There are bad days on the water, and then there is whatever happened near Steilacoom, Washington on the afternoon of May 1st. Around 5 p.m., a 911 caller reported a boat traveling at high speed with its sole occupant apparently passed out at the helm. No one steering. No one watching. Just a motorboat doing what boats do when physics is left in charge and judgment has left the building.
What followed was the kind of sequence that makes experienced mariners wince. The unmanned vessel veered close to two ferries before crashing into a large rock near the Steilacoom Ferry Dock, southwest of Tacoma. Bystanders on the dock caught the whole thing on their phones, and the footage is precisely as alarming as it sounds. The boat, with no hand on the wheel and no apparent awareness of anything happening around it, threaded a needle between two ferries before gravity and geology had the final word.
After the crash, the boat came to rest in a nearly vertical position against the rocks, and the man was ejected from his seat into the water, which, in context, might have been the luckiest part of the whole ordeal. He climbed out onto the rocks under his own power. By the time first responders arrived, the man was conscious, but trying to fall asleep, which tells you just about everything you need to know about the afternoon he had been having.
The Pierce County Sheriff’s Office Marine Services Unit found alcohol bottles littered 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, for its part, 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.
A Witness Who Expected the Worst
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, a man whose job requires knowing what goes 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 just how close this came to being a very different story.
The Ferry Factor
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 anything resembling seamanship.
Ferry delays were reported as a result of the incident, which is the most orderly footnote to what could have been an outright disaster.
What the Law Calls It
In Washington state, operating a vessel under the influence carries penalties similar to 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 was not shy 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.
The Broader Problem on the Water
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 jet ski 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 on the water 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.