Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy (16 page)

While Beck set about to resolve those issues, he had a couple more problems. He had no crew capable of sailing a square-rigged ship, and his own sailing experience was limited to time spent aboard Naval Academy yawls before he graduated in Annapolis in 1977. Beck’s most recent background was aboard a relatively small, heavily armed naval vessel that could make over forty-eight knots. He had traded that “stinkpot” for a “rag bagger” with no rags, no crew, and no competent captain.

In fact,
Constitution
had a crew of tour guides. In the fall of 1995, Beck sent them to Jacksonville, Florida, where they boarded the coast guard tall ship,
Eagle
. “Their assignment was to learn [tall ship sailing] but also to write me a letter to tell me they could sail
Constitution
,” Beck said. “Every one of those kids when they took
Eagle
from Florida to New London, every one said, ‘We can do it.’ ”

Now the question was, could Beck do it? He invited what he thought were eminent tall ship captains for a meeting in Boston. A handful arrived. He presented them with his idea of sailing
Constitution
for the first time in decades. They found old drawings, brainstormed how to set up the ship, how to use the rigging, and what sort of ship would provide a similar sailing experience for training. “
Bounty
was, quite frankly, the closest,” Beck said.

Bounty
was at her winter berth in St. Petersburg when Beck first saw her. He had asked to visit in order to learn what he needed to know. He went up the gangplank and reported aboard. The first mate told him the captain had given the order to get under way immediately.

“There was a guy in a hammock at the stern of the ship and I didn’t know who that person was,” Beck recalled. “I assumed the first mate had authority to get under way. When we got out into the water and needed to set sail, Robin came up to me and tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘This is where you’re going to learn.’ The process of learning was [to become] an ordinary seaman and following commands.”

Beck said, “In that week, I learned an awful lot.” He trusted Walbridge, who never showed him arrogance, but only displayed a sense of competence. “He struck me as professional, and he did it in a way that was unassuming. My life was always oriented around ‘How do you build trust in a crew?’ I was very much aware of anyone who had a similar approach to teaching their sailors through building trust. That’s what Robin was all about.”

When the week was over, Beck asked Walbridge to come to Boston to train
Constitution
’s mast captains and deck officers.
Bounty
was one-third
Constitution
’s size but had the same three-mast sail plan. Each mast had a mast captain, responsible for giving orders to the sail handlers up on the rigging. The captain would give the first mate an order regarding the sails. The first mate would pass along the command to the appropriate mast captain, who would pass it along to the crew on his mast.

On board
Bounty
, Beck had learned that the mainmast—the middle of the three—had to be set first to maintain a balanced ship. A navy man with two decades under his belt, Beck knew none of this. Walbridge was his teacher. Beck loved him as a good student would.

And so, with a certain reverence, Beck invited Walbridge on board
Constitution
for the celebratory sail in Boston Harbor on July 20, 1997. Among the invited dignitaries were Massachusetts senators Ted Kennedy and John Kerry, and legendary television anchorman Walter Cronkite. In the shadows was Robin Walbridge. Beck had assigned him as his backup. If for any reason Beck was incapacitated, Walbridge was to sail
Constitution
.

•  •  •  

The two-hundredth-anniversary sail was a highlight in Walbridge’s career. It was also a golden opportunity for the chamber members from Fall River. Tom Murray was on board, surrounded by captains of industry, the sort of men whose largesse he coveted. Murray was shaking hands and passing along the message from
Bounty
. Sponsorships were available, for a fee.

Fall River could count on a donation from the state government, but only if the chamber could raise a substantial portion of their costs themselves. Murray did his best, attempting to convince Fortune 500 executives aboard
Constitution
that sail training was a great investment.

He failed. “I couldn’t convince anybody to kick in one hundred thousand dollars,” Murray said. Nor could some other chamber members who traveled in loftier financial circles than Murray find any fat cats to help keep
Bounty
afloat.

The expenses were vastly more than the chamber guys had anticipated when they’d accepted the wily Ted Turner’s gift. They couldn’t afford to haul
Bounty
every two years for repairs. They couldn’t do the work needed to assure the ship’s survival.

