Cruise ship passenger lost overboard

Sorry to learn that a passenger has disappeared from Fred Olsen’s Balmoral, the ship on which I recently sailed to the Baltic.
The 79-year-old man went overboard about 45 miles south of Lizard Point in Cornwall shortly before the ship was due to return to Dover after a 21-day cruise to the Mediterranean and the Adriatic.
A coastguard helicopter from Portland in Dorset, the Royal Navy frigate HMS Westminster, and a French coastguard plane searched the English Channel without success.
The man’s wife had reported him missing in the early hours of yesterday morning when she woke to discover he was not in their cabin. Crew searched the 43,000-ton vessel, which carries up to 1,350 passengers and 510 crew, before alerting the emergency services.
One passenger disembarking in Dover this morning said: “The whole ship was devastated by the news which we received at about 10.30 a.m., long after the crew had done all the searching that was possible.”
And a woman who was there to meet her father from the ship added: “Unfortunately it seems that the gentleman concerned may have had Alzheimer’s and took his own life. It is very sad for all his family.”
Kent police boarded the ship in Dover and will conduct an investigation.