Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy (10 page)

In addition to the four large fuel tanks, two, smaller, day tanks in the engine room each held four hundred gallons. Among Barksdale’s engineer duties was to fill the day tanks at eight o’clock each evening. On the side of each day tank was a “sight glass”—a vertical glass tube with a valve at the top and a valve at the bottom. With the valves open, the glass showed the level of the fuel inside the tank. Each watch stander making boat checks had, among his or her duties, to take note of the level of the day tank by looking at the sight glass. Failure to do this could result in an engine’s running out of fuel. This was a critical duty on
Bounty
.

While the heavy lifting was going on in the old and new tank rooms, other crew members were busy on
Bounty
’s hull, recaulking seams that needed it. Bosun Laura Groves was in charge of this work.

Groves, on board for three seasons now, had learned her caulking skills on
Bounty
. Her teacher was Dan Cleveland, the crew member she replaced as bosun. Her crew included Jessica Hewitt, who told Groves that she had caulking experience, and green crew members Anna Sprague and Claudene Christian, as well as Mark Warner and John Jones.

In Groves’s opinion, 5 percent of
Bounty
’s seams below the waterline needed recaulking. First on her agenda was teaching the four inexperienced hands how to apply seaming compound where the edges of the horizontal hull planks met. Groves thought that 20 to 25 percent of the underwater seams needed new seam compound on top of the existing caulking.

Above the waterline, two planks needed to be recaulked, one on each side of the ship. One of these Groves felt unqualified to handle, and she turned the work over to the shipyard employees.

But Groves and Hewitt took on the caulking under the curve of
Bounty
’s hull. One held a caulking iron—a chisel-like metal tool, used to wedge cotton and then tar-soaked oakum twine into a seam once the old caulk had been removed. The other swung the beetle—a wooden mallet with a long head—against the end of the iron. When they did the job right, the iron rang a musical note similar to one that would sound if the solid wood of the hull had been under the iron.

These were not big women. Groves stood five feet four inches tall, Hewitt perhaps somewhat taller. They didn’t need to be muscle-bound to be good caulkers.

“I’ve watched qualified caulkers who were five foot four, one hundred pounds,” said Jan Miles, co-skipper of the square-topsail schooner
Pride of Baltimore II
, a wooden replica of a vessel from the War of 1812. “It’s about the swinging of the mallet, the alignment of the iron. You can create an environment without overexhausting yourself.”

Miles said that in the past he used an underwater seam compound, but he now uses “a bunch of waxes blended together. [The former compound] wasn’t setting up fast enough for us.” Miles said he “wouldn’t consider . . . at all” using what
Bounty
gave Groves and her team to use in their caulking.

Under Walbridge’s direction, the crew used two products that were cheaper than marine seam compound: DAP caulk purchased from a home center, and another product called NP 1. Miles dismisses the latter, a product that, he says, does not remain bonded to the wooden planks when submerged.

Groves had no problem using DAP and NP 1. They were used when she arrived in 2010, and all her knowledge came through Robin Walbridge.

“Oh, indeed, caulking is a specialized skill,” said Miles. It “takes time to learn the niceties of the process. It can be injurious to the caulker if they don’t understand the power that’s needed. It does take discipline.”

When the work on the fuel and water tanks was completed, more heavy work had to be done. Walbridge wanted to trim
Bounty
more toward the stern, to put the rudder deeper in the water to improve steering, and to raise the bow. He directed that movable lead ballast ingots weighing twenty to forty pounds each be shifted from under the water tanks to the lazaret and the new tank room. Anna Sprague was recruited for the job. The ingots were eight inches long and three inches thick. Sprague worked with the cook at that time, a woman named Morgan.

Todd Kosakowski and the yard crew tended to the items on the punch list assigned to them, including the repair of the port quarter where it had struck the dock in Eastport. The damage was centered on the last planks aft of the side windows that ended at the transom. Kosakowski preferred to replace the full length of each plank, but Walbridge wanted a less expensive solution. So the yard removed the damaged ends of the existing planks and glued and nailed new three-foot end pieces in place, a cosmetic patch but one that lacked the strength of Kosakowski’s preferred traditional solution.

