Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy (22 page)

One by one, they filed to the weather deck with little hysteria. Still wearing their suits halfway, Cleveland and Groves stood on deck at the Nav Shack entrance, directing traffic toward the windward deck—the high side—some going forward to brace themselves on structures in front of the Nav Shack, others heading aft, toward the life rafts.

The wind had abated some, to perhaps forty knots, still strong enough to make the rigging sing and roar, to stifle conversation with its volume. But the seas were still huge. With her bowels filled with a heavy ballast of salt water,
Bounty
rode smoothly. A full moon above lit the edges of the racing clouds, enough light that the crew could see their ship leaning forty-five degrees to starboard, see the waves all around them, as if they were sitting deep in a valley with dark mountains on every side and only the silvery sky above.

As they made their way to the weather deck, some of the crew members formed a line and handed up the gear that the bosun had assembled in plastic bags, the life jackets that were tied together in orange rafts.

Walbridge and Svendsen remained in the Nav Shack as the exodus continued. Then the captain asked Anna Sprague, one of the last to go on deck, to help him into the top of his survival suit. He followed her to the weather deck, which slanted up like a steeply pitched roof, and sat down on two yards that had been lashed there to the deck, near his bosun, Laura Groves, waiting for morning to arrive, the time when he would dictate an orderly departure.

Moments later, Svendsen came on deck. He had been watching the starboard rail. It had dipped under the waves. With so much water in her,
Bounty
was leaning farther and farther on her side. The chief mate knew his captain wanted to avoid abandoning ship during the night, hoped to conduct that final desertion of his beloved
Bounty
when daylight would make it safer. But now the caprail was submerged, and Svendsen sensed that the time was at hand.

Despite the roaring wind, Laura Groves heard it clearly.

“It’s time to go,” Svendsen told Walbridge.

The captain did not respond, so the chief mate waited a half minute and repeated his suggestion, his plea.

Again Walbridge ignored the warning.

When for the third time in two minutes Svendsen asked Walbridge to order the crew into the life rafts, the captain agreed. Svendsen returned to the Nav Shack to alert the C-130 flying above. The word began to spread across the ship. The crew would launch the two rafts and attempt a controlled descent from the deck.

It was too late. With a suddenness bordering on petulance, the ship leaned hard to starboard, as if in response to the skipper’s betrayal, dropping its masts in the ocean, bringing its deck to vertical. Anyone not thoroughly braced instantly fell into the sea. Others clung to the nearest fixed object, desperately trying to postpone their own baptism.

Laura Groves had just helped Dan Cleveland into the top half of his immersion suit when
Bounty
lurched. There was no space in her awareness between her efforts to secure Cleveland’s safety gear and the instant when she found herself in the ocean.

Joshua Scornavacchi had settled on the port side of the fife rail around the mainmast, his feet braced on the rail, his back lying on the tilted deck. Claudene Christian was beside him, and she smiled at him. Then she scampered aft, toward another group of crew members. Scornavacchi closed his eyes, and a moment later when he opened them, he saw his fellow sailors hanging like so much laundry from various lines and railings. Scornavacchi himself was standing on the now-horizontal balusters of the fife rail, the once-tilted deck a vertical wall behind him. He worked his way down the deck toward the water and then jumped.

Prokosh, at the stern behind the helm, saw the big wheel go under the water and thought,
This is where I get off.
He allowed himself to slide down onto the helm and then jumped toward a clear patch of water, hoping to avoid getting entangled in the rigging.

Jessica Hewitt had fallen asleep near the helm. She awoke to see water directly before her.

Jessica Black heard someone yell “She’s going!” and sensed what was happening. She wanted to be in control of her destiny, so she let go and fell into the sea.

Svendsen, still in the Nav Shack calling the coast guard, was caught by a flood of sea, a waterfall coming into the companionway. He fought against it, made it to the deck. Before him he saw Robin Walbridge, a life jacket strapped over his immersion suit, walking aft—walking, not crawling, because while the deck was vertical, there were horizontal surfaces such as the fife-rail balusters.

