Shortly before Bounty departed from Boothbay Harbor, Christian was promoted by Walbridge from volunteer to paid hand—a position for which she’d earn a hundred bucks a week. “Volunteer with drinking money,” was how Walbridge phrased it, but Christian was immensely proud of her new position. It gave her status, but, more importantly, it validated her feeling that she belonged on the Bounty.
But Christian was still a green sailor, and she had never experienced bad weather at sea. The approaching storm clearly scared her in a way that it did not scare the more seasoned hands. In an e-mail conversation with her friend Rex Halbeisen after leaving Connecticut, she said she was “praying to God that going to sea was the right decision,” and expressed concern with the equipment on Bounty. “You know me, I am not a mechanical person but the generators and engines on this ship are not the most reliable,” she told Halbeisen. “They are always stewing over them. I would hate to be out to sea in a storm and the engines just quit or we have no power.”
But by the time she sent a subsequent text message to her mother, probably late on Saturday night, Christian seemed to have made peace with her misgivings. “Just be sure that I am ok and HAPPY TO BE HERE on Bounty doing what I love,” she wrote. “And if I do go down with the ship & the worst happens … Just know that I AM GENUINELY HAPPY!! And I am doing what I love! I love you.”
Five. Saturday, October 27, 1:00 p.m.
By Saturday afternoon, Bounty was a couple of hundred miles due east of the border of North Carolina and Virginia, and Robin Walbridge made the decision to change course. He would now steer the ship southwest, toward the coast.
It was a tactic he had used before when sailing in the vicinity of large storms. “You try to get up as close to the eye as you can, and you stay down in the southeast quadrant and when it stops you stop, you don’t want to get in front of it,” he said in a 2012 television interview. “You’ll get a good ride out of the hurricane.” As third mate Dan Cleveland later recalled, Walbridge reasoned that by October 27, Bounty had made it out far enough beyond Sandy’s eye that if he steered inland again, the winds whipping counterclockwise out along the margins of the storm would help propel the ship to St. Petersburg.
Walbridge reminded his senior officers that he had a good sense of how storms behaved. “He [was] never a yeller or a screamer,” Cleveland later testified. “When things would go wrong, you’d never see him freak out, he’d handle situations in a calm manner. I never saw him get nervous or scared. It made you feel like you could handle things.”
Cleveland, a twenty-five-year-old former landscaper who other crew members say “worshipped” Walbridge, had been through a few bad storms on Bounty, too, including one in 2008 that hit the ship as she made her way north to Louisiana from the mouth of the Panama Canal. He had heard the saying, popular among crew members, that “Bounty loves a hurricane,” and although he was loath to go that far himself, he did believe that the ship handled well in strong winds. “She works hard and you work hard,” was the way he put it. In the end, neither Cleveland nor the other senior officers who might have had a say in navigational matters ever objected to the new southwestern tack.
But Walbridge had made a miscalculation. His plan assumed both that the forecasts of Sandy’s path would hold and that it was possible to get around Sandy at all—that she was a hurricane of normal size, a few hundred miles across. Irene, in 2011, had been 600 miles in diameter; Katrina, in 2005, measured only 415 miles from edge to edge. Skirtable distances, if your ship was well-equipped and moving fast. But Sandy was not skirtable. Meteorologists later estimated that she was the largest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Basin, with a diameter of 1,000 miles, and a wind swath of 2 million square miles. If Walbridge had kept to his original southeasterly course, it was conceivable that he might have made it to Sandy’s edge. Instead, now he was unwittingly sailing Bounty directly into her maw.
• • •
That afternoon, the weather worsened. Winds were now reaching over thirty miles per hour, waves were climbing to fifteen and twenty feet. A cold rain fell periodically overhead. Bounty rocked irregularly, making it hard to get any rest belowdecks. Even simple actions, like moving around the cabin or walking down the passageway to the head, required concentration and energy.
