Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy Read online

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  CONTENTS

  PART I

  Chapter 1: The Speech

  Chapter 2: The Storm

  Chapter 3: A Voyage with Purpose

  Chapter 4: The Captain

  Chapter 5: A Happy, Happy Crew

  Chapter 6: Becoming Robin Walbridge

  Chapter 7: Joshua’s Story

  Chapter 8: A Vigilant Watch

  Chapter 9: Keeping Bounty Afloat

  Chapter 10: A Leaky Boat?

  Chapter 11: From Trucks to Tall Ships

  Chapter 12: An Aging Actor

  Chapter 13: Past Her Prime, Lost Her Prime

  Chapter 14: Mutiny in Her Blood

  PART II

  Chapter 15: Alone

  Chapter 16: Landing the Unquestioned Captain

  Chapter 17: Questioning the Captain

  Chapter 18: Oh, the Water

  Chapter 19: Problems Everywhere

  Chapter 20: Unseen Punches

  Chapter 21: The Dangerous Hours

  Chapter 22: A Rushed and Urgent Call

  Chapter 23: The First Raft

  Chapter 24: The Second Raft

  PART III

  Chapter 25: One Small Strobe All Alone

  Chapter 26: A Swirling Vortex

  Chapter 27: Like We’ve Flown Back in Time

  Chapter 28: Catapulted

  Chapter 29: Flipped Like a Pancake

  Chapter 30: Running out of Time

  Chapter 31: Held by the Sea

  Coast Guard Investigation

  Afterword

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  About Michael J. Tougias and Douglas A. Campbell

  To all the librarians who have helped my writing and speaking careers. Our public libraries are national treasures.

  MICHAEL TOUGIAS

  To those who loved Robin Walbridge and Claudene Christian and who now grieve.

  DOUG CAMPBELL

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE SPEECH

  The autumn afternoon was perfect, untroubled on the New London, Connecticut, waterfront. The rippled river water sparkled; the blue sky was washed clean as fresh laundry. The late-October sun came low behind the woman’s right shoulder, casting sharp, long shadows before her. For twenty years Beth Robinson had been part of the engrossing world of tall ships and she still thought, This is why we go to sea, days like this. She walked onto the City Pier, where, ahead of her, a crew of sailors hustled to their assignments on deck below the three towering masts of the historic square-rigger Bounty. Robinson, a relief skipper on a nearby schooner, knew the ship, a 180-foot, fifty-year-old wooden ship—an expanded replica of the original 1784 ship HMS Bounty. She made a casual inspection, passing the soaring sixty-foot bowsprit, thrust upward toward shore, before reaching the freshly painted black hull. She knew Bounty’s captain, too, Robin Walbridge, and thought her friend of two decades had his boat looking pretty good.

  Robinson had come to see Walbridge for just a passing hello.

  “Hi, Captain,” she called out.

  Walbridge gave a similar greeting—nothing elaborate. He, like Captain Robinson, was native New England stock, a taciturn man who saw eloquence in one’s work and ideals, not in words or attire.

  Walbridge mentioned that Bounty was preparing to leave port, but the exchange was brief as the captain was focused on a serious problem and had urgent business to attend to.

  During the day, several of Walbridge’s fifteen subordinates had received text messages or phone calls from family and friends who knew the ship was set to embark on its annual southward voyage, heading for a winter dock. The callers were concerned about a hurricane, brewing in the Bahamas and heading north, named Sandy.

  A twenty-five-year-old crewman, Joshua Scornavacchi, had received a text message from his mother in Pennsylvania. She was worried about the storm. “I’ll be fine,” he replied, adding that Bounty had been through rough weather before.

  Another twenty-five-year-old got a worried text message from her mother on Cape Cod. The young woman, a maritime academy graduate, was not concerned, though, nor were most of the other crew members, many of them considered “green” sailors as far as experience aboard Bounty was concerned.