The chief mate found the nearest mast, now horizontal, and climbed along it, away from the deck, away from his captain, away from
Bounty
.

•  •  •  

Just prior to
Bounty
’s lying on her side, Wes and Mike alternated flying the C-130 above the ship, sometimes flying at five hundred feet to get a visual and sometimes at seven thousand to give their team less of a pounding. The two pilots knew the turbulence was considerably rougher on the crew than on themselves. The pilots were so focused on flying the plane and exchanging information with both
Bounty
and Sector that it was easy to ignore the stomach-churning dips and rises of the plane. Most of their crew, however, were in standby mode, waiting to see how things played out. If the vessel stayed afloat until the helos arrived, their role would stay modest, but should
Bounty
sink before dawn, they’d be scrambling with a number of tasks. But for now they had plenty of undistracted time to experience the full nauseating effects of their roller-coaster ride.

Suddenly at 4:45 a.m. Svendsen’s voice boomed into the cockpit of the C-130. “We are abandoning ship! We are abandoning ship!”

Wes’s heart skipped a beat. All previous calls had been calm and collected, but this one was rushed and urgent. He grabbed the radio. “
Bounty
, this is CG 130, tell us what is happening.”

Silence.

Chills went down Wes’s back. “
Bounty,
this is CG 130, how copy?”

Silence.

“
Bounty
, are you getting into life rafts?”

Dead air.

Wes switched to another channel. “HMS
Bounty
, this is coast guard C-130, how copy?

No response.

Wes cursed under his breath and made eye contact with Mike. He knew this was not the orderly abandoning of ship everyone had hoped for. Svendsen clearly had just a second to get his distress call out. Something sudden and cataclysmic had happened, and Wes wondered if anyone got off the ship alive.

Adrenaline shot through every vein of Wes McIntosh, and he had to fight back a surge of nervous energy. He had formed a bond with the people on
Bounty
, particularly with Svendsen on the radio.
This whole night it’s been just us and the
Bounty
alone out in this black mess, and now it might be all over. It sure didn’t sound like they had time to get in life rafts.
Wes was certain the ship had capsized, but the people could be either in the water or trapped inside the ship.

The plane was up at seven thousand feet, and while Mike took the controls and started descending, one of the MSOs radioed Sector that
Bounty
sailors were abandoning ship and communication had been lost.

Then Wes spoke on the internal communications system to his crew: “They’re abandoning ship. You know what we need to do now.”

They needed to get life rafts in the water immediately. This is where drop master Joshua Vargo and basic aircrewman Eric Laster earned their pay, no matter how motion sick they were. The two men had trained for months with the Air-Sea Rescue Kit (ASRK), which includes eight-man life rafts and survival bags stuffed with water packs, patches for the life rafts, space blankets, whistles, flares, and strobes. Now they had to drag the equipment toward the rear of the plane where the giant cargo ramp could be lowered. The turbulence caused the men to stagger, and when a particularly strong air gust hit, the floor beneath them fell away and they were airborne, lucky to come down on their feet and not break an ankle.

Meanwhile, Wes entered data into a computer to help calculate a release point. The emergency equipment would be useless if it landed far from
Bounty
. The MSOs worked the radio making continuous callouts to the foundering vessel, hoping against all odds for an answer.

Vargo’s voice came over the internal communication set: “Mr. McIntosh, we have completed our checklist and have the equipment in place.”

“Roger,” answered Wes. “We are descending to five hundred feet and are depressurizing the plane.”

The C-130 barreled out of the clouds at 150 knots, and
Bounty
appeared below them, lying flat on her side, like a once-proud racehorse that’s been put down. Everyone in the aircraft stared out rain-slashed windows trying to pick out survivors. Debris littered the ocean. One of the crew members shouted, “I see a raft!” Then another hollered, “There’s a second raft at two o’clock!”

