Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy (13 page)

Still, there was that trip to Puerto Rico in 2010, the very next year, when
Bounty
hit rough weather, took on water, and had difficulty keeping the bilge pumps—the same ones it had in 2012—primed. The problem then was the rough weather, the rolling ship, the dry topsides dipping down into the ocean with each roll to the side. Most experienced wooden-ship sailors might have anticipated this scenario, particularly when they were accustomed to offshore sailing.

The same scenario had caught one coastal captain by surprise a few years back when he piloted his modest schooner out on Long Island Sound for a short delivery. Eric Van Dormolen, the captain of the
Mary E
, sailing out of Essex, Connecticut, had a charter scheduled in New York City, about 110 miles to the west, an opportunity to make some money for his boat, a restored Maine coastal schooner, and what Van Dormolen calls the UPS truck of its day.

In its day, the
Mary E
was made for offshore work, and every day its planks would get wet and stay swelled, Van Dormolen said. But in the charter service on Long Island Sound, that seldom happened.

“I was sailing from Greenport [Long Island] going toward New York City, and I had some dirty fuel. So I shut the engine down. It was very rough out. What was happening was the boat was not used to seeing swells, eight-foot swells. Every time we would go underwater, a little bit of water would spray in [between the dry planks]. That would weight the boat down. Every wave we hit, we would go under a half an inch.”

Van Dormolen called the coast guard and then managed to sail the
Mary E
into New London harbor with just two other crew members.

“If the engine didn’t die, I wouldn’t have had an issue,” Van Dormolen said.

But the engine did die, and although he lost the New York charter, the skipper and his schooner dodged a much greater problem: sinking.

•  •  •  

In 2012, caught in the leading winds of Hurricane Sandy, Robin Walbridge hoped he could still make the couple of events planned at his destination. But water was coming in and his bilge pumping system wasn’t keeping up. The problem was enough to pull the skipper out of his quarters. If he did not resolve these issues, he would have to write off those events.

Or worse.

Normally, the ship’s engineer would have filled the day tanks in the engine room at 8:00 p.m. on Saturday, October 27. Each John Deere diesel engine that turned one of the two large propellers beneath
Bounty
’s hull got its fuel directly from a four-hundred-gallon day tank, which had to be pumped full once a day while the ship was at sea. But on Saturday, October 27, Chris Barksdale had filled the day tank twelve hours earlier than scheduled. That timing might be explained by his being new aboard the ship and not yet accustomed to the engine room routine.

The odd timing might also explain why, when Claudene Christian, having just taken her place on the A-Watch at eight o’clock that night, checked the day tank, she recorded its level as “low,” not “half-low,” which it should have been.

The timing of Barksdale’s replenishment was but one possible explanation of why the level of the sight glass was low. At Captain Walbridge’s command, both engines were running as hard as anyone had ever seen them run.
Bounty
was racing to the southwest, attempting to pass across the projected path of Hurricane Sandy, and consuming fuel at an extraordinary rate as the ship’s bluff bow banged against the growing seas.

The noise in the engine room was deafening, and it was hot in there. No doubt, Christian had a reason to get the boat check completed and move on. And that may explain why Christian missed the real explanation for why the fuel level in the day tank appeared to be low.

There was every reason to believe Christian was an observant and conscientious crew member, since in the past month she had been promoted from volunteer to paid crew. Proof was found in another observation she made in her boat-check notes. Water was coming into the engine room through an opened seam in
Bounty
’s side, Christian wrote. Bosun Laura Groves, not on boat check, had seen the problem around the same time.

Little things were happening, and Claudene Christian, if she wasn’t yet voicing doubt, was becoming concerned. This would not have been out of character. Her mother, Dina Christian, saw Claudene as a bit of a worrier, even a cautious person.

Christian’s concerns might have been calmed if, in the five months she’d been aboard
Bounty
, she had come to know the boss better. She’d told her mother earlier in the year that she wasn’t close to Walbridge, that he was standoffish. More recently she’d reported that the skipper “seems to be coming around. He is interested in me helping him raise money for the ship because I’m in promotions.”

