Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy (14 page)

At eight o’clock, after the evening meal had been served, the wind had reached forty knots—not an unusual offshore wind—and the seas were close to twenty-five feet when Claudene Christian began her rounds of boat checks. She saw seawater squirting in through the seams of the planking in the engine room, putting the condition in her report. She reported that the fuel in the day tank was low, but as events would make clear—perhaps due to the inexperience she shared with at least half of the crew—she failed to notice the problem causing the low fuel level, a detail that was right before her eyes.

It would be another three hours before anyone discovered the problem.

Good evening Miss Tracie

. . . I think we are going to be into this for several days, the weather looks like even after the eye goes by it will linger for a couple of days

We are just going to keep trying to go fast and squeeze by the storm and land as fast as we can.

I am thinking that we will pass each other sometime Sunday night or Monday morning

All else is well

Robin

—Email from Robin Walbridge to Tracie Simonin, Saturday night, October 27, 2012

The sounds aboard
Bounty
were deafening. Everywhere. With both propulsion engines running, conversation was impossible in the engine room. But with the sea regularly and repeatedly slamming the three-inch-thick planks along
Bounty
’s sides, an endless base-drum thumping accompanied the jarring of the ship. The timbers throughout
Bounty
groaned as the wind, acting on everything above the weather deck—the sails and masts—pushed in one direction, and the weight of the lead ballast in the bilge and the lazaret belowdecks attempted to maintain course in another direction. Above the weather deck, the wind was now howling through those ten miles of rope rigging as midnight came and went and Saturday became Sunday, October 28.

Doug Faunt, exhausted at the end of his watch, descended from the helm to his stateroom on the port side of the tween deck and found that water was raining down from above. Water always came through the weather deck, found paths through the deck caulking even when
Bounty
was moored in port. Faunt had built a plastic tent above his bunk, but his bedding nevertheless was wet.

It didn’t matter. Faunt needed sleep, and he would make do.

Jessica Hewitt was on watch now, dealing with her mal-de-mer headache, doing boat checks. Mechanically, everything was running that should have been. The starboard generator was in use, contributing to the engine room cacophony. But Hewitt could not get the electric pump to keep a prime on the starboard side. Then she noticed the day tank was running low. Looking closer, she saw that the sight glass was broken. She told her watch captain, Matt Sanders, who said she should report the damage to the engineer. So Hewitt sought out Chris Barksdale, and his response was remarkably calm.

“Oh, yeah,” Barksdale told Hewitt. “Someone must have broken it and not told me.” He did not offer any suggestions or say he was working on repairs of the sight glass.

Like other crew members’ concerns about the loss of prime in the bilge pumps, Hewitt’s report of the sight-glass problem up the chain of command seemed to be received with nonchalance, as if it were not truly an issue in need of immediate action. No crew member reported a diesel odor or saw spilled diesel.

Around this time, Adam Prokosh was passing through the Nav Shack, lit in the darkness by the screens of the various instruments. He noticed one instrument in particular: the AIS, a device something like a chart plotter on whose screen a constellation of dots would indicate the presence of all the commercial ships within a certain range.

The AIS was blank. Not one other ship on the Atlantic Ocean was anywhere near
Bounty
.

Prokosh, a voluble man seldom reluctant to share an opinion or observation, was sufficiently dumbstruck that he did not report his finding up the chain of command.
Bounty
was utterly alone, and Prokosh was at this moment given to understatement. The message from the AIS was, he thought, “a little alarming.”

•  •  •  

If Prokosh was left speechless by the realization that his ship was alone at sea, seasoned tall ship captain Daniel E. Moreland had been completely shocked a few hours earlier when he’d learned
Bounty
was offshore, headed toward—not away from—Hurricane Sandy. Moreland, skipper of the
Picton Castle
, a steel-hulled, square-rigged ship about the same overall length as
Bounty
, had several days before decided to keep his vessel in port, changing long-established plans.

The
Picton Castle
had been scheduled to sail to the West Indies by way of Bermuda, leaving Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, on October 19. By Tuesday, October 23, Moreland held muster on his ship and told the crew they were not sailing. Instead, he instructed his crew to begin planning for life at the dock.

“A ship and its crew cannot possibly be safer at sea,” he said.

Then as the weekend arrived, Moreland learned that his friend Robin Walbridge had left port.
I can’t imagine for the life of me why he would leave in those conditions,
Moreland thought. That sixteen mariners were offshore in the same patch of water as Hurricane Sandy was, to Moreland, mind-boggling.

In the tall ship community,
Bounty
was thought to be a bit of an outlier—not really in the same game as the scores of tall ships that were sail-training vessels. Moreland knew that improvements were being made on
Bounty
, that a lot of money was being spent on her. The ship was looking better than he’d ever seen her in the fifteen years he had known Walbridge. And the crew was doing a good job.

Moreland, with forty years of experience on the ocean, many of them on tall ships—some wooden—put it this way: “A car is safer in a parking lot.” Being in the North Atlantic in late October 2012 was simply a bad idea. The track of the hurricane wasn’t important. There was no safe place out there.

