I thought I'd grabbed some footage of you threading the needle with the other crew's runaway sloop, but it doesn't seem to have saved.
However I do have this, of a near-miss cannonball, from when they caught up to us later.
Ninchilla decided to go check out an apparently-unattended sloop on an outpost; he raised the anchor and jumped off, leaving the sloop to drift off in the direction it was parked facing. He found the owners - a pair of Northern Irish lads, by sheer coincidence - drinking in the tavern, while I continued on our galleon with Mrs. Ninchilla, to a shipwreck a little bit away.
They eventually left the tavern, stumbling drunk, attempting to race to their ship, which resulted in the hilarious overheard question from one of them, "here, where did we park our ship again?". Ninchilla then attacked and killed one of them before mermaiding back to our galleon.
In the meantime, their wayward ship had passed our galleon - not far from crashing into us - and was headed for an unmarked rock formation in the middle of the sea, which has an archway in the middle. It's easy enough to sail through, even in a galleon, but whatever combination of the way they'd parked, how they'd set their sails and the wind direction once it was set adrift, their sloop managed to make it through the archway with no-one at the helm.
They soon teleported back on board and quickly realised that their tavern assailant was on our crew. Despite their initial insistence that they were friendly, they instigate a lengthy battle which we ultimately won pretty handily - at least, I never felt like we were in any danger. Most of the time was spent manoeuvring; their attempts to board us were ineffective and we managed to run them aground in the end, before killing them long enough for their ship to take on a critical mass of water.
We were pretty paranoid about every other sloop we saw tonight, though - convinced they'd come back for revenge.