Actually this is quite possible, nearly happened to my brother when a wave smacked him while he was working his way up a ladder. Mangled his arm pretty good but he held on. Water, being very dense, is powerful.
If they were trying to clamber aboard an old dhow in foul weather I can see it happening. And if it happened at night in rough seas, even worse.
I would like to know what happened to that show, though, if it was carrying missiles to the Houthis from an Iranian port it should not have been allowed to go on its merry way, especially if part of the team is missing.
The dhow was sunk
For a while there during the Libyan thing, Iran was smuggling weapons via Eritrea, as I recall, and some of them ended up in Gaza.
Would be nice to know where the dhow picked up the missile parts.
In addition to the density of water, the property of hydrogen bonding, the attraction of hydrogen in one water molecule to the oxygen in another, contributes a lot to the formidability. Water molecules have 2 negative points and 2 positive points which are slightly attractive. It resembles a tetrahedron. The attraction is enough to create the effect most commonly recognized as surface tension. It’s also the force responsible for the way water forms hexagonal crystals when it freezes.