Jan Miles, the “partner captain” of the
Pride of Baltimore II
, learned of
Bounty
’s location late on Saturday. He drew a blank, couldn’t understand it. Here was the largest storm in geographic spread ever forecast. So many questions had no answers.

Safer at sea?
Miles thought. A navy ship or a large cruise ship, perhaps. One that could make twenty knots and in twenty-four hours would be nearly five hundred miles away.

But a sailboat?
Pride of Baltimore II
had a simple hurricane plan. Avoid them, and don’t go to sea when they are out there.

When Hurricane Sandy was approaching,
Pride II
was moved from Chestertown, Maryland, to Baltimore ahead of the storm.

“All of my efforts,” Miles would say, “have been to expose the vessel to the least amount of weather possible.”

But there was
Bounty
, steering into Sandy. Nobody,
nobody
, was out there going directly at Sandy, Miles knew. Not even the navy with its high-speed ships and not the passenger industry that went out on Sunday. They went the opposite direction.

But not
Bounty
. She and her crew were following their captain’s vision and his alone.
Bounty
’s culture was traditional, and traditionally a sea captain’s authority was second only to God’s. To question such authority was, in the days of sail that Robin Walbridge wished to in some ways re-create, to risk severe—sometimes capital—punishment.

As recently as World War II, the sanctity of a ship’s chain of command was in play. Such was the case on board the supply ship
Pollux
. In a small convoy with two other American warships on February 18, 1942,
Pollux
was steaming from Portland, Maine, to Newfoundland in a blinding winter storm.

To evade German submarines,
Pollux
and the two other ships were zigzagging to port and starboard along a base course that would lead them to Placentia Bay in Newfoundland. With so little visibility in the thick and driven snow, the ships’ navigators, who had almost no electronics other than rudimentary and unreliable radar, had to rely on taking sun and star sights with a sextant. A severe southeast wind was pummeling the starboard flanks of the ships, driving them to port—north on the compass. In her book that chronicles the story, Cassie Brown related one navigator’s reaction:

Lt. (jg) William Grindley, navigator of the
Pollux
, had had no premonition of disaster as [another crewman] had, but Grindley’s own alarm bells were ringing. After years of making landfalls in all kinds of weather, he had developed a built-in alarm clock, an uncanny sense when things were just not right, and he had that feeling now. Something was amiss.

Because of the poor visibility he had been on the bridge for 19 hours, and during this hour before midnight he was definitely uneasy. Since 1100 hours his best efforts had not enabled him to absolutely fix their position. He recommended to Commander Turney [the officer in command] that they discontinue zigzagging.

Commander Turney had been on the bridge for the past 16 hours and, already harassed by the numerous messages directed at them earlier, he had refused. Worry had triggered disagreement between the two men.

Grindley had gotten three quick star sights under hazy conditions at 0620. It was less than satisfactory, but better than no sight at all. By early afternoon he had caught three sun lines; one, at 1220 hours, had not been an exact fix, and he made a notation on the report: “This position could be five to eight miles in error in any direction due to adverse weather conditions while taking sights. . . . Be governed accordingly.”

Grindley caught one more sun line at 1400 hours as they steamed into Newfoundland waters, and radio bearings, although only approximate, established their position.

Knowing approximately where they were was not satisfactory. In midocean, five to eight miles was nothing to be concerned about. Approaching land in bad weather, at night, that distance was something else. Commander Turney was on tenterhooks, but still would not discontinue the zigzag.

In Grindley’s estimation the zigzag plan had too many broad changes of course, which made it practically impossible for him to correct the course to compensate for the wind and waves hitting the starboard beam. Since landfall would be made in darkness, it would be more sensible, and assure better dead reckoning navigating, if he had only to plot the straight lines of the base course. It certainly would lessen the danger of a northward drift toward land.

He had bluntly suggested to Commander Turney that they request permission of the escort commander to discontinue zigzagging. Annoyed, Turney had refused. Under Navy rules the senior officer (Webb) [on board another ship in the convoy] was the one who determined what action to take, and no orders had been received from him, [Turney] told Grindley, therefore unless and until he received orders they would continue to zigzag.

Grindley understood his commanding officer quite well. Those needling messages still rankled, and Turney had no intention of stepping out of line and giving the flagship the opportunity to humiliate him further in front of his crew.

The
Pollux
rolled on. Quartermaster Isaac Henry Strauss and the rest of the lookouts rotating on the wings had squinted against the wind, snow and spume, watching to make sure they did not run into the
Wilkes
or the
Truxtun
[the other two ships]. Wretchedly and unspeakably cold, Strauss was torn between keeping a good lookout to avoid collision and hoping they would collide and go down and get the misery over with quickly.

During the compass checks, which had to be entered in the logbook, Strauss was in and out of the chartroom, where the tension between the captain and the navigator was becoming quite unbearable. Once Strauss heard a snatch of the conversation as Grindley maintained that very possibly they were standing into danger.