Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy

by Michael J. Tougias

  “It held a certain fascination [for me] that Paul Revere’s house didn’t have,” Lucille said.

  So that’s where the family went, again and again, with Robert in tow.

  One memorable summer vacation led not to Quincy but to a campground in Eastport, Maine, near the Canadian border. Robert was about ten, and the family had packed everything in and on the Volkswagen. When Howard struck up a conversation with a fellow, the man invited the whole family to stay in his cabin at the ocean’s edge. In fact, the cabin was built out over the water, and nearby, lobster boats floated on their moorings. The Walbridges ate lobster from the sea and slept over the lapping waves of the Atlantic. When they got home, young Robert wanted his own lobster boat.

  The request was not granted, and this angered the boy, turning him against his mother. But the boy was going to be a long-haul trucker, anyway. That was his focus. When he entered high school, he concentrated on acquiring the money to fund that vision. He had jobs delivering two local newspapers. He worked at a ski area helping to pack the snow. He had an egg route, selling eggs from the family chickens. He raised three hundred turkeys at a time to sell for Thanksgiving. At night, he had a job at a local Howard Johnson restaurant.

  “He had fudged a bit on his age,” Lucille said. He was thirteen, not the required sixteen, when he was hired. “He was rapidly promoted to opening and closing” the restaurant, she said. “His theory was [that] wherever you worked, you learned everything you could, every job in the place.”

  By the time he was fifteen, Robert had a steady business buying, repairing, and selling cars, even though he wasn’t old enough to hold a driver’s license. At times, the long driveway at the farm would be cluttered with old cars. As a sideline, he sold scrap metal.

  The price that the boy was willing to pay was academic. He thought school was a good place to catch up on his sleep. Like the son of a preacher, this son of teachers seemed to snub the family trade. He managed to earn B’s, but thought his plan would be advanced more quickly if he quit school altogether. He informed his parents.

  Learning was considered fun in the old farmhouse north of Montpelier. What was the boy thinking? His mother was distraught, pleading with Robert to stay in school.

  Robert Walbridge relented and completed high school. He had another reason to be angry with his mother. But the hostility did not interfere with the boy’s drive to excel. He earned the rank of Eagle in Boy Scouts, an achievement announced in the local newspaper. Among his badges was one for canoeing.

  Nor were these years in Montpelier devoid of simple joy for the boy. In winter, he would climb the hill behind their home and ski down before school with his sisters. After supper, Anna Walbridge would read to her children. In the summer, during family picnics, one of the larger rocks on a hillside field served as the table. Everyone would sit and talk around a campfire. Anna quoted different poems, Howard quoted Shakespeare, Grandfather recited Longfellow, Milton, and Shelley, and Grandmother a little bit of everything.

  Robert and his sisters helped set the table; washed dishes; dusted; fed the farm animals—they raised their own cows and chickens, as well as vegetables; mowed lawns; weeded their assigned three rows of peas each day during the summer; drove the tractor for haying; assisted in canning the vegetables—anything their parents were doing, the Walbridge children did.

  In Boy Scouts, Robert learned to cook. One morning, Lucille started to cook eggs in the farmhouse kitchen. “He put his arm around me and gently shoved me aside and said, ‘Let me do that,’ ” Lucille recalled. “He took four eggs, two in each hand, and then simultaneously cracked all four of them and dumped the shells in the wastebasket in one smooth motion. Eggs went in the frying pan and shells went in the trash. He was thirteen. It was a few days after that that he got the job cooking at Howard Johnson’s.”

  Nor, Walbridge told his sister, did he ever stop cooking. Aboard Bounty, he said, he baked eight loaves of bread every other day. He said he taught bread-baking to his crew members.

  • • •

  The Vietnam War was raging when Robert graduated from Montpelier High School. That summer, he took a job as a cook at a prestigious golf resort on Vermont’s Lake Morey. He wanted a truck but he wasn’t twenty-one yet, and the Lake Morey Inn was a move up from Howard Johnson.

