UPDATE: Search off Alki Point suspended; no one missing from ferry M/V Puyallup

| Seen at sea | West Seattle news | WS breaking news

5:44 PM: Thanks for the texts. The state ferry M/V Puyallup has been involved in what Washington State Ferries describes as a “search/rescue” situation off Alki Point. The U.S. Coast Guard says someone might have gone overboard and it’s helping search. The Puyallup’s one of the biggest ferries in the system and serves the Seattle-Bainbridge run.

6:05 PM: The Puyallup is continuing to sail slowly off Alki, changing directions periodically – it’s currently heading westward again, according to VesselWatch. Our crew sees the USCG helicopter circling, too.

6:31 PM: The Puyallup finally went on to Bainbridge Island. One person on board tweets that what/who they were looking for might just have been “a seal.”

10:10 PM: The USCG says the search was officially suspended before 8 pm after Puyallup’s captain confirmed no one was missing.

newnative October 21, 2015 (11:23 pm)

Thank for following up. I was surprised at the lack of interest. I am glad that it turned out to be a false alarm.

kittritz October 22, 2015 (7:57 am)

As we waited on the Bainbridge side, to get on what would have been the Puyallup, the WS Blog was the first place(and only place, for quite some time) that we could find any news at all about what was going on. The ferry announcement was brief and not very informative. My sister and I laughed that the first news mention of this came from WSB; not from any of the other online news sources. Thanks to WSB for keeping West Seattleites stuck on Bainbridge informed of the haps!

WSB October 22, 2015 (8:18 am)

Kittritz, glad to hear we were helpful. A few of the regional news sources were tracking it – but only on Twitter, where you’d have to wade through their tweets on various other subjects to even find it, assuming you are in the relatively small percentage of people who even use Twitter. We have used social media extensively since its early days in 2007 but there’s still no substitute for publishing breaking news here on the mothership (website), where it can be reliably found, and where search engines quickly index it, etc. – TR