Rescued Italian cruise ship holidaymakers and crew recount panic and chaos as vessel ran aground
British passengers on the Costa Concordia spoke of their ordeal as they returned home last night.
Rose Metcalf, 23, from Wimborne in Dorset revealed she had written a note to her mother in case she did not survive.
She was one of the last people to be rescued by helicopter from the ship.
"There was just so much panic so I decided to wait until the water was high enough so I could jump or swim, but I didn't want to be inside," she said.
"My heart was racing, but I was calm to everyone else.
Metcalf said she used her watch to time how quickly the water was creeping up the side of the ship, and estimating what degree the vessel was lying in the sea.
"We had already judged where we were going to swim to on the shore," she said.
Thank God we were near the shore."
Phoebe Jones, from Walton-on-Thames in Surrey, said: "It feels really surreal. It still doesn't feel like I'm home."
The 20-year-old was on stage performing a magic show when the ship ran aground. "The ship went on a huge, huge lean," she said. "Suddenly there was a blackout and everything from the stage crashed to one side."
"Some people started to panic, but I was fine."
Jones said the were no alarms or warnings, but she instinctively went to her nearest rendezvous point.
"We all started to naturally think: go to your muster stations, go to where you go if there was an emergency," she said.
"Even though I was so scared, I was so content, but so scared, I still didn't really get what was going on."
"When I got on to the ferry and realised I was actually on a hard surface and safe, that's when I realised.
"We watched everything from that ferry and that night we just watched the Concordia sink."
A group of dancers who worked on the ship also came back to Heathrow last night. James Thomas, 19, from Sutton Coldfield, said: "My life was that ship for six months, and now it's gone."
Describing the evacuation, he said: "It was chaos, because we had to go through the centre of the ship, which had been obliterated by the tilt. Everything was everywhere."
Thomas said he was in charge of a group of 20 staff on board the boat as they helped passengers to muster stations and liferafts. "It was handling everyone else that was the biggest problem," he said.