  The resort provided its guests with small boats on which to sail the lake, where the pink summer evening clouds reflected majestically on the lake surface. Robert Walbridge borrowed a friend’s sailboat and sailed across the lake. He was hooked. The feel of the wind in the sails thrilled the teenager, who as a boy had seen lobster boats and lusted. But for a while, boats and sailing would have to wait.

  He applied for conscientious objector status and took a defense-industry job at Pratt & Whitney in East Hartford, Connecticut. During his time at the aircraft company, he was always busy but found time to enroll in art and algebra courses at a community college. His trucking plans were on hold, and he felt that in taking courses, he also was wasting his time. He told his sister that he had earned A’s in both courses but that he had learned all that college could teach him.

  On October 25, 1970, Walbridge turned twenty-one and was eligible to get a truck driver’s license. As soon as that was accomplished, he paid cash for a new semitractor—money from the egg routes and paper routes and car sales and restaurant jobs and even from the coins he’d accepted in his childhood “for my truck”—and hit the road as a long-haul trucker. He had planned for seventeen years for this moment and had made it happen.

  It would be another decade or more before Robert Walbridge turned away from the highways and toward the sea. Just before he did that, he made another move he had apparently been contemplating for some time.

  Few people outside the Walbridge family called him Robert. They seemed to feel that Bob or Bobby was a better name. This apparently grated on him, and in his midthirties he took action.

  In some court the date is recorded when Robert Walbridge officially changed his name to Robin. He was like that, headstrong and determined. These qualities would have grave consequences as Bounty headed toward Hurricane Sandy.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  JOSHUA’S STORY

  Friday, October 26, 2012, was a good day at sea. The winds were moderate and the seas relatively calm as Bounty’s bluff bow plowed south across the Atlantic. Long Island had disappeared in her wake overnight. Now, dark blue water was in every direction, with only thin lines of foam atop small waves. The crew knew a change was coming, though. They had their weather fax, among other modern conveniences, to remind them that Sandy was headed north. So those sailors not on watch began tackling the jobs on Bosun Laura Groves’s list.

  The C-Watch, Joshua Scornavacchi’s crew, finished its last tour at eight o’clock, ate breakfast, and now was available to help Groves. Safety ropes called jack lines had to be strung along the top—or weather—deck and on the wide-open sections of the tween deck just below. “Sailor strainer” netting had to be raised along the exposed sides of the weather deck. And Groves wanted to lower the unused royal yard to the deck to bring its weight down.

  Jack lines are long lines or straps running along a sailing vessel’s deck from bow to stern. In rough seas they give crew members a place to hold on or on which to clip a tether attached to a harness to prevent them from falling and sliding overboard.

  The sailor strainer is netting raised along the aft rails to catch crew members before they are washed overboard.

  The royal yard is the spar that supports a royal sail, a small, light-air sail flown at the very top of a mast.

  Scornavacchi, as nimble as any of the other crew members, was sent aloft first with Drew Salapatek to reef some of the sails, a normal tactic prior to foul weather and rising winds. Reefing is gathering up part of a sail into folds, thus reducing the area of sail exposed to the wind.

  With the reefing accomplished, Scornavacchi alone was sent higher, to disconnect and lower the royal yard. Although Bounty’s sta
bility letter—an official document stating under what circumstances a vessel is stable in the water—prohibited use of royal sails, she was rigged with the spars, and at times Walbridge ordered that canvas flown.

  One hundred feet up the mast, where he could see far beyond the horizon that would be visible to the helmsman on deck, Scornavacchi rode the mast as it rocked gently. Salapatek was below, keeping an eye on him for safety. It was a perfect day for this job, and shortly the yard was lying on the weather deck, where Scornavacchi joined the rest of the crew.

