The PinePhone doesn't have the performance, battery life, or application ecosystem to be a primary phone. LineageOS or one of the other de-googled Android distributions are worth checking out.
Awesome geography knowledge here! This was fundamentally a weather and engineering issue though. There’s just no way to get to safety when you realize the storm is too much for you in a slow and clumsy craft like this. You have to make the decision not to go out at all if the forecast is potentially dangerous. I’ve never seen weather swells on these small lakes large enough to swamp anything (big speedboat wakes are another story) so I would imagine the wind caught the awning and tipped it enough to take on water. Then the awning drowned everyone when they couldn’t overpower the bouyancy of their jackets to get out from under it. Bad decision by the driver to make the trip caused the accident, and the life-jacket policy combined with the awning design made it fatal.