By A.S. Kinsman

It’s a situation not many of us can truly empathize with – at least not the living. It is a chilling thought to imagine pitching sixty feet over the railings of a ferry boat, and even worse to imagine doing so at night, into frigid waters that hover just above freezing.

This very thing happened to 23-year-old Jeni Anderson from Essex, England. A college student, she was on her way to Amsterdam with three friends to celebrate graduating from Northumbria University when the accident happened. The women were having drinks on deck when Anderson pitched over the railing into total blackness below.

“I just remember thinking that that was going to be it. I remember thinking what a terrible way to go and I was going to try my best for that not to be how it ended. I remember swimming and screaming and trying to make sure that if anybody was looking they would see me.”

Anderson says that she cannot remember hitting the water, but she does vividly remember the long fall. “I just remember the feeling of going over, it was pretty surreal and awful at the same time. I don’t remember hitting the water, I don’t remember going under, but obviously I must have done.”

At first, Anderson could only scream and shout for help. Twenty miles offshore the North Yorkshire coast, she was alone and in complete darkness except for the fading lights of the ferry as it drifted farther and farther away from her. Her friends called for help, and the ferry soon turned around, but for thirty long minutes, Anderson was alone in the rough waves and darkness of night.

“I just have flashbacks of being in the water and trying to swim after the boat even though I knew that was not really going to help me, and shouting and screaming so that even if people couldn’t see me then maybe they could hear me.”

The ferry was able to turn around to try and assist Anderson, but in the end it was the Coastguard who plucked her from the chilling waters of the North Sea and saved her life. Her three friends, still aboard the ferry, were warned by the captain to expect the worst while they awaited the news of Anderson’s fate.

‘The captain said to them that in 20 years he has never found anyone who has gone over and my chances were very slim of being found,” Anderson said. “I’m very, very lucky to be alive.”

And she is, indeed, to survive with just bruises. She could have easily died from the sixty foot drop alone. To make her chances of survival even slimmer, the human body cannot resist cold shock. That’s when individuals can involuntarily breathe in when they are suddenly immersed in icy cold water. She may have been briefly unconscious as she hit the sea and thus did not inhale water. It also explains why she recalled falling from the ferry and swimming, but not the moment of impact.

It is still not known why Anderson fell off of the railings on the ferry in the first place. She insists that neither she nor her friends had been intoxicated at the time of the accident. “We had had drinks, but we were by no means drunk. How that came to happen, I don’t know – whether I was just leaning too far, or whatever, I really don’t know what happened, I just remember going over.”

Anderson has since made a full recovery and is now much more careful when she is on ferry boats. And she is not quite ready yet to die – at least not on a ferry boat.