When this trip was over, Christian told her best friend, Michelle Wilton, she would get off
Bounty
. But she did hope to land a shoreside job with HMS Bounty Organization LLC, Robert Hansen’s holding company. It would be a chance, she told her college friend, to get her life back on track.

Once again, when thinking about
Bounty
, Claudene Christian had big ideas, grand plans to go along with the perpetually bubbly personality that everyone saw and that had disguised a promising life sidetracked by too many disappointments.

Her early life and success was well and publicly documented. Christian, who back in Boothbay Harbor had celebrated her forty-second birthday, was born in 1970 in Anchorage, Alaska, where, in 1987, she won the Miss Alaska National Teenager pageant. She was on her high school track team, competing in the pole vault. She was a gymnast whose specialty was the horse. And she was a cheerleader. At the same time, she participated in plays and performed as a singer. In 1988, she was in an opening act when singer Marie Osmond performed in Anchorage.

Then she enrolled in the University of Southern California, where the five-foot-one-inch blonde majored in sports information, and she joined a sorority, where, as in the past, her personality had drawn friends to her side.

Wilton was one of those friends. Christian became her roommate, and Wilton, who was not a cheerleader, found she was living with “the most fun person I’d ever met in my life.”

Christian simply seemed to enjoy living. She was “one of those type of people that everybody wanted to be around. You’d meet her, you’d automatically become one of her friends.”

Wilton saw Christian as unpretentious, nonjudgmental, outgoing. The cheerleader held no grudges, never spoke ill of others.

At USC, Christian sang with a number of local bands and at fraternity parties, and taught herself how to play the guitar. Her mind was always seeing possibilities. Christian became a limited partner in a Hermosa Beach bar called Dragon.

For her LinkedIn résumé, Christian listed “Promotions Manager, Church Hill Downs/Hollywood Park Racetrack, 1993–2001.” Although she still listed herself as “Owner, Cheerleader Doll Company, 1989–Present,” by the time she boarded
Bounty
in May 2012, all of her business efforts had long since come tumbling down.

Claudene Christian had briefly sailed on the replica of Columbus’s ship the
Niña
but had no other time aboard a tall ship when in May she arrived at
Bounty
’s dock in a heat wave in Philadelphia. Her inexperience showed.

Christian was dressed all in pink and white and, towing a suitcase with wheels, not toting a seabag, looked very much like one of her fashion dolls. When she was assigned a cabin, she filled it with clothes, and not the sort meant for swabbing decks. And among her many, many personal items was a hair dryer.

Looks were deceiving. Christian, once she knew what was expected of crew, threw herself into her role as a deckhand. She told Wilton that she wanted to prove herself, so she worked her butt off.

Bounty
was nothing like her life immediately before May 2012. The girl from Anchorage, Alaska, where the sight of salt water was within a short walk; the young woman from Southern California, where the suntan beach was just to the west; this person felt landlocked living in Oklahoma, stifled and bored.

Bounty
, she told Wilton, was so different. For the first time in a long time, Christian felt at peace and happy.

Her shipmates noticed her attitude. Dan Cleveland saw her always smiling while she was working, saw the attention she paid during muster.

In Boothbay Harbor, Christian was under the hull working for Bosun Groves, getting dirty with the caulking. Her effort was rewarded by the warm embrace she got from the rest of the crew.

Christian’s birthday arrived while
Bounty
was up on the rails in Boothbay Harbor, and she was treated to the same intense celebration when she turned forty-two as other crew members got on their birthdays, if not the same precise means of attention. For example, Anna Sprague, youngest aboard
Bounty
, was thrown into the water when she turned twenty and that night got her wish to sleep in a hammock high in
Bounty
’s rigging.

Christian’s wish for dessert on her birthday was wine and cheese. The cook at the time got cheese and red wine, Christian’s favorite, and everyone drank with her. Then the entire crew went to a Boothbay Harbor bar that served pizza. There the crew sang with Claudene, the professional singer; danced; and performed with a karaoke machine.