  However, among the more experienced crew, there were worries. The chief mate, John Svendsen, forty-one, now in his third season aboard Bounty, had spoken earlier with his junior officers. The third mate, Dan Cleveland, on board Bounty five years, and the bosun, Laura Groves, on board three years, had doubts about sailing offshore toward a hurricane. The second mate, Matt Sanders, was moderately concerned. The conversation convinced Svendsen that he needed to talk with Walbridge and present the captain with options.

  Svendsen knew that the New London City Pier, which projects out from the west bank of the Thames River, would be exposed to heavy weather by way of Long Island Sound, which lay two miles south via a straight path of open water. Bounty was moored to the exposed south side of the dock, where the fetch to the Sound invites trouble. Svendsen knew that if Bounty remained where she was and Sandy arrived, the storm’s winds and surge could race up that fairway, presenting the possibility of serious damage to the ship.

  Svendsen, who had become aware of the hurricane two days earlier, thought there were better choices than heading offshore. Bounty could simply sail farther up the Thames to where the US Coast Guard Academy’s tall ship Eagle had docked. Bounty could sail east, to where the city of New Bedford, Massachusetts, had a hurricane barrier—a stone wall across its deep harbor. Bounty could also sail farther north, to Boston. Svendsen even thought sailing toward Bermuda, 650 miles to the southeast, might be an option.

  • • •

  From the moment the crew awoke on Thursday, October 25, 2012, Bounty had been crammed with activity. The crew was preoccupied with more important considerations than their coming departure. Company was expected—special visitors. Bounty’s owner, a wealthy Long Island businessman, had invited the crew of the navy’s newest submarine, the Mississippi, for a daysail aboard Bounty on Long Island Sound.

  Soon after daybreak, the crew was busy preparing. One team washed the decks. Two hoses were neatly stowed on deck: one to reach forward to the bow, and the other to extend to the stern. On the ship’s third and lowest deck, down a set of stairs and then a ladder, two diesel engines powered electric generators whose most important function was to run the electric bilge pumps that kept the ship afloat. Without pumps, like any other leaky wooden boat, Bounty would eventually sink.

  Below the floorboards of the third deck, which housed crew quarters and fuel and water tanks, pipes and hoses extended from the two pumps to the bilge space. The hoses sucked up water in the bilge space and discharged it amidships back into the sea. But the process could also be reversed and seawater could be sucked up into the deck-washing hoses. As the team used this seawater that bright autumn morning, one team member noticed something different, troubling. Instead of a powerful stream, the washdown hoses gave him barely enough spray to wet the deck boards. Normally, the pressure in the hoses would be too high if some of the water wasn’t diverted overboard. Yet this morning, even using the full ca
pacity of the pump, the crewman could not fully charge the hose. He mentioned the problem to his two teammates, who seemed unconcerned, and then reported his observation to the ship’s engineer. In the end, the pump problem was ignored.

  • • •

  The sun was high when the crew from the Mississippi arrived at the City Pier. Bounty’s owner, Robert Hansen, and her captain, Robin Walbridge, greeted them. Then Bounty’s crew cast off the dock lines and, engines running, pointed her lancelike, uptilted bowsprit south on the Thames.

  Bounty’s crew led the visiting submarine sailors as they climbed aloft in the 111-foot-high rope rigging, teaching them how to set the sails in a light breeze. For a while, the canvas billowed white and full until the wind died. Bounty circled the Ledge Lighthouse, a redbrick, two-story cube just off the mouth of the Thames, drifted in place for a while, and about midafternoon motored back to the City Pier.

  Walbridge made a point to catch one of his guests—New London dockmaster Barbara Neff—before she went ashore. He told her that although Bounty had originally been scheduled to spend another night in the city, he had decided to leave that evening due to the oncoming hurricane. He explained that sailing around the hurricane could give Bounty a good boost of following winds after the storm passed.

