Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy (7 page)

One hundred feet up the mast, where he could see far beyond the horizon that would be visible to the helmsman on deck, Scornavacchi rode the mast as it rocked gently. Salapatek was below, keeping an eye on him for safety. It was a perfect day for this job, and shortly the yard was lying on the weather deck, where Scornavacchi joined the rest of the crew.

Next the crew strung two jack lines—one on each side—on the weather deck. The lines were loose, giving anyone holding on to them the ability to go near the outer rails. Then Scornavacchi and the crew went below, where they strung two tight lines on the tween deck and another, short line athwartships in the galley to give the cook, Jessica Black, something to hold on to while she prepared meals.

In all the time Scornavacchi had been aboard
Bounty
, the crew seldom had need of jack lines, nor did they need the sailor strainer netting, which they now attached to the vertically slanting ropes that, like guy wires on a telephone pole, rose from the hull to support the main- and mizzenmasts. Scornavacchi had endured the calm summer weather while longing for some action at sea. Now, he was happy preparing for the storm.

•  •  •  

Bounty
was in San Juan, Puerto Rico, when Scornavacchi met her. He arrived in the early-morning hours in a downpour. Rainwater streamed down the street as he approached the dock. Through the rain, he saw the ship, dark, huge, breathtaking. Everyone on board was asleep, but he made enough noise to awaken a watch stander sleeping near the companionway. He was shown to a display case on the tween deck, and there he bunked until dawn.

A month later,
Bounty
began her season sailing north for St. Augustine, Florida. On that first day out of San Juan, Scornavacchi climbed the rigging with others in the crew to set the four topmast staysails and the main topsail. From high on a mast, he saw dolphins bounding by the ship’s sides.

Then a squall struck, and quickly the seas built to eight to twelve feet.

Scornavacchi and two other young men, following orders to furl the jib, went out on the jibboom, a spar holding down the bottom of a triangular sail above
Bounty
’s sixty-foot bowsprit.

“Whenever you’re furling a sail, you’re going to be standing just on a footrope and that’s it,” Scornavacchi said. “It’s pretty cool. Man, you do things that you think you would never do.”

Sailing in his first storm, Scornavacchi worked with the snapping sailcloth, the wind blowing so hard he couldn’t hear his shipmates. One of the other crew members, Johnny, was yelling, but his words were carried away in the howl. The rain stung and the ship’s bow plunged and spray rose in great, soaking fans.

The furlers climbed back down to the deck, where, without breaking stride, Scornavacchi vomited off the leeward rail. Then he went up the mainmast to set the main topsail. The ship moved side to side and fore and aft and up and down, and the yard that he was approaching moved side to side. He hadn’t quite reached the yard when a humpback whale breached immediately beside the ship. Then another, big as a small bus, broke the surface, and soon whales were jumping out of the water everywhere.

The crew set the sail but, gawking at whales, they were not quick. Scornavacchi watched in awe, all the while worrying that the next wave of nausea would rain the remaining contents of his stomach down on the crew members below. He finished his work aloft, then vomited once he returned to the deck. He took a turn at the helm, then had to hand off the job to race once again to the leeward rail. And still the whales and dolphins leaped as if they, indoctrinated into
Bounty
’s routine, knew—as did Scornavacchi—that you didn’t stop working for anything.

That night had its own reward for the young sailor. As the boat broke through the water, it agitated floating phosphorescence, and as if a switch had been thrown, the sea swirling along the hull turned green, and the dolphins, still swimming beside
Bounty
, glowed.

Life seemed perfect. These were the best days. But unknown to Scornavacchi, he had contracted a virulent infection through some cuts and scrapes. After a week at sea, boils began appearing on his skin, eleven of them when the ship was two days from St. Augustine. By then, he was unable to walk.

As soon as
Bounty
docked, he was given a heavy dose of antibiotics and sent home to Pennsylvania to recover. More shots and pills and nasal antibiotics and antibiotic soap took care of the staph infection. But it took weeks, while everyone Scornavacchi knew attempted to keep him from returning to sea.

