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…