Murray broke the news to his friends: “The jig’s up.”

In the next year, the chamber guys had an offer of $2 million from one potential buyer, but they believed
Bounty
was worth $3 million. So the ship stayed tied to big aluminum pilings in Fall River.

The crew was dismissed, and Walbridge, who had met and married a local woman—Claudia McCann—was unemployed but still in town, checking on
Bounty
.

At one point, the wave action on Mount Hope Bay slammed
Bounty
so hard against the aluminum pilings, padded with old tires, that she suffered a hole in her hull. Water came in faster than the bilge pumps could discharge it, and a Fall River fire truck was called to pump out the bilges.

But then an angel of mercy arrived—Robert Hansen—and for what a chamber of commerce member characterized as a bargain price, he bought
Bounty
.

On March 15, 2001, Tom Murray boarded
Bounty
and raised an American flag to mark the final day of Fall River’s ownership.

The next day, Hansen was the owner. And Robin Walbridge once again was her captain. Now, of all the square-rigger captains in the world, he was the one whose credentials had the US Navy stamp of approval. It appeared to almost everyone who met him that to understand how a tall ship operated in the day of sail, one only had to learn from Robin Walbridge.

But, as Tom Murray noted earlier, the ship doesn’t discriminate: it’s going to hold you accountable.

Bounty Update 10/28
 . . .So far so good! Bounty’s move to the east avoided all the storms up the Atlantic Coast. Bounty has now positioned herself to pass on the west side of Hurricane Sandy.

—
Bounty
Facebook entry, 9:39 a.m., Sunday, October 28, 2012

French toast was heating in the galley oven when Laura Groves got up on Sunday morning. She helped herself to a serving, and then, making her way the length of the tween deck while
Bounty
rocked, slammed, and groaned, she joined her fellow officers for the morning meeting in the Great Cabin. A chart lay out on a table, and the officers took note of their position and that of the hurricane.

Although Sandy was still quite a distance to the southwest, it was clear that at the moment,
Bounty
was crossing directly in front of the approaching weather. It was like crossing railroad tracks and seeing the train coming a mile away. The crossing wasn’t a problem if they didn’t linger or stall.

The explanation for Walbridge’s move from an easterly course to a southwesterly one would be obvious to a sailor, who would know that a hurricane’s winds rotate counterclockwise. The winds on the right side of the path are going in the same direction as the center of the storm. If the winds are sixty knots and the storm is traveling at fifteen knots, the cumulative effect on the right side of the storm’s path is seventy-five knots of wind. But on the left side of the storm’s track, the same fifteen knots—blowing opposite the direction the storm is traveling—is deducted, giving wind speeds of forty-five knots.

It is sound practice if caught at sea with a tropical cyclone or hurricane to get on the slower side. Based on
Bounty
’s position and that of the approaching hurricane, Walbridge calculated that he had time to make it to that favorable left side of Sandy.

Walbridge had outlined his plan two days earlier in an email to
Bounty
headquarters on Long Island.

“We are headed S x E waiting to see what the storm wants to do,” he stated in the message to Robert Hansen and office manager Tracie Simonin. “I am guessing it wants to come ashore in NJ/NYC. We are running trying to stay on the east side of it. Bad side of it until we get some sea room. If we guess wrong, we can run toward Newfoundland. If it turns and wants to tangle with us that means it is pretty far off shore and we can turn and go down the west side of it. I need to be sure it is well off shore before we can take advantage of the good weather for us. Right now I do not want to get between a hurricane and a hard spot. If you can send us updated track info (where it is projected to go) that would be great. We know where it is, I have to guess (along with the weather man) where it is going.”

About ten hours later, on Friday evening, he continued in another email, “We are still heading toward the storm and waiting for it to make up its mind as to where it wants to go. I am hoping it heads a little further out to sea so we can sneak down the west side of it. Otherwise we will be heading to Newfoundland.”