  Next the crew strung two jack lines—one on each side—on the weather deck. The lines were loose, giving anyone holding on to them the ability to go near the outer rails. Then Scornavacchi and the crew went below, where they strung two tight lines on the tween deck and another, short line athwartships in the galley to give the cook, Jessica Black, something to hold on to while she prepared meals.

  In all the time Scornavacchi had been aboard Bounty, the crew seldom had need of jack lines, nor did they need the sailor strainer netting, which they now attached to the vertically slanting ropes that, like guy wires on a telephone pole, rose from the hull to support the main- and mizzenmasts. Scornavacchi had endured the calm summer weather while longing for some action at sea. Now, he was happy preparing for the storm.

  • • •

  Bounty was in San Juan, Puerto Rico, when Scornavacchi met her. He arrived in the early-morning hours in a downpour. Rainwater streamed down the street as he approached the dock. Through the rain, he saw the ship, dark, huge, breathtaking. Everyone on board was asleep, but he made enough noise to awaken a watch stander sleeping near the companionway. He was shown to a display case on the tween deck, and there he bunked until dawn.

  A month later, Bounty began her season sailing north for St. Augustine, Florida. On that first day out of San Juan, Scornavacchi climbed the rigging with others in the crew to set the four topmast staysails and the main topsail. From high on a mast, he saw dolphins bounding by the ship’s sides.

  Then a squall struck, and quickly the seas built to eight to twelve feet.

  Scornavacchi and two other young men, following orders to furl the jib, went out on the jibboom, a spar holding down the bottom of a triangular sail above Bounty’s sixty-foot bowsprit.

  “Whenever you’re furling a sail, you’re going to be standing just on a footrope and that’s it,” Scornavacchi said. “It’s pretty cool. Man, you do things that you think you would never do.”

  Sailing in his first storm, Scornavacchi worked with the snapping sailcloth, the wind blowing so hard he couldn’t hear his shipmates. One of the other crew members, Johnny, was yelling, but his words were carried away in the howl. The rain stung and the ship’s bow plunged and spray rose in great, soaking fans.

  The furlers climbed back down to the deck, where, without breaking stride, Scornavacchi vomited off the leeward rail. Then he went up the mainmast to set the main topsail. The ship moved side to side and fore and aft and up and down, and the yard that he was approaching moved side to side. He hadn’t quite reached the yard when a humpback whale breached immediately beside the ship. Then another, big as a small bus, broke the surface, and soon whales were jumping out of the water everywhere.

  The crew set the sail but, gawking at whales, they were not quick. Scornavacchi watched in awe, all the while worrying that the next wave of nausea would rain the remaining contents of his stomach down on the crew members below. He finished his work aloft, then vomited once he returned to the deck. He took a turn at the helm, then had to hand off the job to race once again to the leeward rail. And still the whales and dolphins leaped as if they, indoctrinated into Bounty’s routine, knew—as did Scornavacchi—that you didn’t stop working for anything.

  That night had its own reward for the young sailor. As the boat broke through the water, it agitated floating phosphorescence, and as if a switch had been thrown, the sea swirling along the hull turned green, and the dolphins, still swimming beside Bounty, glowed.

  Life seemed perfect. These were the best days. But unknown to Scornavacchi, he had contracted a virulent infection through some cuts and scrapes. After a week at sea, boils began appearing on his skin, eleven of them when the ship was two days from St. Augustine. By then, he was unable to walk.

  As soon as Bounty docked, he was given a heavy dose of antibiotics and sent home to Pennsylvania to recover. More shots and pills and nasal antibiotics and antibiotic soap took care of the staph infection. But it took weeks, while everyone Scornavacchi knew attempted to keep him from returning to sea.

  The Center for Infectious Diseases had to clear him, but so did his mother and family and friends and his girlfriend. “They were just really worried,” he recalled. “I felt like I was just starting on that [nautical] journey. I wanted to finish it. My girlfriend left me pretty soon after that, and then I just continued on the ship.”

