Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy (17 page)

The coast guard’s primary search-and-rescue assets in the mid-Atlantic area—its helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft—are stationed at Elizabeth City, North Carolina, just south of the Virginia border. But on Sunday, October 28, the winds had been blowing for a full day too fiercely for a C-130 aircraft to take off and land from that airfield. So all the fixed-wing planes had been moved inland, to Raleigh, North Carolina. They could fly from there if necessary. The agency’s helicopters—which have a substantially shorter range than the fixed-wing craft—were ordered to remain “on deck” and ready in Elizabeth City.

•  •  •  

Bounty
’s rub rail—its deck level—was getting submerged from time to time in the building seas as the ship heeled thirty degrees to starboard. Occasionally, her cap rail at the top of the bulwark was underwater. Moving about any deck was a serious challenge. This was the sort of sea that Scornavacchi had been looking for when he signed on
Bounty
, and now, when he had no chores, he was on the weather deck, filming the chaos and violence.

The evidence of the storm was belowdecks, too. The port generator and the port engine had stopped running. The starboard generator was working, powering the bilge pumps. But the pumps were increasingly ineffective.

Meanwhile, in the galley, Jessica Black was struggling. She attempted to boil water in a pot, and the pot flew into a bulkhead. She held her personal jack line with one hand while with the other she cooked hot dogs and macaroni and cheese for lunch for a crew that was exhausted and losing its appetite.

An entry on
Bounty
’s Facebook page at 10:41 a.m., Sunday, October 28, revealed the conditions at sea, the source of crew fatigue:

Here are some readings from a weather buoy 150 miles east of Cape Hatteras, which is close to Bounty’s current position.

Station 41001

. . . NDBC

Location: 34.561N 72.631W

Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2012 14:50:00 UTC

Winds: ENE (70°) at 36.9 kt gusting to 48.6 kt

Significant Wave Height: 29.5 ft

Dominant Wave Period: 12 sec

Mean Wave Direction: E (84°)

Atmospheric Pressure: 28.87 in and falling

Air Temperature: 75.9 F

Water Temperature: 79.9 F

Interpretation: The seas were nearly thirty feet high, the winds gusting close to fifty knots.

About fifteen minutes later, at around 11:00 a.m., Sunday morning, Robin Walbridge appeared in the engine room. Above the roar of the starboard engine and generator, he heard the news from Barksdale. The ship was taking on even more water than before. The level in the bilge had risen to thirty inches, the top of the keelson, double what it would normally be.

Walbridge remained silent. But as noon approached, Barksdale was certain that more water was entering
Bounty
than the bilge pumps were removing.

Barksdale, nauseated but not vomiting, could stand the hundred-degree engine-room heat only so long before he needed to breathe fresh air. He was becoming dehydrated. After fifteen minutes, he would have to go topside. But while in the engine room, he saw water flowing in sheets down the inside of the hull. When he saw Chief Mate Svendsen and Third Mate Cleveland, he mentioned these waterfalls inside
Bounty
’s hull. They wondered whether it was not simply water that had washed up the side of the boat when
Bounty
rolled. “No,” Barksdale said. “This water is coming in through the hull.”

Barksdale knew that not only the ship was taking a beating. He had already wrenched one arm and badly bruised a leg in falls.

Barksdale went to the tween deck for a break and found Walbridge in the Great Cabin. The two men were alone in what might have been the most quiet spot aboard
Bounty
when, without warning, the ship lurched, catching Walbridge off guard, catapulting him through the air, backward. A solid table bolted directly to the deck met Walbridge’s spine, halting his flight and dropping him to the floor. The table didn’t move. Barksdale was amazed that Walbridge did. He rose to his feet, but he was clearly injured.

Instead of retiring as he normally would have to the solitude of his stateroom, Walbridge descended again into the engine room. There was work to be done, machinery to be fixed. Everyone on board was needed. The mechanic who had kept all those houseboats running back in Florida and who, with amazing speed, had rebuilt a blown diesel aboard
Rose
could no longer delegate. Injured or not, he and his hands were needed, too.

Bounty Update 2 for 10/28 . . . Bounty looks to be sailing thru the tail end of the rain storms.