While he oversaw the yard work, Kosakowski checked what the
Bounty
crew were doing. He found their work adequate.

On closer inspection, he thought the planking from near the keel to the waterline was in better-than-average shape. But from the waterline up, he saw the seam compound spitting out of the seams from what he believed was either the movement of the planking or excessive drying. The topsides were in rough shape. Those planks—the lower-grade Douglas fir that had been installed in 2006–7—should have been in better condition.

Some of the planking, which was attached to the underlying frames with three different types of fasteners, was decaying from the inside out. Rot had gone two-thirds of the way toward the outside. Cracks across the planks weakened the wood.

Walbridge had asked Kosakowski to investigate two topside planks, one on each side of the hull, each covered by plywood when
Bounty
arrived at the shipyard. The framing under those planks was soft and damp, Kosakowski found, and it showed the same cross-grained cracks as the planking.

To Kosakowski, this did not look like typical rot. It was dry or burned or charred-looking. He knew that cross-grain cracking is not typical of rot. The only way to deal with the problem was to remove the bad wood and replace it.

But
Bounty
’s stout construction included not only planking on the exterior of the hull, but interior planking, called ceiling. The vertical frames were sandwiched between the two horizontal courses of planks, making inspection impossible without removing planks.

Kosakowski told Walbridge the entire boat should be inspected to see how far the rot went. Then the most severe rot should be dug out and replaced with white oak.

Walbridge was both shocked and furious. Six-year-old wood should not be in this condition. He called Robert Hansen, his boss, who shared the captain’s anger and whose first thought was that HMS Bounty LLC should sue Boothbay Harbor Shipyard for inferior work.

In a brief visit to the shipyard office, Walbridge told Kosakowski what Hansen had said. But Walbridge assured the yard manager that he would defend the shipyard when talking with Hansen.

Walbridge said the time-consuming and costly search for widespread rot would have to wait for the next yard period, in 2013. He told Kosakowski that he would have the crew paint over the places where rot had been discovered.

Having had his advice soundly rejected by Walbridge, Kosakowski nevertheless told the skipper that he was more than worried about what he had found under
Bounty
’s exterior. Walbridge replied that he was “terrified.” Kosakowski later said that he had urged Walbridge to avoid heavy weather wherever
Bounty
went after leaving the yard.

Before he left Boothbay Harbor, Walbridge relayed to Kosakowski the message he had given to his boss, Hansen:

“Get rid of the boat as soon as possible.”

Bounty Update . . . Bounty is currently 250 miles due east of the Chesapeake Bay on a Southwest course at 6.8 knots. The Captain reports that Bounty should be encountering weather from the storm sometime this evening.

—
Bounty
Facebook entry, 9:44 a.m., Saturday, October 27, 2012

Bounty
’s AIS (Automatic Identification System) transmitter recorded the ship’s position at 1:21 p.m. on Saturday as N 36° 55', W 70° 25'. Earlier, Robin Walbridge had emerged from his cabin and given the order to change course.
Bounty
had gone far enough to the east and was at the same latitude as Virginia Beach, just south of the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.

The skipper told his chief mate, John Svendsen, that the hurricane was going to track up the Gulf Stream and not make landfall south of Cape Hatteras, so he wanted to cut across the top of the hurricane’s path. (At that moment,
Bounty
was south and east of the Gulf Stream.)

The southwesterly course, he let the crew know through Svendsen, would put the wind on
Bounty
’s port quarter, and the ship would track into the storm’s northwest quadrant, where the slower winds should be.

Having delivered the order, Walbridge would normally have returned to his cabin on the tween deck on the port side, the farthest aft of seven officers’ cabins on that side. Or he might have gone to his office, directly across the deck from his cabin, also the last of seven cabins, on the starboard side. Everyone who sailed aboard
Bounty
knew Walbridge as a traditional captain, one who delegated the hour-by-hour running of his ship to his officers and who did not otherwise mingle with the crew.

