Police Boat Clotheslines Itself Driving Full Speed Into Cable Ferry Line

Heads up…

Have you ever seen a boat get clotheslined? I personally hadn’t until this video came to my attention, and since everyone that was involved is reportedly okay, that means we have the green light to get a kick out of this. It’s not everyday that you see a boat accidentally hit itself with a wrestling move.

This police boat (I’m sure the captain is never going to live this down at the precinct) that was driving along in Timár, Hungary made a critical mistake that ended up causing the vessel to capsize. Somehow, the boat’s driver missed all of the warning signals and ran right into a cable ferry that was extended above the water.

As you’ll see in the clip below, the cable stayed strong (as it’s supposed to), so when the boat’s center console cab made contact with it at full speed, it stopped the police boat right in its tracks. The vessel immediately goes bow-over-stern, flipping upside down and capsizing into the water. Miraculously, the captain was able to swim to shore afterwards and survived.

If you aren’t familiar with how cable ferries work, the caption of the post explained how and why this accident came to be:

“These cables are usually only up when the ferry is in operation. Regulations require that the crew operating the ferry must be verbally requested to lower the cable by the passing vessel. The officer failed to request the cable to be lowered. There are also many warning signs, lights and flags before approaching.”

I’d like to see all of the warnings that the captain drove right past. It sounds like there should have been plenty of alarms and signage warning of the cable ferry, and if there was, that makes this brutal mistake that much worse. But it did make for quite the entertaining accident video: