Doug Liman Blog Birthday Pie With a Side of Boat Crash

Share on Facebook posted 08-06-09 by Doug Liman

Hi, Ninjas,

Many of you may not know that I have a sailboat that I share with my friend Avram Ludwig. So last night, Laura Moses (my former assistant/development person) was going to bake me a pie for my birthday, and we were going to go on a dessert sail with her friends and mine: Avram, Mark from Off Hollywood (a post house I work with), a few other people, and my dog and Natalie Portman’s dog, Whiz Bang. We sailed from Pier 40, where we keep the bridge, to Ellis Island, and around midnight we started heading back to Houston street (I’m wiring my whole apartment myself, and I wanted to get back and do a little).

A little around 1 in the morning we starting getting close to Houston when I saw a light in the Hudson, and we thought it was a kayak or maybe a motorboat; we couldn’t really tell. All of a sudden we saw a ship bearing down on it, and we said, “Is that boat in the way of that ship?!” It all happened so fast — the ship just ran over it! All four people went under the ship, three had jumped out of the boat, and one dove into the cabin of the motorboat. So we started the engine of our boat, which was under sail power at the time, raced over there, called 911. How any of them survived is beyond me. Particularly the one who had dived into the cabin of the boat! She was cut, bruised, and in shock (and pretty cute). There were two men and two women. When we got to them, the current was taking them out toward sea, and we pulled the two women and one guy out of the water, but the guy whose boat it was swam over to his boat, which at this point was almost all the way sunk with about 2 feet of it sticking out of the water, and he was yelling: “I’m not leaving my boat I just refurbished engines on it for $18,000. Take my passengers to shore.” They had just survived, by a miracle, a massive boat crash and he’s concerned with saving his trashed boat! This is the reason movies can suck. In the movies the hero’s always like, “Save the women!,” and that’s not how human beings behave in a crisis. Human beings are irrational. Well, there was no way we were leaving him there, so we just had to wait. It took the harbor police and the Coast Guard about 25 minutes to get there. When they showed up, there were helicopters and boats swarming all around. We took the three people to shore and an ambulance met us. We left the one guy with the Coast Guard, and as we were leaving we heard on the radio that they’d convinced him finally to get off his all-but-sunk boat and onto the Coast Guard boat. I totally understand — it’s so expensive to refurbish the motors of a boat; I just had to do it myself, and I totally relate to this guy’s being upset about how much money he’d just spent on his boat. And ironically, I heard the next day that they were in fact able to save his motors, so it turns out he wasn’t so irrational after all.

I guess what happened was they were drifting in the shipping channel of the river, and when they saw the ship the guy was frantically grabbing the keys trying to start the boat, and he was panicking, as you would, and he couldn’t get it started, so he just turned and yelled, “Jump!” just before they got hit. And three of the people jumped out of the boat while one — this woman wasn’t a very good swimmer — jumped into the cabin. This 30-foot motorboat literally got crushed under this massive ship. We watched it pop back up to the surface about five seconds after the ship had passed. The Coast Guard guys said she she should stop on the way to the hospital and get a lottery ticket she was so lucky.

Avram has a technique of setting autopilot and going to sleep on overnight sails. I’m a little more nervous about that now.

This has more of the story: Daily News