A woman and her child were plucked from the Baltic Sea on Thursday after the youngster fell from a ferry and the frantic mother jumped in afterwards, Swedish rescue services said.
The Stena Spirit, en route from Gdynia in Poland to Karlskrona in Sweden, alerted rescue services after the incident.
"First we received a report that one person had fallen overboard, then it turned out to be two," said Lars Blom, chief of rescue operations at the Swedish Maritime Administration's Joint Rescue Co-ordination Centre (JRCC).
"The child had fallen into the sea and the woman had jumped in after," Blom told AFP.
According to Swedish media reports, the child is seven years old.
Blom told AFP that both helicopters and boats had been deployed to aid in the search, after they received the report at 4:20 pm (1420 GMT).
It took about an hour before the two were located and they were then taken to a hospital in Karlskrona, though Blom said their condition was unknown.
According to the Swedish Maritime Administration the woman was found by a helicopter while the child was found by a rescue boat.
