TACOMA — Skippering a 590-foot freighter in the Strait of Juan de Fuca while legally drunk gets you 14 days in prison, six months of supervised release and a six-month ban from U.S. waters.
That essentially was the sentence handed down Monday in U.S. District Court in Tacoma to Korean national Seong Ug Sin, who was arrested by a Coast Guard inspection team in the Strait last April 14.
U.S. Magistrate Judge J. Richard Creatura, who imposed the sentence, heard evidence earlier this month that Sin, who resisted the inspection team’s boarding of the STX Daisy he was commanding, had a blood-alcohol level of 0.108 percent, more than twice the legal limit.
No matter who is at the ship’s helm, U.S. law requires captains to have a blood-alcohol level of less than 0.04 percent when traversing U.S. waters.
Once the boarding team took charge of the ship, it was ordered to Port Angeles Harbor, where it anchored for several days until another captain arrived to take it to Olympia.
According to trial testimony, the Coast Guard inspection team had difficulty boarding the STX Daisy from a small inflatable boat because Sin refused to follow their instructions.
“Once on board, Capt. Sin continued to have difficulty providing the records required, and a review determined he had no usable charts of Puget Sound,” according to a statement Monday from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Seattle.
“A search of the ship determined that significant quantities of Korean whisky had been consumed by SIN and one other officer.”
Prosecutors noted during the trial that the STX Daisy’s intended route of 205 miles was through Admiralty Inlet and south on Puget Sound to Olympia to pick up a cargo of logs.
“More importantly, the defendant’s intended track crossed no less than six Washington State Ferry routes, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and many areas of high commercial shipping and recreational boating activity,” Assistant U.S. Attorneys Matthew Thomas and David Reese Jennings wrote in their sentencing memo to Creatura.
The case was investigated by the U.S. Coast Guard and was prosecuted by Thomas and Jennings along with Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Marc Zlomek, a Coast Guard lieutenant commander.
Sin faced a maximum penalty of one year in prison and a $100,000 fine.