The Center for Infectious Diseases had to clear him, but so did his mother and family and friends and his girlfriend. “They were just really worried,” he recalled. “I felt like I was just starting on that [nautical] journey. I wanted to finish it. My girlfriend left me pretty soon after that, and then I just continued on the ship.”

•  •  •  

Already, Scornovacchi had discovered something compelling aboard
Bounty
. In that, he was not alone. Many of his shipmates were tugged aboard in the same way. For Scornavacchi, unique ingredients in the stew of his first twenty-five years may have steered him toward
Bounty
and Robin Walbridge.

In his early memories there is the divorce. He was five when his father and mother separated. He stayed with his mother, learned to resent his father.

Two years later, when Scornavacchi was in first grade, he had what he now describes as his “midlife crisis.” It began in a moment when he stopped and looked around him, at everything, and thought,
If I died right now, I wouldn’t have accomplished anything in my life.

He felt old. He looked down at a small patch of grass—he was standing in his own yard—and stared at it. He saw what he now says were fourteen different species of plants and many types of insects.

“A patch of grass the size of a dinner plate. It made me realize it wasn’t just grass. I didn’t even know what was in my own yard. And if you put that in perspective with Earth, I know nothing about what is around me. I just started exploring everything,” Scornavacchi recalled.

Even as a young adult, he would have difficulty being content. He would always need to do more, see more. There would always be something to explore, even in a barren room. But the feeling began back then, in grade school.

In the first grade, he looked ahead and saw twelve more years of school. He started abhorring routines. They were monotonous, inhibited his ability to live. He became depressed.

The feeling lasted until he was fifteen. Then he realized that he was wasting time. Obsessing about his inability to constantly experience the world around him, he was also doing little.

He decided to stop thinking and start living. He was in high school now and joined every group he could find: the orchestra, the concert band, the jazz band, the choir, the wrestling team, hockey, tae kwon do, the Christian Club. He became president of the outdoor club and the dance club. He joined the ski and snowboarding club.

Having switched into overdrive, he found that though he was well-rounded, he was mediocre at everything and an expert in nothing.

“If I was to climb Mount Everest at that point in time, I would have done more than I had ever done in my life, but looking out over that expanse, I would see that there was more to do out there than I knew before,” he said now. He was overwhelmed.

For a while in high school, Scornavacchi suffered from narcolepsy. He fell asleep randomly and as a result began missing school. He was medicated and the sleep disorder vanished.

He earned his Eagle rank in Boy Scouts and had the grades to enroll in Penn State University after high school. There, in rural central Pennsylvania, he found a passion for the outdoors.

He camped, backpacked, did rock climbing and scuba diving. In the summer, he worked as a white-water rafting and kayaking guide in nearby Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania.

Scornavacchi lived to hike in the snow. In this and other activities, he found that he was alone. Others were content to remain indoors in front of a television. When he worked, his fellow employees would, at the end of the day, go to a bar. He wanted to go hiking and backpacking. He went alone.

Ten inches of snow covered the forest one February day when, alone, he headed into the woods. Reaching a campsite, he set up his tent and spent the night. The following morning, he was headed out of the woods with a sixty-pound pack on his back when his knee snapped, tearing his meniscus. His leg was stuck in one spot.

“I couldn’t put much weight on it,” he said. “I used the two ski poles I had brought with me and then dragged myself out of the woods. It started raining and it got dark and a lot of times I had to crawl. Every time I took a step, I would thank God I was able to take one more step.”

He made it out of the woods. Undeterred, he would go back for more. Perhaps he was testing himself. He wanted the whole experience and believed if he held back, he would only get part of it.

He felt the same way when the infection interrupted his voyage on
Bounty
. And so, when the boils healed and the infection was gone, Scornavacchi got back aboard the tall ship.