Last reported coordinates as of 2 PM EST

N 34 degrees 22' W 074 degrees 15'

Speed 10.3 knots

—
Bounty
Facebook entry, 1:52 p.m., Sunday, October 28, 2012

Jessica Black had the hot dogs and mac and cheese ready on the tween deck at noon Sunday when the A-Watch ended its shift. The four watch standers turned the helm over to their replacements on the B-Watch in the shrieking and howling of the rigging and the rearing and plunging of the bow and went below to the thundering inside the ship’s hull.

Bounty
, which had earlier been making ten knots—double her normal cruising speed—was now getting by on one engine, the starboard unit, because the port engine had stopped running. The starboard generator was powering the bilge pumps. The ship was heeled to port more often than not since she was on a starboard tack.

Doug Faunt, a retiree who could have been anywhere he wanted doing anything that he pleased, was feeling his age when he got off watch. He grabbed some lunch, but then, ready for some rest, he headed across the Great Cabin to his stateroom on the port side, just aft of amidships. It would be an uncomfortable nap. His bunk was soaked.

Anna Sprague, once baptized by her father in the Savannah River, had just gotten up at noon, having napped since eight o’clock, when her morning watch ended. She got a bowl of mac and cheese and, hearing no work parties were scheduled, settled in to await her next watch at four o’clock in the afternoon.

Jessica Hewitt woke just before noon for her next watch. She talked with Claudene Christian, who told her the electric bilge pumps were running constantly, as was the portable hydraulic pump. Hewitt knew the pumps were finicky and she didn’t feel she was competent with them. If there was a problem with the pumps, she would hardly recognize the issue, so she was not particularly alarmed. She joined Adam Prokosh on the helm, which now, in the towering seas, required the strength of two crew members.

The seas seemed to be getting worse by the hour.

At about this time, Christian, whose cabin was near Faunt’s, approached him. The normally ebullient woman was serious. She had noted problems—basic machinery problems—on board, but, she told Faunt, when she tried to raise her concerns with the ship’s officers, she felt ignored.

Faunt attempted to assure Christian that their leaders were aware of the problems and were seeking solutions.

Joshua Scornavacchi had several hours to wait before his next watch, and although Walbridge had told the crew there would be no work parties, the young outdoorsman saw work to be done. He climbed down the ladder to the engine room and set to work removing debris from the bilge so the pumps wouldn’t clog. The many wood chips might have been causing the pumping problems. But when Scornavacchi inspected a strainer at the end of one bilge hose, he didn’t see any blockage.

On the weather deck, Prokosh and Hewitt were at the helm and looked up and saw the fore course—the same sail that the crew had furled earlier—ripping down the middle. Prokosh yelled an alert that brought the injured Walbridge to the deck. A call for all hands went out as the captain relieved Prokosh on the helm and began assembling a team to deal with the flailing canvas partway up the foremast.

Laura Groves was in her cabin in the lazaret when she heard the call. She scampered to the weather deck, joining in the shouting that rang through
Bounty
’s cabins as each crew member called out the message. It was near two o’clock in the afternoon. The wind was now blowing at fifty knots, howling through the rigging, although in the engine room, all other sounds were overwhelmed by the hammering of the diesels. Scornavacchi, working down in the bilge area, was only aware of the loud protests of the ship’s timbers. They screeched like enormous rusty hinges when, as the ship rolled side to side, the bulkheads worked against the deck. But over all this, Scornavacchi heard, from above, the latest call for all hands. He began hollering, “All hands! All hands!”—as he had learned to do during his six months aboard. Anytime anybody said an order, crew members were required to call it back to assure they had heard it. For serious events, such as man overboard, the rule was to call it out loud over and over. That was happening now. The alarm was being broadcast.

When Scornavacchi arrived on the weather deck, Walbridge was selecting crew to go aloft as he and Hewitt wrestled with the helm. He wanted only the most experienced men aloft, he said. He chose Drew Salapatek, John Jones, Josh, and Adam, and they scurried across the slanting deck to the starboard rigging and began to climb.

Hewitt was offended. Walbridge had limited his call to men. But she joked instead, “What about me?”

The wind was hitting sixty knots in the rigging. It had caught a fold in the furled sail and created a bubble and was pushing the sail, adding strain on the mast and the steering.

