Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy (8 page)

The tight-knit
Bounty
community was even closer when standing watch together. C-Watch was a good team. Cleveland, Sprague, Salapatek, and Scornavacchi shared one thing above all: their mentor and the source of virtually all of their tall ship knowledge was Robin Walbridge.

Only twelve crew members were standing watch on the voyage toward Hurricane Sandy. This was almost a minimum crew. Had a handful decided not to sail, the watch standers would have been spread thin.

Three members of the crew—in addition to the captain—were exempt from standing watch.

Laura Groves, twenty-eight, of Apalachee Bay, Florida, the bosun, was in charge of deck work and thus was spared the rigors of the four-hours-on, eight-hours-off watch system. She had plenty of her own work to keep her occupied.

Groves was raised in a sailing family, had a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies, and had worked as a science instructor on a research ship. She joined
Bounty
in 2010. In the off-season, she’d earned a hundred-ton coast guard intercoastal license and an AB rating. She had had no experience on wooden vessels before she joined
Bounty
, but when the bosun job opened in February 2012, she applied for it and Walbridge gave her the duties.

The bosun’s job, as Groves saw it, was to create work lists to meet the ship’s needs, prioritize those lists, then to delegate jobs to crew members and oversee their work, whether it be on deck under sail or onshore when the ship was hauled out for maintenance and repairs.

Bounty
was the only tall ship on which Groves had worked. But she’d formed an opinion of the captain. Walbridge was knowledgeable, caring, analytical, thoughtful, and a good teacher.

Unlike Groves, the ship’s engineer, Chris Barksdale, had minimal sailing experience when he came aboard
Bounty
. As a ship’s officer, he was exempt from standing watch, a role through which others learned the ropes of the ship.

Barksdale’s role was to keep the machinery running, and
Bounty
had lots of machines: two large John Deere diesel engines for propulsion, two smaller John Deere diesels to turn two electric generators, and various pumps to keep the bilges dry.

Chief Mate John Svendsen had met Barksdale on a vessel operated by the Nature Conservancy and invited him to join
Bounty
in September 2012, in Boothbay Harbor when the previous engineer left. Barksdale characterized his experience as thirty years in “horticulture,” operating and maintaining loaders and backhoes. On the Nature Conservancy vessel, his job was maintaining the drinking-water system.

Aboard
Bounty
, if he had not known it before, Barksdale learned he was prone to seasickness when out on the high ocean.

Like Svendsen, Barksdale said he could not remember a time in his life, even at an early age, when he was not on the water. As a teen, he worked at a marina. He was a small-craft operator, but his work was primarily shore-side support.

Bounty
was hauled out of the water when Barksdale arrived in Maine. He found a copy of his job description posted in the engine room on the bottom deck, down a stairway and then a ladder from the weather deck. It said the engineer was responsible for operation and maintenance of the engines, electrical systems, plumbing and water systems. Even after the ship left the dock in New London, Barksdale wasn’t certain the bilge pumping system came under his authority.

The cook, Jessica Black, had never been aboard a tall ship before the night of October 24, when her train pulled into the New London train station. She disembarked, and there
Bounty
was, just a few steps away on the City Pier.

Black, thirty-four, was a graduate of the New England Culinary Institute in Burlington, Vermont, and after working in catering, she had applied her kitchen skills for the most recent two years in the galleys of motor yachts sailing out of Florida. The smallest of these multimillion-dollar vessels was 75 feet long, the largest 150 feet. These vessels spent much of the time steaming to the Bahamas and the islands of the Caribbean.

Black was looking for a job and had posted her résumé in a shop in Ft. Lauderdale. She got a call from John Svendsen on October 16, eight days before she arrived on board. On the motor yachts, she had been required to do a bit of deckhand work. On
Bounty
, she stood watch over two electric ranges and a microwave in the galley near the bow of the boat. Never was she required to stand with a regular watch. As soon as she was on
Bounty
’s deck, though, she felt compelled to be a loyal crew member. When, the afternoon after she arrived, Robin Walbridge gave everyone permission to leave in the face of Hurricane Sandy, Black stayed. In part, she didn’t want to leave the boat without a cook. As it turned out, whether
Bounty
had a cook would be the least of its problems.