More distressingly, it had become clear that Bounty was taking on a considerable amount of water. It seeped through the ceiling and across the floorboards and through the forepeak. It spouted through the walls and squirted down from the ceiling and collected in greasy little pools in the corners of the cabins. The floors turned slippery, the stairs and ladders downright murderous. All wooden ships leak, of course, and some of the crew members comforted themselves with the fact that Bounty had pumped herself out of a few disasters before. There were five pumps on board—two electric, two hydraulic, and one “trash pump,” a smaller unit that could be hauled around to different locations on the ship. But the hydraulic and electric pumps were working at peak capacity, and still the water was rising.
At eight a.m. on Sunday morning, after a long and mostly sleepless night, Walbridge gathered his mates in the navigation shack for a meeting. Chris Barksdale, the engineer, was also invited. Barksdale, a handyman by trade, was already seasick—later that day, when a crewmate gave him a pill for it, he vomited it back up. Walbridge pinpointed Bounty’s location on a map, and reviewed the plan for the day ahead: southwest and then south and straight on toward St. Petersburg.
At this point, Laura Groves later recalled, the seas were twenty-five feet and the wind was blowing at nearly sixty miles per hour. After the meeting concluded, around 8:45 a.m., she departed to help adjust the jack lines, the bow-to-stern lines that allow sailors to move safely around the deck of a storm-struck ship. Groves believed that the end was in sight, especially once they’d swung over the bottom quadrant of the hurricane and put the storm behind them. There was not yet much cause for concern, she thought.
This was not an opinion shared by Doug Faunt, who had spent Saturday night and much of Sunday morning in the engine room, monitoring the pumps. If the devices were unable to keep up with the seawater, the engine room would flood. And if the engine room flooded, Bounty would eventually find herself entirely at the mercy of the growing storm, batted about by the waves like a toy boat. The replica Bounty would be forced to rely solely on her sails, just as her namesake once had.
Faunt dashed from one engine to the next, minding the meters, tinkering with the levers, cursing under his breath. It must have been 120 degrees in that room, and humid as hell. He stripped down to his T-shirt and underwear and hiking boots, occasionally ducking through the hatch for a breath of fresh air. It was exhausting work, and at noon, he handed off the baton to another crewmember and crawled back upstairs to try to catch a few hours of sleep. When he got to his cabin, he found the room flooded and his gear soaked. He climbed naked into his sleeping bag. The bag was polyester, not cotton, and although the sensation was uncomfortable—not unlike folding your body into a used athletic sock—it did afford a bit of warmth.
Faunt had barely closed his eyes when he heard someone shout the “all hands on deck” call. You’ve got to be kidding me, he thought. He shouted his acknowledgment, fumbled for his sweat- and seawater-soaked clothing, and dressed in the damp darkness.
Six. Sunday, October 28, 12:30 p.m.
Josh Scornavacchi made it on deck a few minutes before Doug Faunt. Looking up at the masts, he saw the reason for the all-hands call: the forecourse was split, and the canvas was flying free. The forecourse was the Bounty’s storm sail; it helped steady her. It had to be furled. So Scornavacchi began to climb. He was a strong climber, comfortable with heights, but the rigging seemed to just get smaller and wetter as he shimmied upwards. The wind whipped the ropes around him into a fury, lashing him on the arms and neck hard enough to draw welts. Nevertheless, within the next hour, Scornavacchi, Laura Groves, and John Svendsen were able to secure the sail to the gaskets on the top of the yard.
Now she fixed Faunt with an intent stare, and complained that no one on the ship was listening to her. “What aren’t they listening to?” Faunt asked. He had to holler over the roar of the storm. Behind them, thirty-foot waves were breaking over the foredeck.
“We’re taking on too much water. The pumping isn’t going well. We’ve got big problems.”
“I know,” he said. “We all know.” There wasn’t a person aboard the Bounty who didn’t know the ship was in trouble. But it did no good to complain about it. It was better to keep your head down and do what you could to make sure everyone got out of this mess alive. Faunt tried to reassure Christian. “Listen,” he said. “It’s going to be fine.”