Joshua Scornavacchi was but one of sixteen aboard
Bounty
when, twenty-four hours into her voyage and nearing sunset, she was making seven knots across the Atlantic Ocean, about 110 miles south of Montauk Point, Long Island, and due east of Atlantic City, New Jersey. C-Watch—with watch captain Dan Cleveland, Anna Sprague, Drew Salapatek, and Scornavacchi—was on duty on the weather deck, and at the forward end of the tween deck, the evening meal was being prepared in the galley.

The seas had been between three and four feet, the wind ranging from ten to fifteen knots, but by now, everything aboard
Bounty
was lashed in place and prepared for the coming storm. The big diesel engines thrummed two decks below the helm. Those on watch rotated through all four positions during their four-hour duty. Up front, the person standing forward watch had a clear view ahead of the gathering darkness. Another watch stander spent an hour in the bowels of the ship, checking the bilges and monitoring the engines. The fourth person was on standby, and this evening that duty called for little effort.

Dan Cleveland, twenty-five, the watch captain, had served aboard
Bounty
longer than anyone else except Robin Walbridge. He boarded her in 2008 with little sailing experience—a few daysails on schooners—and became a deckhand with no authority except to take orders. He found his skipper quiet, not much of a yeller. Walbridge never got excited, even when problems arose, never showed nerves or fear. In Cleveland’s view, the captain was a problem solver, always two steps ahead of anyone else.

Cleveland stood his watch, observed, and learned. At the beginning of the 2009 season, he was promoted to able-bodied seaman—AB—of the watch, and halfway through that summer, when
Bounty
needed a bosun, he applied for the job and got it.

The bosun was in charge of the deck in all-hands situations—sail handling, docking, or leaving the dock. Cleveland was twenty-one years old and had major authority on a storied tall ship. In the winter of 2011, Cleveland earned a hundred-ton coast guard license, which qualified him to be captain of a substantial vessel. On
Bounty
, he was promoted to third mate.

Anna Sprague, twenty, had been on the sailing team at Auburn University when
Bounty
arrived in her hometown of Savannah, Georgia, for the Tall Ship Festival in the first week in May 2012. Her mother, Mary Ellen Sprague, a Savannah alderwoman, was working on the event and had an extra ticket that she gave to Anna.

Sprague had been sailing her whole life. The family had small boats—Sunfish and Lasers—that they sailed in the Savannah River. One time when she was much younger, her father, Larry, took her sister and Anna out on the river and threw them overboard so they would be comfortable off a boat in the water. The family chartered catamarans in the Caribbean islands from time to time as well.

Anna Sprague, then, was no novice in sailing and salt water, and that gave her the confidence when she visited
Bounty
, moored dramatically along Savannah’s picturesque waterfront promenade in the center of the fleet, to ask how the ship selected crew.

The answer: we’re looking for three new crew members. On Saturday, she was interviewed by John Svendsen, the chief mate, and on Monday, when the festival was over and the dock lines were dropped, Anna Sprague sailed down the river, the youngest member of
Bounty
’s crew.

Drew Salapatek, twenty-nine, boarded
Bounty
at about the same time as Sprague, but it was for his second season. He’d been a deckhand in 2011 and had sailed across the Atlantic and back. When he boarded that first time, he had no maritime licenses, but in the fall of 2012, while
Bounty
was hauled out for repairs, he went to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, and earned both an AB certificate and a hundred-ton license. When the Chicago native returned, he was the AB on the C-Watch.

While Salapatek was aboard
Bounty
crossing the Atlantic, his father, Jim, sitting in his television repair shop in Chicago, was curious. “It just grew interesting, and as I went more and more digging into it, I found
Bounty
’s Facebook page,” the father recalled. “I was just a regular person who liked the page. I kept posting, asking some questions. There were a lot of parents who were concerned. Their children were sailing on the ship. When [my son] got to England, I found pictures from people who had toured the
Bounty
[and were posting] on their Flickr pages.”

In time, Jim Salapatek would become the Internet voice of
Bounty
, making all its Facebook postings, and he would visit the ship. He was so connected to the vessel that when the ship left New London, he got a quick text message from a crew member.