A man is under arrest after the Coast Guard says he sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge after refusing to allow his boat to be boarded.
A man is under arrest after the Coast Guard says he sailed away after refusing to allow his boat to be boarded before getting involved in an altercation with a Coast Guard boarding party.
Coast Guard Petty Officer 1st Class Thomas McKenzie told SFBay the trouble started around 3:30 p.m Sunday when the crew of a Coast Guard patrol board approached a man on a 45-foot sailboat as it was moored off Sausalito.
The Coast Guard asked to board the boat so the crew could conduct a routine inspection. But instead of allowing the Coast Guard crew to board, McKenzie says the captain of the sailboat cut his mooring line and sailed away.
The patrol boat followed the sailboat as the man — the only person on board — sailed the boat away from Sausalito, under the Golden Gate Bridge and out of San Francisco Bay.
The Coast Guard called in one of its cutters, and eventually a combined boarding party from the cutter and from the patrol boarded the sailboat about 2-1/2 miles off Ocean Beach.
When the boarding party got on the sailboat, the man was described as “non-cooperative” and was involved in what McKenzie described as a “minor altercation” with the crew.
The man — who has not been named — was taken into custody around 9 p.m. His boat was towed back to port.
It’s not known why the man refused to allow the Coast Guard to inspect the boat, which has the authority to board vessels for inspections.
McKenzie says usually the inspections are uneventful with Coast Guard crews checking on safety issues and other routine matters.
The CG is now a fully militarized service that boards SF Bay boats for practice. Boardings have nothing to do with safety (they never board falling-apart anchor outs) or “other routine matters.” Citizens out for a day sail have to put up with young, armed, and usually tattooed community college dropouts stomping around on their boats. A friend, with his wife and two children, about to duck behind a tanker on their way to the city front, were cut off by a CG boat screaming that they were to keep their distance, while some prick on the bow pointed a 35 cal machine gun at them. An American family, threaten to be cut down by our wonderful “armed forces.” When I want to applaud that CG, the best I can do is a golf clap.