The West Coast party girl had many more opportunities with her shipmates to revel. At one port, the photographer, Kannegiesser, bought a drum set, Scornavacchi played, and the whole crew held the
Bounty
Bash on deck, inviting aboard the crews from other ships. In Nova Scotia, most of the crew went camping ashore at some seaside cliff caves, where they had a bonfire and sang sea shanties.

But there was more than mere parties for Christian aboard
Bounty
. She told her mother that she’d found romance.

This apparently was not uncommon aboard the ship. Laura Groves’s father, Ira Groves, introduced her and Dan Cleveland to his Florida yacht club members as a couple. Anna Sprague’s father said she and Mark Warner were an item. And Jim Salapatek said that his son, Drew, was dating Jessica Hewitt.

Christian’s boyfriend, she told her mother, was Second Mate Matt Sanders. Dina Christian believed that her daughter was on good terms with all of her ex-boyfriends, but one relationship—the previous one—had, as Wilton understood it, driven Claudene back to live with her parents. So dating Sanders was perhaps a leap of faith.

On that Thursday afternoon in New London, when Walbridge offered his crew members the chance to go ashore before the ship sailed, Christian had one strong reason to sail—Sanders. But Jessica Hewitt knew that Christian also had some strong reasons to skip the voyage, so before Walbridge addressed the crew and before the dock lines were dropped, Hewitt asked Christian what she was going to do. Christian said she wanted to see the voyage through.

By that time, Christian had already felt some pressure from her family, who urged her to quit
Bounty
in New London. Her father, Rex, called and said, “Look, they have that boat up for sale so I don’t know how much upkeep they are doing. So don’t do anything you don’t feel safe doing.”

To a friend also named Rex she had sent an email: “Pumps are not the most reliable and I’d hate to be out at sea and something happens.”

Dina knew about Hurricane Sandy and assumed that
Bounty
would not sail. But Thursday afternoon, even before Walbridge announced his decision at the capstan, the mother sent a text message to her daughter while she was touring the submarine
Mississippi
: “Why don’t you ask one of the guys if you can stay on the submarine during the storm. You will be nice and safe. Your Dad can come and get you.”

Christian had made her decision, however. She replied, “
Bounty
loves hurricanes, haven’t you heard? The Captain has thirty years’ experience. All will be ok. We will go as far east as we can. We may be half way to Europe to get around it.”

Once
Bounty
was under way but before the ship was far out to sea, Christian looked up more information about the hurricane on her phone. When she saw Jessica Hewitt, she repeated her earlier thought: “The storm looks like it will be so enormous we are going to have to go halfway to Europe.”

Then she called her mother. Dina Christian was busy and asked if she could call back.

Claudene sounded frantic. “No! We are out on the ocean and I’m afraid I’m going to lose reception. I gotta tell you how much I love you. I really do.” A little later, a text message appeared on Dina Christian’s phone: “If I go down with the ship and the worst happens, just know that I am truly, genuinely happy.”

Now, two days later and hundreds of miles offshore, Claudene Christian had reason to be less than thrilled with her ship. Many little things had happened. Not all, she thought, was well.

The seas, which at eight o’clock in the morning had grown to eight to ten feet with twenty knots of wind, began to build even more. At noon Saturday, with the winds at thirty-two knots—gale force—and the seas reaching fifteen feet, Chris Barksdale, caught by the violent and unpredictable rocking of the ship, lost his balance and, in the attempt to catch himself, injured a hand.

Barksdale also discovered that the nuts on the engine mounts of the port generator had turned loose, allowing the engine to move. The crew turned off that engine and its generator, and Drew Salapatek turned on the starboard generator at two o’clock in the afternoon.

By four in the afternoon, the bilge pumps were losing the battle with rising bilge water. The level was not yet critical, but the indications were of a mounting problem. Walbridge ordered the hydraulic pumps put into service.

At the same time, Jessica Hewitt was becoming seasick—headache only, no vomiting.

When the crew began working with the hydraulic pumps, they found them corroded and inoperative. At least until they could repair these pumps, the bilge water would continue to rise.