ship called Jewel of the Seas.
"We started to go back to sleep, and right after that, we started to hear voices out in the water. We heard, 'Hey, hey, hey, hey,'" said Roy Nagy. "We sat and thought about it for a minute and then we said, 'Somebody's out there and we better make a call.'"
Two others also thought they heard those cries for help. The ship's captain took the reports seriously, turning the cruise ship around and searching with flood lights. After about an hour, they found a white spot in the ocean. "When it finally hit on something that was clearly sticking out of the water a little bit, that was a rush," said Nagy. "As the ship got closer, we saw the guy there waving. That's when we really got goose bumps."
The captain sent a rescue crew in a smaller boat. It returned with three American citizens who live in St. Croix. They had capsized in their speedboat, which was floating upside down for ten hours. At one point, that boat's owner, Matt Spencer, was trapped in the cabin under water. "I really just took away from it that there's a lot of nice and really good people in the world," he told WBZ.
He and the other survivors met the Nagys and posed for pictures together with broad smiles. Nagy says it's a smile of relief that he and his wife picked up the phone. It was a small gesture that made all the difference. "We still get goosebumps."