This fit Walbridge’s personality, his quiet, taciturn nature, his penchant since childhood for keeping his plans—and his life—closed to the outside world. His personal life was so shuttered that even his most trusted subordinates, who had sailed with him off and on for years, did not know that he had an older sister, Lucille, and another sister, Delia Mae, a year and a half younger, who lived in Poland.

As a young man, Walbridge had devised a long-term plan for securing his financial future. The details of this, too, were private. They involved thrift and effort. His effort was channeled into long-haul trucking. He invested his trucking income in property, whose rents gave him more income even while the value of the real estate appreciated. Some of his property was in Florida. Perhaps only he knew where else he was a landlord or property owner.

When he was in his thirties, he announced that he had retired from trucking.

About then, Walbridge moved to the Suwannee River, on the bend between Florida’s peninsula and its panhandle, and took a job at Miller’s Houseboats. At first, he lived aboard a small sailboat. One of his jobs was teaching folks who rented houseboats from Bill Miller how to operate the vessels. The Suwannee winds seventy-five navigable miles from its headwaters in the Okefenokee Swamp to the boat rental property, a mile from the Gulf of Mexico.

When he arrived at Miller’s, Walbridge was calling himself Robin, and no one was contracting that into a nickname. Everyone at Miller’s liked the new guy and appreciated his skill—shaped in his teens when he rebuilt all those old cars—as a mechanic.

Bill Miller’s evaluation of his employee was the kind that makes for a good résumé: “He was a very, very smart individual. There wasn’t much he couldn’t do, and there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t try to tackle.”

In his time at Miller’s, Walbridge even dove into the political muck keeping the Suwannee from being dredged, Miller recalled. Walbridge had no success. The river still needs dredging, Miller complained.

In time, Walbridge moved out of his boat and into a house trailer, but while he was living aboard, he acquired a pet parrot. His boat was small. His parrot was smart. Walbridge wanted his ship to remain tidy, so he taught the parrot to go outside to relieve itself. This was a fatal error.

One day, Walbridge climbed his mast and was working up there with a scrub brush, Miller said. The bird, having learned its hygiene lesson, came outside. Walbridge lost his grip on the brush, which plummeted toward the deck. It reached the parrot first, Miller said, and there his bird tale ends.

In the off hours, Walbridge and Miller played chess. The former trucker dominated these contests, and when his time at the houseboat-rental business was over, Walbridge had allowed his boss to win precisely once. Miller chuckled at the memory.

In the late 1980s, the man who as a boy had no use for a classroom other than as a place to sleep began teaching adult-education classes in the area of Cedar Key, Florida. He took his lessons west along the coast to Apalachicola, Florida, where he offered night courses to commercial-fishing-boat captains. The idea was that when they earned a captain’s license, they could take paying customers aboard and increase their incomes.

Kristin Anderson, a Northerner, had come to Florida in 1985 to escape the cold. In Wisconsin, she had sailed on other people’s boats in the short sailing season. In Florida, she bought a used foam-and-plastic sailboat, got a life jacket and a bailing bucket, and, with a jug of drinking water, set out to learn to sail.

Someone challenged Anderson to take the captain’s course, and when she did, she discovered Robin Walbridge was an excellent teacher, who feasted on the success of his students. They became friends.

In 1990, when Anderson helped in an effort to bring the
Governor Stone
, a Gulf Coast schooner, to town, Walbridge became a volunteer captain. He moved to Apalachicola for a while, bought some houses, renovated them, and filled them with paying tenants.

“He’d blow into town once in a while and call on me,” Anderson recalled. On one visit, Walbridge took Anderson and another woman out on the
Governor Stone
. It was tied at the land end of a thousand-foot-long pier. Walbridge began teaching the women how to dock the boat. His teaching was deliberate. His explanations were clear. His voice was calm, never raised, and he almost never took the helm but stood back and pointed out the waving of a flag, the effect of the wind atop the masts.

“We spent the entire afternoon and we never got beyond the end of the pier,” Anderson recalled. “It was fantastic. He was such a good teacher.”