A 26-year-old motorboat skipper from Vorarlberg has been sentenced to 12 months in prison, eight of them suspended, over the death of a 57-year-old woman on the Austrian part of Lake Constance. In October 2025 his Windy 33 ran over her almost stationary sailing boat near the Rhine delta. He had been distracted by his phone and, at the moment of impact, had turned round with his back to the direction of travel. On 11 August 2026 a jury at the Feldkirch Regional Court unanimously rejected a murder charge and convicted him of grossly negligent homicide.
What happened off the Rhine delta
It was Saturday 11 October 2025, around 15.35, off the Austrian shore between Fussach and Gaissau. The lake was calm and the wind had died by mid-afternoon, according to German boating magazine float. The sailing boat, a seven-metre wooden Waarschip 710 built in 1967, was hardly moving. Its owners, a Bavarian couple, were heading home.
The motorboat was a Windy 33, an express cruiser of about 10 metres, with the skipper and three friends aboard. They were heading to Konstanz for dinner, ORF Vorarlberg reported.
The woman's 58-year-old husband saw the boat a long way off, coming fast and straight at them. The couple waved and shouted. Nobody could be seen at the helm. In his statement to police, quoted by float, he said it came at them "like a ghost ship" (quotes translated from German). Police said it hit the sailing boat without slowing down; according to the APA news agency, it rode up over it.
The husband jumped into the water seconds before the impact and was seriously injured. The propeller struck his wife's leg, and she died at the scene. The four on the motorboat were unhurt; a crisis team looked after them.
Why the first trial turned into a murder case
The first hearing, on 21 April 2026, dealt with grossly negligent homicide. The prosecution put the motorboat's speed at 60 km/h, an expert's estimate based on the damage, against a limit of 40 km/h. The skipper said he had been doing 30 to 35 km/h, had looked ahead the whole time and had never seen the sailing boat. "Why I didn't see that boat, I still can't explain," he told the court.
According to the expert, he had at least six minutes in clear weather to spot it. "For six minutes you watched the lake and drove dead straight, without any reaction, at a sailing boat with its sail up," the judge told him. "I can't even say any more what is grossly negligent here. We have to assume conditional intent in any case."
In Austrian law, conditional intent means seeing a death as a possible result and accepting it. That is murder, with ten years to life and a jury trial, against up to three years for grossly negligent homicide. The judge ruled her court not competent, and in May prosecutors charged the skipper with murdering the wife and attempting to murder the husband.
What the skipper admitted before the jury
The prosecutor backed away from the charge in the opening minutes of the jury trial. "I have to admit straight away that I am not convinced it was murder," the prosecutor said. "I think he simply did not keep a proper watch on the water."
With a new lawyer, the skipper changed his account. He had been taking photos on his phone, sending them and trying to book a berth in Konstanz, and kept turning round to talk to his friends. When the boats hit, he had turned round and had his back to the course. "I did not watch the lake all the time," he said. Asked by the husband's lawyer whether he would have seen the sailing boat had he looked ahead, he said: "Pretty sure."
The presiding judge found the first expert report, the source of the 60 km/h estimate, unconvincing and ordered a new one. "I saw an empty boat," the husband told the court. He could not bring himself to describe the collision itself, so the judge read out his statement. The husband's lawyer said the skipper had not looked at the water for at least four minutes, and argued for gross negligence.
How the sentence is made up
The jury convicted the skipper of grossly negligent homicide, grossly negligent bodily harm to the husband and grossly negligent endangering of his passengers. Under Austrian law, when part of such a sentence is suspended, the part actually served must be between one month and a third of the term. Four months out of 12 is that upper limit. The presiding judge said he might serve those four months under electronic monitoring, a decision that rests with the authorities. ORF Vorarlberg reported that he must also pay €5,000 to the woman's relatives. A civil claim for damages for pain and suffering is still to be heard, float says.
That day, ORF and the APA news agency reported that the verdict was not yet final: the skipper waived his right to appeal, and the prosecution made no statement. By float's account, updated on 25 September, it is now final.
What the lake rules say about speed and phones
Germany, Austria and Switzerland share one set of shipping regulations for Lake Constance. The limit is 40 km/h, about 21.6 knots. Sailing boats have right of way over other vessels, with a few exceptions. The rules say nothing specific about using a phone at the helm.
In 2025 the lake's water police counted 146 accidents, YACHT magazine reported, and named a lack of care by skippers as the main cause.
Photo: Asurnipal / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: ORF Vorarlberg, APA, float, BOOTE, YACHT, SegelReporter, Bodensee-Schifffahrts-Ordnung.
