Life-Saving Trick Keeps Her Alive After Ferry Sinks Woman Turned Knotted Pants Into Balloon

Panicking passengers from the sunken ferry pushed her off a life raft.

But in the dark and stormy waters, Margaret Crotty remembered an old lifesaving trick: By removing her pants and knotting the legs, she was able to trap enough air in them to create a balloon that helped keep her afloat for 16 hours while she swam to safety.

Crotty, a 23-year-old aid worker from New York, and 225 other people were aboard the ferry Gurita on Friday night when it sank in a storm on the Andaman Sea just six miles from its destination, Sabang, on the northern island of Weh. Forty-seven people, including Crotty and a 6-year-old child, are known to have survived.

Crotty, who works in the Jakarta office of Save the Children, said she was able to stay afloat by using a survival technique she learned long ago.

“I was actually pushed off a rubber raft filled with more than 40 people but I survived by tying a knot at the edge of my pants like a balloon,” she told the Associated Press in a telephone interview from her hotel in Banda Aceh, capital of Sumatra’s northernmost province, Aceh.

Crotty was in her cabin when the 555-ton ferry began to list and sink.

“I heard noises and screams with many people praying,” she said. “Many were fighting for life jackets and I was pushed into one of the cabinets. But I jumped off the boat without a life jacket.”

Once in the water, she grabbed a rubber life boat but panicking passengers who feared she would drag it down pushed her off.

She said she passed many dead bodies in the water as she struggled to reach land.

After swimming for more than 10 hours in the choppy water, a man appeared by her side with a bag full of hard candy, she said.

“It was like a miracle,” Crotty said. “He appeared beside me and then offered me some candies and that’s how I survived for the next five or six hours.”

She cut her leg trying to get off the ferry, and the thought of hungry sharks terrified her throughout her ordeal.

“I was fortunate, she said. “There was no shark to get me. But I have six stitches on my leg.”

After 16 hours at sea, she reached a lighthouse and clawed her way up the piles of rocks around it. Police in a boat searching for survivors picked her up less than an hour later, she said.