Laughter with the family at dinner in Venice 24 hours on
KAY Longstaff donned a red dress for a family dinner a day after she went overboard from a luxury cruise liner.
The air stewardess and her boyfriend said an emotional farewell to relatives in a Venice hotel on Monday night as she prepared to return home yesterday.
The 46-year-old had been kept overnight on Sunday in a psychiatric ward in Pula, Croatia, for observation before she being collected by her boyfriend, Craig Rayment.
Senior doctors said she was checked over for signs of acute stress after the terrifying ordeal but was ‘a healthy woman’ and ‘in good spirits’.
Just over 24 hours after the extraordinary ordeal, and having travelled to Venice, she donned a knee-length dress for dinner with her boyfriend and two other family members in their hotel in the romantic Italian city – the original disembarkation point of her £1,000-a-head luxury cruise.
She could be seen laughing and joking before they came out at around 10.30pm and hugged each other goodbye.
A relative, speaking after the family meal, said: ‘It’s something that’s happened, they just want to put it behind them now. We’re family, we look after each other. I can tell you now they will not speak. A lot of what’s said has been wrong – apparent “friends” speaking and people on board the ship who don’t know anything.’
The happy reunion comes after some claimed the couple had been rowing moments before Miss Longstaff went into the water at midnight on Saturday.
She is understood to have been drinking when she fell from the seventh deck of the Norwegian Star 60 miles off Croatia. Miss Longstaff was said to have suffered a facial injury from hitting the water and was at the point of giving up when she was saved by Croatian coastguards at 9.40am local time on Sunday.
She told Croatian television after being brought ashore that she ‘fell off’ the back of the ship and was ‘lucky to be alive’.
But passengers on the 92,000ton Norwegian Star claimed she had been drinking and arguing with her partner in the hours lead- ing up to the incident. A crew member suggested she may have jumped after scaling railings on the edge of the deck. Daniel Punch said the fall was unlikely to be an accident, adding: ‘She didn’t fall, she jumped. It was on my ship. I spoke [to her] throughout the whole week. She was arguing with her fella the whole time.’
Passengers said they were told the incident had been captured on the ship’s CCTV and showed that Miss Longstaff was alone when she went over the edge.
Italian authorities appeared to corroborate that, saying she ‘most likely jumped’ after apparently having a row.
‘Officers spoke with the woman’s partner on the ship when it arrived in Venice,’ a spokesman said. ‘The footage has been viewed and you can clearly see she was there on her own when she fell.
‘The boyfriend said they’d been drinking and had quarrelled. He went back to his cabin and left her. The next thing he knew he was woken by the crew to say they thought she was missing as they had found her belongings.’
By this point a search was being carried out by the crew and the ship doubled back and carried out at least four passes. The coastguard then took over, and the ship went on to Venice.
‘She most likely jumped’