A luxury cruise ship ran aground off the coast of Tuscany, sending water pouring in through a 160-foot (50-meter) gash in the hull and forcing the evacuation of some 4,200 people from the listing vessel early Saturday, the Italian coast guard said. Three bodies were recovered from the sea, said Coast Guard Cmdr. Francesco Paolillo. There were reports that three other people had died after the accident late Friday night near the tiny Tuscan island of Giglio, but those reports were not yet confirmed, he said. Helicopters plucked to safety some 50 people who were trapped on the Costa Concordia after the liner listed so badly they couldn't launch lifeboats, Paolillo told The Associated Press in Rome by telephone from his command in the Tuscan port city of Livorno. "We were having dinner aboard when we heard a loud noise, like that of the keel being dragged over something," passenger Luciano Castro, who is a journalist, told Italian state radio early Saturday. The lights went out "and there were scenes of panic, glasses falling to the floor," Castro said. Another passenger on what was be an eight-day pleasure cruise around Mediterranean ports, Mara Parmegiani, also a journalist, told the ANSA news agency that "it was like a scene from the Titanic." Survivor Christine Hammer, from Bonn, Germany, shivered near the harbor of Porto Santo Stefano, on the mainland, after stepping off a ferry from Giglio. She was wearing elegant dinner clothes - a cashmere sweater, a silk scarf - along with a large pair of hiking boots, which a kind islander gave her after she lost her shoes in the scramble to escape, along with her passport, credit cards and phone. Hammer, 65, told The Associated Press that she was eating her first course, an appetizer of squid, on her first night aboard her first-ever cruise, which was a gift to her and her husband, Gert, from her local church where she volunteers. Suddenly, "we heard a crash. Glasses and plates fell down and we went out of the dining room and we were told it wasn't anything dangerous," she said. The passengers were instructed to put on life jackets and take to the life rafts but, Hammer said, they couldn't get into the boats, because the cruise liner was tilting so much the boats couldn't be lowered into the cold, night sea. The passengers were eventually rescued by one of several boats in the area that came to their aid. "It was terrible," Hammer said, as German and Spanish tourists were about to board buses at the port. Castro said passengers told them that some people jumped into the sea to try to swim to safety on the reefs of nearby Giglio island, although he didn't see anybody do that. On land, though, he met a young crewman from Asia who told him he swam to the reefs. As dawn neared, a painstaking search of the 290-meter (950-foot) long ship's interior was being conducted to see if anyone might have been trapped inside, Paolillo said. No one is leaning out, shouting, calling that they need help, but until the inspection is completed, we won't know. "There are some 2,000 cabins, and the ship isn't straight," Paolillo said, referring to the Concordia's dramatic more than 45-degree tilt on its right side. I'll leave it to your imagination to understand how they (the rescuers) are working as they move through it. Some Concordia crew members were still aboard to help the coast guard rescuers inspect "every millimeter" of the ship, he said.