The seas were eight to twelve feet and the wind was touching twenty-five knots, the force needed to propel a bulky ship such as
Bounty
, when the B-Watch came on deck at midnight as the day became Saturday, October 27. The sailing was precisely what the members of the watch had hoped for. All that was needed was to steer the course that Robin Walbridge had dictated, about 165 degrees true—dead south on the compass mounted on the binnacle before the helm. They could man that helm. They could steer that course.

Indeed, B-Watch had, among the three assigned watch teams, the most wide-ranging experience. Watch Captain Matt Sanders was a 2001 graduate of Maine Maritime Academy. After he got his degree, he served in the tug-and-barge industry, using his training to advance. Then he took positions on schooners in the Maine windjammer fleet as a deckhand. He had joined
Bounty
in San Juan, about the time Scornavacchi did but with vastly greater knowledge of ships and sailing. He found
Bounty
to be run “professionally.” Everyone knew his job. Sanders’s job was navigator. He prepared the voyage plan for each trip, kept the charts updated, and, of course, ran the B-Watch.

Captain Robin Walbridge was, Sanders thought, someone he could learn from, even after an academy education and more than a decade at sea.

Sanders, thirty-three, from West Palm Beach, Florida, was joined on watch by another Maine Maritime graduate, Jessica Hewitt, twenty-five, from Harwich, a town on Cape Cod. Sanders was eleven years past college when
Bounty
left New London, Hewitt three years. During college, she had worked on the Maine schooner
Margaret Todd
and the next summer on the schooner
Bowdoin
as a trainee. After graduation, she worked as third mate on the schooner
Harvey Gamage
. She got her hundred-ton coast guard license and moved up to second mate.

Prior to joining
Bounty
, Hewitt was the captain of a ferry running out of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, taking luggage and supplies between that port and Star Island in the Isles of Shoals archipelago, six miles offshore along the Maine–New Hampshire border. The island served as a summer retreat, and she drove the ferry as long as the season lasted, then joined
Bounty
in early September.

Aboard
Bounty
, Hewitt—although she held an AB rating—was a deckhand. The AB on her watch was Adam Prokosh. He had served on several tall ships, including the
Lady Washington
, the
Sultana
, the
Amistad
, the
Spirit of Massachusetts,
and the
Harvey Gamage
, all in the past five years, many of them inspected vessels with higher ratings than that of
Bounty
.

Prokosh, who talked in machine-gun bursts, had heard in the tall-ship community that
Bounty
was a “death trap.” When he inspected
Bounty
, he concluded that rumor was out-of-date. He decided to be part of the new
Bounty
, where he felt the crew took the job seriously.

Prokosh enjoyed Walbridge’s style. And he trusted his crewmates and felt a lot of qualified sailors were on board
Bounty
. He was relying on the officers to assure that the ship was correctly maintained. He assumed that was the case.

The second deckhand on B-Watch was John Jones. He had been aboard since San Juan, had been one of the sail handlers with Scornavacchi. Even though Jones, twenty-nine, didn’t spread himself around thick—his wasn’t one of the names mentioned first by the rest of the crew—he’d earned a nickname: the Dudester.

•  •  •  

B-Watch was seasoned, but the thing it alone could not do—had not done—was keep
Bounty
afloat. One man could be credited with doing that, and it wasn’t even Robin Walbridge. Indeed, when Walbridge first became her captain,
Bounty
was nearly sinking at the dock in Fall River, Massachusetts, where she was taking on thirty thousand gallons of water an hour—the volume of water contained in a large in-ground swimming pool. But then in 2001, the ship was bought and money began flowing into
Bounty
’s coffers and her leaks began to be plugged.

Robert E. Hansen Jr. had taken some of his employees on a team-building sail on another tall ship, the
Rose
, and was enthralled with that vessel. When he learned that the City of Fall River was prepared to sell
Bounty
, he bought it.

