From Maine, they stopped over in Annapolis, Maryland and left for the next leg when the boat was overtaken by unexpected heavy weather in the Gulf Stream off the coast of North Carolina.

Five days after the sinking, Scaling and the only other surviving crew member, Brad Cavanagh, were rescued by a passing Soviet cargo ship Olenegorsk and presented to US authorities.

[5][6] The shipwreck was transformative for Scaling who went on to write a popular account of the incident called Albatross: The True Story of a Woman's Survival at Sea (1994) which was made into a TV film, Two Came Back; and profiled in the episode "Shark Survivor" on the Discovery channel series I Shouldn't Be Alive (Ep.

She became a motivational speaker, appeared on Larry King Live (CNN) in 2006, and published another book, No Victims Only Survivors (2006), about lessons for surviving.

[2] In 2019, Discovery Channel released a made-for-TV movie lightly based on the events of the shipwreck titled Capsized: Blood in the Water.