Drunk woman steals 45ft ferry while shouting 'I'm Jack Sparrow'
21 Sep 2012 00:01
ALISON WHELAN drank Lambrini and ate poisonous nightshade before boarding the ferry and drifting up a river on the tide.
A drunken woman stole a passenger ferry on the River Dart and shouted 'I'm Jack Sparrow' and 'I'm a pirate' as she drifted away from police on the shore
A DRUNK has been jailed after she stole a 100-seat ferry and smashed into boats, yelling, “I’m Jack Sparrow! I’m a pirate!”
Alison Whelan, 51, boarded the 45ft Dart Princess with a friend after a two-day bender, where she got drunk on Lambrini and ate poisonous deadly nightshade, which causes hallucinations.
She undid the mooring ropes in the early hours and drifted up a river on the tide, bashing into other boats “like a pinball machine”.
Whelan taunted police, shouting: “What are you going to do now?” and “I believe this is out of your jurisdiction!”
Thirty police, a lifeboat crew, Coastguards and paramedics had to be called.
And when the cops finally arrested her after an hour when the ferry came to rest in calm water, she told them: “We’d have ended up in St Tropez if we hadn’t been caught.”
Magistrates jailed her for 122 days for aggravated vehicle taking. She had denied the charge.
Whelan, of Paignton, Devon, stole the double-decker ferry in nearby Dartmouth a year ago.
She had called an ambulance, claiming to have had a seizure. Medics found her drunk and rambling, and one of them was pushed over by her friend, Tristam Locke.
The medics called police and went to their vehicle to wait, then looked in their mirror and saw the ferry drifting away from shore.
Whelan told police she untied “two or three” of the mooring ropes because she kept tripping over them.
She said she then felt the boat moving and “noticed the hotels getting a long way away”.
The ferry suffered £1500 of damage when it hit two other boats, which were also damaged. Torquay magistrates heard Whelan and Locke could have been killed on rocks if the tide on the River Dart had been going out at the time.
Locke was fined £100 last year for assaulting an ambulance technician.
