A 51-year-old woman, who had been eating hallucinogenic plants, has been jailed for 112 days after stealing a passenger ferry.

Alison Whelan had been on a two-day bender drinking Lambrini and eating the poisonous and hallucinatory deadly nightshade, when she sought shelter on the Dart Princess ferry in Dartmouth.

The court was told that when the ferry drifted from police on the shore, Ms Whelan shouted ‘I’m Jack Sparrow’ and ‘I’m a pirate’.

She told police that she only untied the ferry’s mooring ropes because she kept tripping over them and only knew the boat was moving because ‘the hotels (were) getting a long way away’.

But magistrates rejected this claim and she was found guilty of aggravated vehicle taking and was also in breach of a four-month suspended sentence.

The escapades of Ms Whelan and Tristam Locke, the friend who accompanied her, caused damage to several other boats, as the ferry bumped up the River Dart in the early hours of September 10 last year.

The 45ft vessel finally stopped in still water about a mile upstream and Ms Whelan then told police that they would have ended up in St Tropex if they had not been caught.

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