A decade or so earlier, the HMS Rose Organization, a charitable, nonprofit corporation, had lusted for
Bounty
, wanting to add the rival ship to its fleet. The group was going to run it like
Rose
, as an inspected sailing-school vessel. But at the time, the organization’s finances were spread thin simply for operating
Rose
.

Richard Bailey,
Rose
’s skipper then, recalled that in 1994
Bounty
“was in pretty hard shape.” She still had old fuel tanks with a capacity of sixteen thousand gallons that had been installed for her 1960s trip to Tahiti. The condition of her hull was unknown. There had been so many repairs that the hull—far from being sleek—looked as if it were made of bricks, Bailey said.

The ship’s condition hadn’t improved when in 2001 Hansen became sole owner, with his new company, HMS Bounty Organization LLC, as the documented owner. But at the time, Hansen was seeing promise, not problems.

“We want her on the tall-ship circuit,” Hansen told the online site of
Long Island Business News
on February 23, 2001. “It’s a sin to let her sit.”

Although most tall ships are owned by nonprofits—and all sail-training ships by law have to be owned or operated by nonprofits—the business newspaper reported that Hansen saw
Bounty
as a moneymaking operation, envisioning its use for corporate events, private parties, and tourism-related appearances.

At the time, LIBN.com reported, Hansen had a coinvestor in
Bounty
, an executive from his firm Islandaire Inc. The men told the website that they estimated their start-up cost at $2.25 million. “They are seeking a $2 million loan from the Bank of Smithtown for renovations,” the website reported. “Later, the venture hopes to land $1.3 million in long-term financing from the Long Island Development Corp., with backing from the federal Small Business Administration.”

“This boat is a publicity magnet,” Hansen told the website. “Wherever we go, the cameras will follow, as well as the people.”

Later,
Bounty
’s future expanded in Hansen’s imagination. He was reported as thinking of the ship’s role in “seaside festivals, corporate outings and sponsorships, tall ship gatherings, a movie set, television commercials and teaching 18th century seamanship skills” as part of “her almost limitless possibilities.”

Then Hansen began to deal with the reality of owning a tall ship. He hired Maine marine surveyor and naval architect David Wyman to conduct a survey at the dock in Fall River. Wyman hired a diver to inspect the hull. In a word, the condition was “horrible.”
Bounty
was leaking badly and had grounded more than once.

Wyman recommended that the entire bottom of the hull be covered in plastic with plywood nailed over it. When that was accomplished,
Bounty
was towed to Gloucester, Massachusetts, where a shipyard refused, due to
Bounty
’s condition, to haul her for repairs.

The towing continued up the Gulf of Maine to Boothbay Harbor, where Sample’s Shipyard agreed to put
Bounty
in dry dock.

Joseph Jakomovicz was the yard manager at Sample’s, where he had worked since 1978, first as a carpenter and two years later as manager. When
Bounty
came out of the water, Jakomovicz saw her leaking like a colander. He was flabbergasted. Hansen was there beside him, and he, too, was shocked. The bottom planks were thoroughly tunneled with wormholes. Jakomovicz asked Walbridge what had happened. The captain told him that
Bounty
had been in Florida, where worms were a problem, and there was not the money to make repairs.

Now, however, Bob Hansen was there to write checks. He told Jakomovicz to repair the bottom, and the work began. Hansen’s plan was to carry passengers, so a coast guard inspector came to examine the ship’s condition.

It was agreed that the original white-oak framing was in decent shape. A half dozen pieces of frame were replaced. But the planking was another matter. All of the bottom planking below the waterline was replaced with white oak. Since planks twenty to forty feet long were needed, Jakomovicz had to look outside New England, where the supply of tall white oak had been depleted.

Jakomovicz traveled to Tennessee, where he located a mill that could saw forty-foot planks. He selected the timbers he wanted, and they were sawn to three-and-one-quarter-inch thickness, all of them with their own shapes. The wood was air-dried. Jakomovicz said that you can bend green, fresh oak in a steamer, but you can never bend dry oak. So it was carefully sawn to shape. One plank near the ship’s transom twisted from nearly vertical to nearly horizontal.