In addition to the two rafts being carried away from
Bounty
on the enormous waves, the crew also saw multiple strobe lights blinking in the water, but they couldn’t see people. It was an awful sight for the crew members to take in, especially not knowing if survivors were attached to the strobes or in the rafts. Worst of all, the strobes spread out in all directions around the crippled ship, and soon they would be far apart.

As the plane zoomed past the debris field, Wes banked it to return to the site, trying hard not to grip the controls too tightly as the aircraft groaned and shuddered, battered by varying wind gusts. Keeping the plane in any kind of steady flight was impossible, and the altitude indicator jumped wildly. Wes gave the ocean a wide berth, trying to keep the plane as close to five hundred feet as possible.

Myers radioed Sector, “We’ve visually confirmed that the ship has capsized, it’s on its side. We have seen two rafts, and many strobe lights in the water, but unsure where the people are. We are deploying the ASRK.”

Wes gave Vargo the okay to open the ramp door and told him they were circling back to
Bounty
, and Wes would give the command when to drop two rafts.

A thousand feet of line connected the two rafts, with the hope that a survivor could grab the line and pull himself or herself to safety. Vargo and Laster began opening the ramp, and the roar of the wind was deafening. Each man wore a harness with a tether fixed to the aircraft wall. Should they slip and fall, this would keep them inside the aircraft and prevent them from free-falling into the sea. They double-checked each other’s harness and tether, just to make sure.

Moving the rafts to the open cargo doorway, the two men fought back their motion sickness as best they could. The rear of the aircraft took the brunt of the turbulence, and the men found it impossible to stand without holding on to the walls of the plane. Nausea got the best of one of the men, and he vomited, causing the rain-soaked floor by the ramp to become even more slippery.

Over the headset, Wes alerted Vargo and Laster that they were coming up on
Bounty
and to get ready. Normally Wes would have his drop master release the rafts about thirty yards upwind of the target, but that’s based on twenty-knot winds and an altitude of two hundred feet. Now, at an altitude of five hundred feet with sixty- and seventy-knot buffeting gusts, the commander knew the drop should happen farther upwind. He used the information provided by the computer along with his own experience to estimate the proper distance ahead of the target where the release should take place.

When Wes saw
Bounty
almost directly below them, he waited about five seconds then ordered, “Drop! Drop! Drop!”

Vargo and Laster shoved the first raft out of the plane, counted off two seconds, then pushed the second into the black void. The two-second interval between the rafts was to ensure they did not become tangled. They wanted the rafts to land in different spots with the tether between them. Usually the drop master can see if his drop is accurate, but with pelting wind and darkness the rafts were swallowed by the night before they hit the water. The two men inched back away from the doorway, thankful to have avoided a mishap at the outer lip of the ramp.

Wes circled back around and through his NVGs could see that the two coast guard rafts had landed just where he had wanted them to, near the debris field. But the wind wasn’t going to allow them to stay there for long. Although the rafts had drogue chutes designed to drag aft and slow their drifting, the rafts still blew end over end.

Order had turned into chaos. Human voices were shouting where before the only sounds were from savage nature and its assault on the foundering old ship. In an instant, the sea rose from the starboard bulwark, enveloping half the crew, from deckhands to deck officers.

The order that had marked life aboard
Bounty
had vanished. In its place was the bedlam of unrestrained nature.

The drills that had been so much a part of
Bounty
’s order—the practice and repetition that had made it seem to Adam Prokosh that
Bounty
was a finely organized vessel with great communication—all that regimentation evaporated.

Had Walbridge recognized in time the imminence of disaster, perhaps there could have been an orderly evacuation into the life rafts. But the captain with the unquestioned expertise thought he and his crew could make it to daylight. When they could not, all the planning and the practice were worth nothing. If they were going to survive, the crew members now had only themselves and their will to live—and a couple of life rafts that plunged overboard with the rest of them—to give them any hope.

One group of seven would find one raft. A separate group of six would locate another raft. But in the darkness and the tumult—in the utter confusion as each man and woman went from membership in the
Bounty
family to struggling mortal amid thrashing rigging and surging seas—their paths to those life rafts were anything but obvious.