There were scenes of panic as the Costa Concordia hit a sandbar on the evening of Friday 13th January near the island of Giglio and listed about 20 degrees. People reached land by lifeboats but some swam ashore. Rescue teams went from cabin to cabin, searching for survivors.

Two dads and their 11-year-old sons spent 45 minutes bobbing in the Pacific Ocean clinging to a beer cooler before they were rescued safely. Scott Smiles, 43, and son Ryan and Rick Matthews, 46 and son Riley had set off at dawn Thursday from Botany Bay in Sydney, Australia in a 41-foot cruiser on a fishing trip.

Maintenance workers kissed wind-whipped faces and numb fingers goodbye with the unveiling of a new state-of-the-art boat maintenance building at the Eaton's Neck Coast Guard station on Wednesday, December 14, 2011, featuring climate-controlled enclosures and centralized storage for tools and equipment.

A further key link in the plan to provide effective search and rescue (SAR) coverage off the coast of Africa has been established, with the commissioning of a search and rescue sub-centre that will operate in conjunction with the regional Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre (MRCC) in Cape Town, South Africa.

The Volusia County Beach Patrol today rolled out new utility vehicles that will replace big pickup trucks for most of the lifeguards' work in a change intended to improve the safety of beach driving. The switch to utility task vehicles, or UTVs, follows a July accident in which a lifeguard ran over a sunbather while making a U-turn, county officials said.

Rescuers saved 14 of the 67 people who were on board a floating oil rig which capsized in the Sea of Okhotsk in Russia’s Far East, according to reports. Nine more dead bodies have been found in the freezing waters off Russia's Far East coast, where the Kolskaya oil rig capsized.

A New Zealand Defence Force plane dropped equipment and fuel to the stricken Russian fishing vessel 'Sparta' as it took on water. Sparta has a 30cm hole in her hull approximately 1.5m below the water line. The vessel is near the Antarctic ice shelf in the Ross Sea about 3704km south east of New Zealand.