Haven't seen this mentioned yet:

Tourists swim 14 hours after boat sinks

I'm curious what others think, since it seems that the people that didn't follow what I thought were the general rules (stay together, stay with boat) ended up surviving better.

This may simply be an example of the fact that chance plays a role in survival just as judgement does. You can do everything wrong and end up OK, and you can do everything right and not survive.

Were the survivors just lucky in this case? Or is there an argument that they made the right decision to swim for it?