• • •
That evening, Sandy closed in on Cape Hatteras. The storm had now merged as predicted with the easterly moving cold front. Meteorologists were reporting a noticeable drop in the atmospheric pressure off the coast of North Carolina, a sign that the storm was entering an even more dangerous phase. Bounty, a couple of hundred miles southeast of the cape, had found herself square in the middle of the storm system, with little hope of sailing her way back out.
As night fell over Bounty, visibility that had been limited enough at twilight, when a veil of rain enclosed the ship, was whittled down to practically nothing. The swells rose like battlements around her. Scornavacchi ducked through the aft hatch to check on his cabin. What he saw startled him: several boards had been ripped up from the floor and were swirling around in the wash. He understood the gravity of the situation, but he also felt strangely energized. Back home in Pennsylvania, he had longed for an adventure. Now he had found one.
Around eight p.m., the winds again tore the forecourse loose, and again Scornavacchi was sent aloft to deal with it. He scaled the foremast with extreme caution. A hard hail pelted him in the face; he could barely see, let alone hear anything. A couple of dozen feet below him, the bow of the ship shot down the trough of one wave and up the sheer face of the next. Black water coursed across the deck. Occasionally, the ship would list nearly at beam-ends, the deck at an almost perpendicular angle to the sea and the crew clinging to anything they could get their hands on.
The sail furled, Scornavacchi made his way belowdecks. There, the water had risen further still, and the crew was working micro-shifts to keep it at bay, a couple of minutes lying down followed by a couple of minutes working the pump. Then, suddenly, the world went sideways, then straight again. There was a scream and then a moan. Scornavacchi and his shipmates assessed the situation. Having to abandon ship was now a real possibility. But surely the Bounty would stay afloat, even if she were to permanently topple over on her side. Surely she wasn’t about to sink just yet.
At this point, there were already two injured sailors aboard the Bounty. One was a twenty-seven-year-old named Adam Prokosch, who had been tossed headfirst across the mess by a particularly high wave. Christian set up a mattress in a dry part of the ship, and made Prokosch lie on his back, with his hands at his sides. It was clear that he was badly hurt; Christian worried that he might be partially paralyzed. She told him not to move.
Meanwhile, Walbridge had suffered an injury of his own, likely caused when he collided with the table in his cabin. Several sailors on board later recalled that he was moving only with extreme effort, bracing himself with both hands. Scornavacchi believes Walbridge broke his back; Faunt thinks it may have been a leg. Either would have been an ominous development. Unless you’re extremely lucky, escaping a sinking ship without full ambulatory control is all but impossible.
• • •
As Bounty’s engineer, it was Chris Barksdale’s job to maintain the generators, the pumps, and the diesel engines that powered the ship. In a subsequent interview with Popular Mechanics, Barksdale recalled that the pumps became clogged early Sunday afternoon; Walbridge himself did the unclogging, but it was to little avail. The water was flooding into Bounty much faster than it was going out. As the ship rolled, the water in the engine room and the bilge would heave up the walls and slosh back down over the equipment. The engines sputtered, churned, and sometime after nightfall, with a dull whine, gave out completely. The Bounty was now adrift.
At nine p.m. Walbridge and Faunt descended to the radio room to call for help. Bounty was noticeably light on communications systems—most of the time, the crew members relied on their cell phones. Closer to the coast, in calm weather, this wasn’t a problem. But Bounty was now a hundred-odd miles out to sea, and no one on board had any reception. It was too windy above-decks to conduct a conversation, which meant that the ship’s satellite phone—which got no reception belowdecks—was no good either. So Walbridge and Faunt decided to issue the mayday call on the Winlink system. You almost had to laugh, Faunt thought—they were going to peck out their damn SOS via e-mail.
