Passed Out at the Wheel: Washington Man Arrested After Driverless Speedboat Nearly Collides With Two Ferries
There are bad days on the water, and then there is whatever unfolded near Steilacoom, Washington on the afternoon of May 1st. Around 5 p.m., a 911 caller reported a motorboat traveling at high speed with its sole occupant apparently passed out at the wheel. No one steering. No one watching. Just a boat following the laws of physics while judgment evaporated.
What followed was the kind of sequence that makes experienced mariners wince. The unmanned vessel veered close to two ferries before smashing into a large rock near the Steilacoom Ferry Dock, southwest of Tacoma. Bystanders on the dock captured the entire thing on their phones, and the footage is every bit as alarming as it sounds. The boat, with no hand on the throttle and no awareness of its surroundings, threaded a needle between two ferries before gravity and geology had the final word.
After the crash, the boat came to rest almost vertically against the rocks, and the man was ejected from his seat into the water — which, given the circumstances, might have been the luckiest part of the ordeal. He climbed out onto the rocks under his own power. By the time first responders arrived, he was conscious but struggling to stay awake, which tells you most of what you need to know about the afternoon he was having.
The Pierce County Sheriff's Office Marine Services Unit found alcohol bottles scattered throughout the boat, and the man smelled of intoxicants. The 21-year-old was taken into custody on suspicion of boating under the influence. The boat itself was impounded and required both a flatbed tow and a large wrecker to extract from the rocks. It was not having a better day than its owner.
Department of Corrections ferry captain Michael Godat happened to be on the dock when the boat came screaming through. He heard the thud of impact and rushed over with a friend to help the boater, who told them he had no idea where he was or what had happened.
“I don’t know, I just woke up here,” the man reportedly said. Godat, whose job demands familiarity with what can go wrong on the water, admitted he was bracing for catastrophe.
“When I responded, I was expecting to see mass trauma. It’s just amazing that you could walk away from something like that,” he said. That reaction, from someone with professional experience around marine incidents, gives you a useful sense of how close this came to being a very different story.
The ferries in this equation are not small vessels or inconsequential bystanders. The Steilacoom ferry route has operated since 1922 and serves Anderson Island and Ketron Island in southern Puget Sound, carrying both passengers and vehicles. A loaded ferry is not something a speedboat bounces off of without serious consequences for everyone involved. The fact that the boat passed close to two of them without contact is the sort of outcome that owes more to luck than to any semblance of seamanship.
Ferry delays were reported as a result of the incident — the most orderly footnote to what could have been an outright disaster. In Washington state, operating a vessel under the influence carries penalties similar to a DUI on land, and for good reason. Boating under the influence, or BUI, is treated as a serious criminal offense, and the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office did not mince words about the message they wanted to send. The sheriff’s office noted that the incident serves as a timely reminder not to drink and boat, particularly as the 2026 boating season has just opened. Whether that message lands with the people who need it most remains, as always, an open question.
This incident did not happen in a vacuum. Reckless boating has been a recurring issue on Pacific Northwest and California waterways in recent years. Just last summer, a boater at Discovery Bay, California was caught on video chasing a jet skier inside a harbor before running over the operator and crashing into multiple docked boats. Witnesses there described it as something out of a movie and noted they had been seeing more problems from boaters unfamiliar with local conditions. The throughline in most of these incidents is depressingly consistent: someone who should not be operating a vessel is operating one anyway, and it falls to bystanders, first responders, and a generous helping of fortune to keep the body count at zero.
The Steilacoom incident ended without serious injury to anyone. That outcome was not earned. It was survived.
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