  Neff was mildly disappointed. When she got ashore, she and some others planned to set up a Halloween corn maze on the waterfront—she thought that Bounty’s tall masts in the background would add a nice touch. However, having been acquainted with Walbridge for over fifteen years, she knew him to be low-key and intelligent, never cocky or pompous, and she felt his explanation for the change of plans both understandable and reassuring. She trusted his judgment.

  As Walbridge talked with Neff, his crew accepted an invitation to visit the Mississippi. Walbridge joined them, but was among the first to return to Bounty, sometime before five o’clock.

  Now Chief Mate Svendsen saw his chance. Asking Walbridge to join him on the dock and away from the rest of the crew, he told the skipper about the apprehension among the junior officers.

  “There are people concerned about the hurricane,” Svendsen told his boss. “I want to discuss options, including staying here.”

  Walbridge listened to his chief mate, as he always did, then offered his own thoughts. “A ship is safer at sea than in port,” he told Svendsen, and said he would hold a meeting with the crew and explain his plan.

  At about five o’clock everyone returned from the visit on the Mississippi. Often a recluse aboard Bounty, Walbridge nevertheless conducted an all-hands meeting every day, so this muster was far from unusual. Walbridge used these musters as teaching opportunities, for in part he saw his purpose aboard Bounty as an educator. He had come from a family of teachers as far back as his grandparents and some of his great-grandparents.

  This muster would be different, though. Walbridge, celebrating his sixty-third birthday that afternoon—a low-key event he marked by splurging on a bottle of ginger ale—climbed atop a small deckhouse called the Nav Shack (below its roof were the ship’s navigational equipment and chart table) and in his quiet way began talking.

  In retrospect, this moment seemed preordained. Even as a boy, Walbridge thought through his options in silence, arriving at a decision well before those around him realized there were choices to be made. Similarly on this afternoon, he had decided, selected a path—his path—and he did not seek suggestions. Certainly there were alternative routes for Bounty in the days to come. Yet, like the chess player he’d been for fifty-five years, the captain considered all those moves and dismissed them.

  “There is a hurricane headed this way,” he told his fifteen shipmates with the falling sun at his back. “It’s called Frankenstorm. There will be sixty-knot winds and rough seas. The boat’s safer being out at sea than being buckled up at a dock somewhere.” Then he laughed a little and, as if in jest, added, “You guys will probably be safer if you take a train inland.” The levity ended there.

  “I know that some of you have received phone calls and text messages from worried friends and family. If anyone wants to go ashore, now is the time. I won’t think any less of you. Come back to Bounty when the weather clears up.”

  No one budged, nor did anyone speak.

  “My plan is to sail south by east, to take some time and see what the storm is going to do.” He told them about hurricanes Bounty had encountered under his command. The ship had made it through then, and she would do so now.

  Still, no one spoke. Chief Mate Svendsen, who had given his captain his best advice, did not now share his thoughts. He had accepted the Walbridge plan as prudent.

  Nor did the second mate, third mate, or the bosun voice their doubts.

  Some of the crew members were nervous as they looked up at Walbridge. Some were excited for a new adventure after a summer of tranquil voyages. The moment for objections passed, and everyone—even the new cook, who had first boarded Bounty the night before—went to work, preparing to set sail.

  • • •

  The sun slipped behind the railroad terminal just inshore from the City Pier. Dockmaster Neff and her crew were creating the Halloween maze when one of them looked up and saw Bounty was leaving. They all stood for a moment and enjoyed the spectacle: the dignified progress of a stately vessel of ancient proportions departing into the gathering dusk, heading south toward a monster storm.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE STORM

  Bounty has departed New London CT . . . Next Port of Call . . .

  St. Petersburg, Florida.

  Bounty will be sailing due East out to sea before heading

  South to avoid the brunt of Hurricane Sandy.

