Cruise Ship Overboard: Couple Falls Overboard Off Australian Coast Into Shark-Infested Waters

An Australian couple from New South Wales State have been missing since Thursday after it was discovered they fell overboard while traveling on a Carnival cruise.

The couple was discovered missing Thursday afternoon when the Cruise ship Spirit docked at Sydney's Circular Quay after a 10-day trip, Yahoo News reports.

Video cameras on board the cruise ship caught the couple, a 30-year-old man and a 26-year-old woman falling overboard from mid-deck Wednesday night. A search by air and sea was launched Thursday after the ship made port.

Reports are saying that no life preservers were missing from the ship. If one had been missing it would have indicated that one passenger had attempted to rescue the other.

The names of the couple have not yet been released, local10.com reports. The couple has not yet been found. The Police Superintendent of New South Wales, Mark Hutchings told the press,

"We believe that they were up mid-deck, which is halfway up the side of the ship, which is quite a way to fall."

The waters around Australia are notoriously shark infested. Just last January a British man on vacation in Australia pulled a 6-foot long dusky shark away from some young children playing in the shallow water off the Sunshine Coast.

In April a fisherman was attacked by a grey nurse shark off the coast of New South Wales, but luckily survived.

Despite the danger faced by the couple that fell overboard Hutchings is not dismissing the possibility of finding the pair alive.

"This is a tragic event at the moment, but we're holding out hope we might be able to find these people alive."

CNN reports the couple was traveling on a 10-day Pacific Island cruise with their family and friends.

"It's game on and we are going to pull out all the stops to try and find these people."

The Carnival Cruise Company has been suffering a lot of publicized incidents regarding their ships. The Costa Concordia which ran aground off the coast of Italy and killed 11 people last year, was owned by the Carnival Company.

In February passengers traveling around the Gulf of Mexico were stranded on board the Carnival ship Triumph when an engine fire left the ship without power. Passengers had no power, food was running short and the toilets began to back up.

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