While a few secondhand accounts have emerged about what happened aboard the Volare last Tuesday, bringing a quick and tragic end to a memorial cruise for 20 family members and friends, today we get a firsthand account from one of the survivors.

Stefanie Gollmer spoke with KPIX over the weekend about her experience aboard the boat, which was being captained by her uncle, John Boisa, and where, moments before the boat tipped over and sank, she had been chatting with her mother, Carol Boisa. Gollmer, a nurse based in Palo Alto, was one of the 20 assorted family members and friends who gathered to mark an anniversary of the death of her cousin, Maria, who died by suicide in 2015.

"Everyone was just [having] fun, jovial, fun conversations," Gollmer tells KPIX. "There was nothing amiss, nothing."

We had heard from another survivor, secondhand, last week that there were four women in an interior cabin when the boat went down, three of whom appearently died. But according to Gollmer, she was also in the cabin talking with her mom, meaning there were five in total.

"Mom and I were sitting on the deck for a little bit and just enjoying the views," she tells KPIX. "We got splashed a few times and then kind of decided, let's go inside."

She describes to the station the quick turn that things took. "There was one really far tilt this way, and we all went, 'Oh,' and then we all started going this way. Then we just realized my mom just went down. My aunt slid past me in a chair, and then realized, we're not going back."

As the boat began taking on water and sinking, Gollmer tells KPIX she managed to survive by swimming out of a cabin window, and she says she banged her head several times in the process, ending up with a bloody wound — witnesses last week had described seeing a woman bleeding from the head among the survivors.

She says she became alarmed as people were being rescued and she did not see her mom among them. Gollmer said in her interview that she does not believe her mom survived.

Carol Boisa, Gollmer's aunt Jackie Boisa, and a friend of the late Maria, 58-year-old Tondra Madruga, were identified as the three initially missing after the Volare sank. Madruga's body was then found Thursday floating west of Treasure Island, and the other two women likely both were trapped in the cabin and went down with the boat.

79-year-old Clifford Boisa, who was married to Jackie, was confirmed dead on the day of the sinking, after he was initially among the survivors.

On Friday, the SFPD located the wreckage on the Bay floor via sonar imaging, but a salvage effort is being complicated by multiple factors, not the least of which is the depth of the Bay in this location, which is about 12o feet.

Following the KPIX broadcast, there was no doubt plenty of response, but Gollmer added that she wanted to pay tribute to her late mother by finding a new home for her elderly cat, Miss Tina, who originally belonged to one of Gollmer's now deceased patients.

Previously: Owner Had Taken Capsized Boat on Open Ocean to San Diego

Photo courtesy of Stefanie Gollmer