It is a perfect day on the water. The kind of day that makes you remember why you chose this work. Passengers are smiling, the sun is cutting across the water at just the right angle, and your return trip from a private charter is underway without a hitch. Then, in a matter of seconds, something shifts. A confrontation near the bow. Raised voices. A passenger, someone who boarded with a ticket and a smile, has produced a knife and driven it into the captain.
This is not a hypothetical. This violent encounter recently occurred on a passenger vessel in Hawaii. The captain was stabbed by a passenger while underway. How could this happen? Why would someone do that? The incident sent shockwaves through the maritime community, and it should. Not because violence aboard passenger vessels is common, but because the possibility now demands our attention in a way it never did before.
Crews spend hundreds of hours training for fires, man overboard drills, and mechanical failures. We prepare for the emergencies we can see coming. But what happens when the emergency is a person, and that person is standing right next to you?
The Unique Vulnerability Of The Maritime Environment
Passenger vessels present a security challenge unlike almost any other setting. You are on open water, sometimes miles from shore. Law enforcement cannot reach you in minutes. Your crew is small relative to the passenger count. And unlike an office building or a hotel, once you are underway, nobody leaves.
This combination of isolation, confined space, and limited crew creates conditions where a determined aggressor has a significant structural advantage unless you have a plan. And not just a plan that exists somewhere in a binder. A plan that has been rehearsed, internalized, and refined until your crew can execute it instinctively under pressure.
In my more than 30 years in public safety as both a paramedic and police officer, I have responded to scenes that most people only read about. What I can tell you with certainty is this: your performance during a critical incident will not rise to the level of your intentions. Rather, it will fall to the level of your training.
Situational Awareness
Your First and Best Defense
Every scenario-based training I have ever delivered, whether to law enforcement, EMS, or corporate teams, begins the same way: “Is the scene safe?” That question is not just a classroom formality. It is the foundation of survival.
Situational awareness is the continuous, deliberate process of scanning your environment, identifying anomalies, and making decisions before a situation demands them. For vessel crew, this practice begins before boarding starts and never stops. What is that passenger carrying? Who seems agitated, intoxicated, or disconnected from the group? Who keeps positioning themselves near crew members or restricted areas? Who isn’t dressed appropriately for the weather? Your brain is always working in the background, cataloging information before your conscious mind catches up. Trust those instincts. If something feels off, it probably is.
Pre-boarding screening is your first and most valuable opportunity to reduce risk. Not every threat carries a weapon; some arrive with volatile emotional states, unresolved grievances, or substance impairments that can escalate rapidly in confined environments. Crew members who interact with passengers during boarding should be empowered, and trained, to recognize behavioral warning signs and communicate concerns to the captain before the gangway is raised.
Consider a simple color-coded awareness model for your crew: Green means everything is routine and relaxed. Yellow is elevated awareness, meaning that something has drawn your attention. Orange signals a specific concern that should be communicated to other crew members. Red means the situation has crossed into an active threat. Having a shared mental framework means your team is speaking the same language before anyone says a word.
De-Escalation Before Confrontation
Most physical altercations do not begin with a weapon. They begin with words, and that means most of them can be redirected before they become something worse. De-escalation is not a soft skill. It is a tactical one.
When approaching a passenger who appears agitated or confrontational, maintain a calm, non-threatening posture. Give them space. Do not mirror aggression. Use a measured tone and open-ended language that invites dialogue rather than demands compliance. Avoid ultimatums unless the situation has already escalated beyond verbal intervention. People in a heightened emotional state often just need to feel heard before they can come down.
Equally important is crew positioning during a potential confrontation. Never approach an agitated individual alone if you can avoid it. Establish a visible crew presence without crowding; sometimes the simple awareness that multiple people are paying attention is enough to change the trajectory of an incident. Know your exits. Know where other passengers are. Know where your other crew members are.
Most physical altercations do not begin with a weapon. They begin with words, and that means most of them can be redirected before they become something worse. De-escalation is not a soft skill. It is a tactical one.
Avoid, Barricade, Confront
A Framework Built for Crisis
Those of you who have read previous issues of this publication may recognize the Avoid-Barricade-Confront framework, which Vitality Sight introduced in the context of active shooter response planning (Foghorn, December 2025). The principles apply with equal urgency to any active threat scenario, including a knife attack, a physical assault, or an unpredictable passenger who has turned violent.
Avoid.
The moment a threat is identified, the priority is distance. Get passengers moving away from the danger, calmly and with direction. People will look to your crew for cues about how serious this is. Panic is contagious; so is calm. Direct people to specific spaces. Tell them where to go, not just where not to be. Leave belongings behind. No exception.
Barricade.
When avoidance is no longer possible, fortify your position. Lock doors. Block entryways with whatever is available. Get people out of sightlines. The maritime environment creates unique barricade challenges; many spaces aboard a vessel are open or have limited locking mechanisms, so this phase of your planning deserves specific walk-through drills on your actual vessel. Identify your best barricade positions in advance. By the time you need them, it will be too late to think about where they are.
Confront.
If you have avoided and barricaded and it still was not enough, you may be left with no choice but to confront the threat. This is not a decision anyone makes lightly, and it should only be reached when the alternative is worse. Keep in mind, when that moment arrives, hesitation costs lives. Use your environment. A fire extinguisher, a boat hook, a heavy door, whatever is at hand becomes a tool. The goal is not to win a fight; it is to disrupt the attacker’s momentum long enough to create an opportunity to escape or protect others. Experience has consistently shown that when an attacker is met with unexpected, coordinated resistance, it can alter or stop their course of action entirely.
