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A man jumped off a cruise ship as a joke. Royal Caribbean has banned him for life.

January 18, 2019 at 11:02 a.m. EST
Nick Naydev and his friends were banned from sailing with Royal Caribbean after Naydev jumped off its ship while it was docked Jan. 11, in Nassau, Bahamas. (Video: Konstantin Kryachun via Storyful)

The last thing Nick Naydev heard before he leaped off the 11th floor balcony of a cruise ship was the laughter of his friends recording him.

“Dude!” one roared as Naydev teetered on the railing. He added an expletive.

Naydev turned back briefly to smile at the camera and then he was off, limbs flailing as he plummeted more than 100 feet into the blue waters below.

The video didn’t show Naydev’s impact, but he survived — and posted the footage to Instagram last Friday.

“Full send,” he wrote in the caption.

What Naydev didn’t reveal was that his 10-second stunt got him booted from that Royal Caribbean cruise — and all others in the future.

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“This was stupid and reckless behavior and he and his companions have been banned from ever sailing with us again,” Royal Caribbean spokesman Owen Torres told The Washington Post in an email. “We are exploring legal action.”

Torres did not answer additional questions about the incident, including when or where it occurred or whether officials from the cruise line had contacted police.

Naydev told Fox News 13 that the cruise ship was docked at the time in Nassau, Bahamas, and that Royal Caribbean security officials contacted local authorities to remove the group from the ship immediately after the incident.

“Fortunately, the police thought the whole situation was amusing and did not proceed to file any legal actions,” Naydev told the news station.

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Still, Naydev, who lives in Vancouver, Wash., said they were forced to make their own way home from the Bahamas afterward. In the comments on his Instagram post, he told others his neck and tailbone hurt after the jump and that he could “barely walk” for three days. A plane ticket from Nassau to Miami cost him about $200, he added.

“I did not think this through before I jumped,” Naydev said in a statement to Fox 13 News. “My idea was this would be a good laugh for my friends, and I would just swim back to shore and continue my vacation and never thought this would be this serious.”

The video divided Instagram commenters, who have called him a “legend,” an “idiot” and everything in between.

“I hope I don’t inspire anybody to do this because it is very dangerous,” Naydev told KGW 8 News. “I mean, don’t think this is a joke. The last thing I want to do is feel responsible that because of me I inspired somebody to do this.”

His post, however, remained on Instagram as of Friday morning. And Konstantin Kryachun, his friend who recorded the video, did not appear to express remorse in an interview with Yahoo Lifestyle.

“He’s jumped from those kind of heights before, and we didn’t really care about the consequences with the cruise company,” Kryachun told the news site. “We just wanted to get a video of it and make it go viral.”

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