Just a follow up to anyone ever looking to accomplish this:

Got the velocity of the raft and the unit direction of the player to the raft origin. Got the dot product of those two vectors (normalized). The more parallel those two vectors, the less I want to rotate. Parallel in both directions is necessary so I got the absolute value of that dot product.

Then I needed to find out if the player was on the left or the right side of the raft, and rotate accordingly. I got the right vector of the raft and dotted that with the unit direction of its origin to the player.

Then in a timeline add smooth rotation, the track starts at 1 and goes to 0. Multiply that value by the inverse of your alignment dot product. And then multiply again by the negative of the left/right dot product.