Do not underestimate the value of calm, confident presence. As I tell every group I train: “When you walk into a crisis projecting competence, you reduce the physiological fear response in everyone around you.” That matters.
Defensive Tools Aboard
What Is Legal, What Is Practical
A natural question following the Hawaii incident is whether crew members should carry defensive tools. It is a reasonable conversation, and it deserves a thoughtful answer rather than a reflexive one.
The answer depends heavily on your operational context, applicable federal maritime law, state regulations, port authority requirements, and company policy. Passenger vessel operators in U.S. waters operate under U.S. Coast Guard jurisdiction and must comply with Maritime Transportation Security Act (MTSA) security frameworks, which means that any policy around defensive tools must be developed in concert with legal counsel and your company’s security plan. What is appropriate on a commercial dive boat operating in remote waters is different from what is appropriate on a harbor excursion vessel carrying 200 passengers.
Some general principles apply broadly. Pepper spray or OC (oleoresin capsicum) spray is legal for civilian use in most U.S. jurisdictions and represents one of the most practical crew-accessible defensive options when permitted by policy. It can help create distance in a confined space, it does not require close physical contact with an assailant, and, critically for the maritime environment, it is non-lethal. Conversely, one main drawback to pepper spray is the risk of overexposure, which subjects anyone in close proximity to the effects. Crew members who carry or have access to OC spray should receive formal training on its deployment, including the effects of wind and ventilation in marine environments.
Impact tools that already exist aboard a vessel include flashlights, boat hooks, fire and extinguishers, all which can serve a dual defensive function when crew members have been trained to think of them as such. The difference between a crew member who grabs a flashlight instinctively in a crisis and one who is paralyzed in deciding what to do is almost always the difference between training and perhaps more importantly, mindset.
Whatever your organization decides about defensive tools, the policy must be written, communicated, and trained, not assumed. Every crew member should know exactly what resources are available, where they are located, and under what circumstances they may be deployed.
Rendering Aid Afloat
The Hawaii stabbing raises a question that goes beyond the incident itself: what happens to the wounded when you are miles from shore and your captain is the one who needs medical attention?
The human body can only tolerate so much blood loss before it can no longer recover. A penetrating wound to a major vessel can become fatal in minutes, and in the maritime environment, a Coast Guard medevac or EMS response is rarely minutes away. That means your crew is, by default, the medical first line. Whether they are equipped to fulfill that role is entirely a function of whether you have invested in their training beforehand.
At a minimum, every vessel crew member should be trained in bleeding control. The core skills include direct pressure application, wound packing with gauze, and tourniquet application on extremity wounds. Commercially available bleeding control kits can be mounted in accessible locations throughout a vessel and cost less than most organizations spend on a single day of administrative printing.
Beyond bleeding control, crew members should be familiar with the basics of shock management, keeping a wounded person warm and as calm as possible while awaiting advanced medical care could mean the difference between recovery and tragedy. Do not underestimate the value of calm, confident presence. As I tell every group I train: “When you walk into a crisis projecting competence, you reduce the physiological fear response in everyone around you.” That matters.
Ask nearby passengers to help. In any mass casualty situation, your crew will be quickly overwhelmed. Ask clearly and specifically: “Is anyone here a nurse, doctor, or first responder?” Most people want to help in a crisis. Give them a role and they will step up. Medical training, whether formal or informal, should be embedded into your annual preparedness calendar, not treated as optional.
Summoning Help And Managing The Scene
As soon as conditions safely allow, your distress call to the Coast Guard should be made. Provide your position, the nature of the incident, the number and severity of injuries, and your vessel’s heading and speed. Do not wait until the situation is fully resolved before making contact. Multiple crew members should attempt to communicate through every available channel simultaneously. Redundancy saves lives.
Preserving scene integrity matters too, particularly if criminal prosecution will follow. Instruct crew and passengers not to move or disturb items unnecessarily. However, it is important to note that the preservation of life will always supersede the protection of evidence. Identify any witnesses who saw the incident and keep them available and separated where possible to prevent the natural human tendency for people to compare accounts before investigators can speak with them individually. Your crew should understand these expectations before they are ever in a position to need them.
Train the plan until it is reflexive. Drill the medical response alongside the threat response. Review and update annually, or after any incident that highlights a gap.
The Time To Prepare Is Now
I have spent a career watching organizations prepare for the emergencies they think are most likely to happen—and scramble through the ones they never saw coming. I have also watched crews who trained relentlessly navigate the unthinkable with a calmness that stunned bystanders, because they had been there before in their minds, and their hands knew exactly what to do.
The Hawaii stabbing should serve as a call to action, not a cause for fear. Violence aboard a passenger vessel remains rare. What is not rare is the gap between how most maritime crews are prepared for physical threats and how prepared they need to be. That gap closes through training.
Start with a crew vulnerability assessment—walk your vessel and ask honestly: “Where are we exposed?” Then build your response plan around those findings. Train the plan until it is reflexive. Drill the medical response alongside the threat response. Review and update annually, or after any incident that highlights a gap.
The passengers who board your vessel everyday trust that the people running it have thought about the worst day imaginable and have done the work to get through it. Honor that trust. Have a plan!
Chief Learning Officer, Vitality Sight
Jarrod D. Broadway is a nationally respected leader in public safety education, translating 30 years of frontline law enforcement and EMS experience into practical, evidence-based training. As chief learning officer of Vitality Sight, he develops programs focused on wellness, resilience, and operational effectiveness across public safety and related professions. His academic background—a B.S. in Criminal Justice and M.Ed. in Adult and Continuing Education—grounds his work in both lived experience and sound learning science.