Still, the system worked fine, and after confirming that the message had gone through, Faunt left Walbridge and made his way forward toward the galley, bracing himself with both hands. The generators were surging badly, and the lights were flickering on and off like disco strobes. After a while, the backup generator kicked in. In the yellow glare of the emergency lights, Faunt could see the other crew members organizing emergency supplies and tending to Prokosch, who was on his back on the mattress.
The next two hours passed in a delirious blur. Salt water would get into one light fixture, and Faunt would no sooner get it clean and working again than the next one would burst. There were electrical fires to put out, pumping to do in the engine room, and loose wood to secure in the tank room, which was now fully flooded. The Bounty was coming apart before Faunt’s eyes.
He dashed back to his cabin and took a quick inventory. He wouldn’t be able to bring much with him—he was going to lose his bicycle, most of his clothing, his radio gear, his books. In the end, he settled on his rescue knife and his teddy bear, Mush, which he strapped to his chest.
Engineless, the Bounty spun windward up the crest of one three-story wave only to be knocked leeward by the next. At around midnight, the first Coast Guard C-130, piloted by Lieutenant Wes McIntosh, came into range, and the Bounty was able to establish radio contact. There was a small cheer from the navigation shack. McIntosh requested that the crew shine a light on the rigging, and Faunt activated the search beam.
For the next couple of hours, the C-130, heavy with fuel, circled overhead, sometimes at 1,000 feet and sometimes at 500. “Someone tell that guy we’re 110 feet,” Walbridge joked. “He’s going to clip us!” There was still time for levity: according to Faunt, despite the six feet of water in the belly of the ship, Walbridge and Svendsen believed that the Bounty might yet be saved, if only the Coast Guard could find a way to lower some working pumps. But McIntosh could barely see half a mile in the rain, and the winds were blowing at between eighty and ninety miles an hour. A gear drop was impossible. The only thing the crew of the Bounty could do was hold on until morning, when a helicopter could be summoned from Elizabeth City. It seemed to Faunt an awful long time to wait.
Seven. Monday, October 29, 2:00 a.m.
Around two in the morning, the crew donned their bright-orange survival suits. Josh Scornavacchi was still not convinced that the Bounty would have to be abandoned, but he knew it was better to be safe than sorry. The suits—what sailors call “Gumby suits,” after the bulbous, ung
ainly form their wearers assume—were made of heavy neoprene. They would protect against both cold water and flame, in the unlikely event that the electrical fires spread through the Bounty. Scornavacchi zipped the waterproof seal on the collar closed and attached a small rubberized plastic bag to his climbing harness with a carabiner. Inside the bag was his ID, a pocketknife—the essentials.
Svendsen, the first mate, was in the navigation shack, his Gumby suit only halfway zipped. He seemed to Scornavacchi to be much less concerned with his own safety than with the safety of the crew. He inspected each sailor carefully, like a commanding officer before a battle, tugging on straps, double-checking rescue lights, slapping shoulders, and patting backs.
Scornavacchi thanked Svendsen, and joined Claudene Christian near the mizzen fife rail, which surrounded the aftermost mast. The clouds he could make out overhead in the darkness were low-bellied and full, and a strong wind blew across the deck. Christian was clearly scared but putting on a brave face for her friend, and she smiled brightly at Scornavacchi.
He looked up at the ghostly lights of the C-130 circling above him in the rain. Then he felt the deck lurch violently beneath him. The Bounty was once again leaning perilously over on her side. Bodies slid past him in the night, some silently and acquiescently, some with horrific screams, their hands desperately clawing for a handhold, a stray piece of rigging, anything at all.
He took a deep breath and jumped.
• • •
After receiving the OK from Svendsen, Doug Faunt waddled sternward in his Gumby suit and lay down on the deck alongside Adam Prokosch, the sailor with the injured back. Prokosch was not paralyzed, as Christian had feared; he would later learn that he had separated his shoulder, broken two ribs, and severely damaged a pair of vertebrae. But it had taken time to get him up on deck, and he looked bad: his eyes were half-closed, and he had his hands crossed over his chest, kind of like a corpse.
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