Functional thinking is essential for maritime vocational college students, particularly when solving mathematical problems related to navigation safety. However, limited studies have explored functional thinking among vocational maritime students. This study aims to explore the functional thinking processes of maritime vocational college students with high mathematical abilities in solving mathematical problems. This study involved two of forty second-semester maritime vocational college students in the Deck Officer Program in Indonesia, selected for their similar characteristics of high mathematical abilities and the highest intensity of functional thinking emergence. Data on functional thinking processes were explored in-depth through semi-structured interviews based on problem-solving tasks. This study found that students with similar characteristics exhibited all aspects of the functional thinking process--identifying problems, representing data, finding recursive patterns, finding covariational relationships, finding correspondence relationships, and evaluating generalized rules. However, they demonstrated different approaches to creating solutions when solving mathematical problems. This difference was evident in their heuristic strategies and ability to abstract real-world situations into general functional rules. The findings suggest that students' engagement in functional thinking processes with multiple approaches is triggered by completing a task that contains representations of functional situations. This task bridges the gap between maritime and mathematics by integrating navigation safety and linear interpolation to equip students to become professional seafarers in the future. Educators are suggested to adapt tasks to similar contexts and characteristics to improve students' functional thinking. Future studies should explore tasks with diverse representations and the role of abstraction in functional thinking approaches.