  —Entry on HMS Bounty Facebook page, 6:06 p.m., October 25, 2012

  Adam Prokosh had been aboard Bounty for almost eight months. On the evening of October 25, he watched as the ship passed the redbrick Ledge Lighthouse and entered Long Island Sound, following the dusk as it dissolved into darkness. Prokosh, twenty-seven, of Seattle, had spent several years on a number of tall ships and schooners before he arrived at Bounty’s dock in San Juan, Puerto Rico, as an able-bodied seaman, or AB, the lowest coast guard rating, but a step above an ordinary deckhand. He had been impressed with much of what he found aboard the old ship, which was at times referred to as a “movie prop.”

  While there was truth to the description—Bounty had been built in 1960 in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, for use in the movie Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Marlon Brando, and had more recently played a role in two Pirates of the Caribbean movies—the ship’s architect had created a rugged vessel that could actually sail. Whether sailing for MGM studios to Tahiti or doubling as the base of operations for the film crew and actors, Bounty was more than just a movie set. The ship was an expanded version of the HMS Bounty, with a 120-foot waterline as opposed to the original 86 feet that had been commanded by William Bligh. Inside were diesel-powered generators, air-conditioning, and other amenities necessary for moviemaking in the tropics.

  Some of the film-crew equipment, such as cameras and lighting, had been scuttled by the time Prokosh boarded Bounty. But he had heard stories about the ship’s adventures under Robin Walbridge and believed her to be fundamentally seaworthy. He was further impressed by how organized and informed the crew were. Prokosh felt that communications aboard Bounty were the best he had ever encountered aboard any vessel. He felt far more excitement than fear about sailing during Hurricane Sandy. Out on Long Island Sound, Prokosh felt his spirits soaring.

  “Sailing is a sport and a team sport,” he would say. “This is the big game. End of the season. This is what we train for. I’ve been on boats before that don’t emphasize seamanship. So those boats have a very set routine of Boston Harbor cruises. They will come back to the same dock after three hours. So, the little things about seamanship don’t get emphasized.” Bounty, having sailed all over the world in every weather and with crew members whose experience ranged from nonexistent to several licensed captains, had a s
pecial emphasis on seamanship training that he’d never experienced elsewhere.

  The past season had been spent on tranquil seas. Prokosh could remember only two instances of sudden squalls that required the crew to douse sails on the double. There had been no sustained storms like what he had experienced on other boats. In his opinion, there was nothing quite like foul, exciting weather to drive home why you practiced good seamanship.

  With these thoughts in mind Prokosh had gone into a New London bar earlier in the day. A patron who recognized him as a member of Bounty’s crew approached him. Prokosh knew few details about the approaching hurricane, although the crew who had heard from worried family members had been chattering about it.

  “You guys will be crazy leaving the dock,” the bar patron told Prokosh.

  “Are you kidding me?” he replied. “This is going to be great weather!”

  • • •

  At 11:00 a.m., Monday, October 22, commercial weather router Chris Parker predicted that the eighteenth tropical depression of the season would turn into Tropical Storm Sandy. In an email to his boating clients, Parker suggested that by Wednesday night Sandy could cross Cuba as a Category 1 hurricane. Yet Parker’s email did not get to Robin Walbridge aboard Bounty. The tall ship was not one of Parker’s subscribed customers. Parker’s forecast a day later carried other sobering suggestions: “We’re used to thinking of Hurricanes as geographically-small systems. Tornadoes cause 200+ mph winds along a swath less than 1 mile across. Most Hurricanes’ strongest winds occur along a swath less than 30–40 miles across. The difference with Sandy is, as she transforms into a non-Tropical LO, her wind-field will expand geographically . . . AND she is expected to continue strengthening.”

  The predicted level of low pressure in Sandy “would normally support a [Category 4] Hurricane. In Sandy’s case (as a non-Tropical LO), [that pressure] will probably support only 70–80 [-knot] winds . . . but those winds could blanket an area more than 500 miles across.”