Marine arrested by police

A 20-year-old Marine from Camp Pendleton was arrested early Monday morning for stealing a pair of dinghies in Newport Beach, a spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff’s harbor patrol said.

Around 2:15 a.m., Seth Charlson of Washington state was arrested with a pair of inflatable boats that had been reported stolen from the Balboa area earlier in the night. Sgt. David Ginther of the harbor patrol said that Charlson made off in one dinghy and then took a second one soon after, possibly because the first one didn’t go fast enough.

When police encountered Charlson, Ginther said, he had been drinking and appeared to have been abandoned by a group of friends. The theft of the boats, he noted, may have been an attempt to get home rather than to get rich.

“At first, we were thinking he kind of got abandoned by some of his buddies, so we’re not really sure what he was planning,” Ginther said. “Maybe trying to get somewhere, we’re not sure. It might have been to keep [the boats], but it might have just been for transportation.”

Charlson was booked into Orange County Jail in Santa Ana with a $20,000 bail.

The first boat theft, Ginther said, occurred on the Balboa Peninsula. Shortly after, a family called the police from Balboa Island, saying they had woken up on their boat to hear someone stealing their dinghy. The family’s cat was inside the dinghy when it sped off.

When the harbor patrol located Charlson, he had two boats with him. The family identified their boat and cat on the scene, and the owner of the first boat claimed it later on Monday. Ginther said Charlson had been charged with theft, though he did not have enough alcohol in his system to be charged with operating a boat under the influence.

Ginther noted that after the Balboa Ferry shuts down at night, people occasionally try to steal vessels to make it to the other side. Still, he said, Monday’s arrest was a puzzling case.

“Whether he was trying to take the boat back to Camp Pendleton, we don’t know,” Ginther said. “It’s a long way there.”