Now, thirty-six hours later, Walbridge had another option. He could yet aim for a safe harbor. As the officers met in the Great Cabin,
Bounty
was almost due east of the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay, with the harbors around Norfolk within hours. The wind was coming from the right direction to blow him there, and
Bounty
was making good speed. And—as had been the case even before
Bounty
left New London—the ship clearly had issues that could better be addressed in protected waters.

One of those problems was a hydraulic pump. A-Watch was on duty, and Doug Faunt was in the engine room, attempting to drain the bilge with the portable hydraulic pump, which had been serviced and was now working.

But this so-called portable pump could not be moved from the starboard side of the keelson—the longitudinal beam that rose from the bottom of the bilge up to the sole boards of the lower deck—to the port side. Faunt discovered that at some point in
Bounty
’s history someone had made a modification that trapped the pump’s hose in place.

Chris Barksdale, the engineer, whose job was to handle the ship’s mechanical needs, was seasick and not immediately available. So Walbridge, Second Mate Matt Sanders, and deckhand John Jones descended the engine-room ladder and attempted to move the pump. They failed.

While this crew was working in
Bounty
’s bowels, another was up in the rigging. Eager and adventurous, Joshua Scornavacchi had come off watch at 8:00 a.m. and learned that the captain had canceled work parties for the day. So he went to his berth in the aft crew quarters and had just lain down when there was a call for all hands on deck.

With no time to put on foul-weather clothes, Scornavacchi was wearing ragged trousers, a T-shirt, sneakers, and glasses. He scrambled back to the weather deck and saw that the fore course sail—which had been set with the fore staysail as storm sails but then had been furled—had blown out of its furling. All the deck officers and several of the deckhands now scrambled up the rigging. This required them to climb up on the bulwark—the three-foot-high wall at the outer edge of the deck—and then step around the ropes that slanted from there to halfway up the foremast. Now on the outside of the rigging, with only their hands to secure them, the crew members climbed the ratlines—the webbing between the slanting shrouds. As the boat rocked, the climbers found themselves at one moment looking down across the deck into the sea below, then up into the sky, their backs free to fall straight down into the ocean.

Everyone made it up to the second yard, where the fore course was whipping and snapping, adding its own racket to the ocean’s roar and the wind’s howl.

Once at the yard, they stepped away from the mast and, like acrobats on a high wire, onto a single footrope. A back rope was behind them, and they each had on a climbing harness that they clipped to the nearest fixed rope.

But now they were face-to-face with the fore course—a large, white spread of fabric that, driven by fifty-knot winds, viciously slapped their faces. At the same time, flailing lines—buntlines used to furl the sail—whipped at the crew. Scornavacchi’s arms were cut repeatedly as he struggled with the sailcloth, which ballooned before him, stretched so tight he could not get a grasp. As soon as he would get a grip and begin to pull the sail in, the wind would yank it from his grasp.

“Punch it!” yelled John Svendsen, standing on the footrope beside him.

Scornavacchi punched, the balloon collapsed, and he was able to grab a fistful of fabric.

Punching again and again, Scornavacchi over time gathered most of the port side of the sail and had it furled.

•  •  •  

While
Bounty
’s crew wrestled with the fore course, Coast Guard Sector North Carolina, located in Wilmington on the Cape Fear River, was keeping an eye on Sandy. A year earlier, Hurricane Irene had hit the Outer Banks, and a repeat in 2012 was the biggest concern.

The folks at Sector North Carolina didn’t yet know that a vessel was at sea in their neighborhood. They did know that Sandy was a massive weather system, a large hurricane that stretched 800 to 860 miles across, taking up a lot of real estate.

The district search-and-rescue coordinator, Commander Jimmy Mitchell, had alerted the eight small boat stations along the Outer Banks and the bays. As usual, those units were monitoring VHF Channel 16, the hailing and distress channel, and high-frequency communications—ham radio and single-sideband. The radio room also kept touch with the coast guard’s Rescue 21 system, which has ten send-and-receive towers along the North Carolina coast that can receive marine distress calls and locate the position from which a call is sent. Rescue 21 “takes the search out of search and rescue,” Mitchell would say.