As the men climbed the rigging and looked out from the ship, they saw waves towering thirty feet, twice as high as the height of
Bounty
’s cap rail above the water while docked. Spindrift was everywhere, a white lace of blowing foam that streaked from the breaking wave tops in long tendrils into the deep troughs between the peaks. Looking out, the climbers saw waves, and beyond them, more waves, grayness and froth marching away from them on the lee side toward the horizon.

The wind was at their backs, and they didn’t have to hold on with their hands because the wind was plastering them against the rigging. But if they turned and tried to look into the wind, they were blinded by driving rain. It felt like hail, stinging needles of rain.

They couldn’t see because of the wind and they couldn’t hear. The wind roared and howled, and there was no chance at communications.

Once they reached the fore course, they couldn’t hold on to the sailcloth. As they pulled at the cloth, the wind would yank it from their grip. The sail rebelled against their touch, jerking hard enough that they felt they would be flung from their tenuous perches on the footrope.

The men had taken extra gaskets with them—lines to tie the sail tight against the yard. But they lacked the strength to secure the sail, and eventually they let it go and the wind ripped the heavy fabric as if it were cheap toilet paper.

Dan Cleveland was down on the deck, overseeing the men’s work high in the rigging. He signaled the crew to return to the deck. It was getting dangerous and they had no hope of corralling the ripped fore course. Looking down, they saw Cleveland look aft and then run toward the stern. Following his path with their eyes as they descended the shrouds, they saw what had drawn the third mate. The spanker, a fore-and-aft sail mounted on the aft side of the mizzenmast and used to stabilize the ship’s track, was flailing out of control. The sail was mounted on a wooden boom at the bottom and a wooden gaff along its top. That gaff had broken in two places, making three sections of gaff, each with a piece of sail connected to it. All three were flying like kites just above the aft deck. By itself, the spanker and its broken gaff was not a serious hazard, even in these conditions. But wooden blocks—pulleys—were attached by ropes to the gaff and were swinging in lethal arcs like medieval weapons.

Once on the deck, the four climbers crouched and scampered back to the mizzenmast, where the whole crew was now gathered in an attempt to control the treacherous spanker gaff. Scornavacchi grabbed a line—called a vang—designed to control the gaff. The wind gusted, lifting the scrap of sail attached to the gaff, hauling light, wiry Joshua Scornavacchi up off the deck. Adam Prokosh, heavier than his mate, grabbed the vang, too, and he also found himself suspended in the air over the deck. Four other crew members grabbed the vang, and finally, with Scornavacchi hooking his toes under the lip of the doghouse roof over the Great Cabin, they pulled the shattered rigging to the deck, where they tied it down.

Two sections of gaff were still unrestrained. Cleveland climbed the shrouds on the port side—
Bounty
’s low side—and lassoed the remaining sections. Scornavacchi, wearing a helmet camera on a headband, had caught the whole adventure on video. He was having a blast, with the sort of excitement that he had until now experienced only in his dreams.

When the excitement subsided, Scornavacchi climbed down the forward stairs from the tween deck to the fo’c’sle and then, spinning the wheel on the steel door, into the claustrophobia-inducing bosun’s locker. He found water three inches above the sole boards in the locker, and when the boat rolled, if he did not have a grasp on a fixed object, he would feel his body rise in the air, seeming to float, or he would smash into a bulkhead. He collected tools and climbed back to the tween deck.

Laura Groves went aft to the lazaret to resume her nap with her bunkmate, Dan Cleveland. He got a wake-up call at three forty-five to go on watch, but she remained in her bunk. At about four o’clock a large wave slammed into
Bounty
’s rear corner, near where she was napping. It was loud, like a dump truck hitting a house, and water was coming in the Great Cabin windows. Groves went on deck to report this problem to Cleveland.

Around this time, Walbridge had given the order to turn to a port tack to put the bilge water on the starboard side, closer to the bilge pump strainers. Jessica Black began serving more macaroni and cheese for the dinner meal. Contained in bowls, the food had a chance of being eaten as the seas built even larger and the crew struggled to remain upright. Their efforts were aided when Walbridge went to the watch and directed Cleveland to heave
Bounty
to, a maneuver that would hold the ship relatively in place, facing into the seas, putting the ship on a more even keel. Walbridge wanted to take a break from moving, not for the convenience of diners, but to allow the crew to solve some of the mounting problems.