  • • •

  Already, Scornovacchi had discovered something compelling aboard Bounty. In that, he was not alone. Many of his shipmates were tugged aboard in the same way. For Scornavacchi, unique ingredients in the stew of his first twenty-five years may have steered him toward Bounty and Robin Walbridge.

  In his early memories there is the divorce. He was five when his father and mother separated. He stayed with his mother, learned to resent his father.

  Two years later, when Scornavacchi was in first grade, he had what he now describes as his “midlife crisis.” It began in a moment when he stopped and looked around him, at everything, and thought, If I died right now, I wouldn’t have accomplished anything in my life.

  He felt old. He looked down at a small patch of grass—he was standing in his own yard—and stared at it. He saw what he now says were fourteen different species of plants and many types of insects.

  “A patch of grass the size of a dinner plate. It made me realize it wasn’t just grass. I didn’t even know what was in my own yard. And if you put that in perspective with Earth, I know nothing about what is around me. I just started exploring everything,” Scornavacchi recalled.

  Even as a young adult, he would have difficulty being content. He would always need to do more, see more. There would always be something to explore, even in a barren room. But the feeling began back then, in grade school.

  In the first grade, he looked ahead and saw twelve more years of school. He started abhorring routines. They were monotonous, inhibited his ability to live. He became depressed.

  The feeling lasted until he was fifteen. Then he realized that he was wasting time. Obsessing about his inability to constantly experience the world around him, he was also doing little.

  He decided to stop thinking and start living. He was in high school now and joined every group he could find: the orchestra, the concert band, the jazz band, the choir, the wrestling team, hockey, tae kwon do, the Christian Club. He became president of the outdoor club and the dance club. He joined the ski and snowboarding club.

  Having switched into overdrive, he found that though he was well-rounded, he was mediocre at everything and an expert in nothing.

  “If I was to climb Mount Everest at that point in time, I would have done more than I had ever done in my life, but looking out over that expanse, I would see that there was more to do out there than I knew before,” he said now. He was overwhelmed.

  For a while in high school, Scornavacchi suffered from narcolepsy. He fell asleep randomly and as a result began missing school. He was medicated and the sleep disorder vanished.

  He earned his Eagle rank in Boy Scouts and had the grades to enroll in Penn State University after high school. There, in rural central Pennsylvania, he found a passion for the outdoors.

  He camped, backpacked, did rock climbing and scuba diving. In the summer, he worked as a white-water rafting and kayaking guide in nearby Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania.

  Scornavacchi lived to hike in the snow. In this and other activities, he found that he was alone. Others were content to remain indoors in front of
a television. When he worked, his fellow employees would, at the end of the day, go to a bar. He wanted to go hiking and backpacking. He went alone.

  Ten inches of snow covered the forest one February day when, alone, he headed into the woods. Reaching a campsite, he set up his tent and spent the night. The following morning, he was headed out of the woods with a sixty-pound pack on his back when his knee snapped, tearing his meniscus. His leg was stuck in one spot.

  “I couldn’t put much weight on it,” he said. “I used the two ski poles I had brought with me and then dragged myself out of the woods. It started raining and it got dark and a lot of times I had to crawl. Every time I took a step, I would thank God I was able to take one more step.”

  He made it out of the woods. Undeterred, he would go back for more. Perhaps he was testing himself. He wanted the whole experience and believed if he held back, he would only get part of it.

  He felt the same way when the infection interrupted his voyage on Bounty. And so, when the boils healed and the infection was gone, Scornavacchi got back aboard the tall ship.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A VIGILANT WATCH

  Joshua Scornavacchi was but one of sixteen aboard Bounty when, twenty-four hours into her voyage and nearing sunset, she was making seven knots across the Atlantic Ocean, about 110 miles south of Montauk Point, Long Island, and due east of Atlantic City, New Jersey. C-Watch—with watch captain Dan Cleveland, Anna Sprague, Drew Salapatek, and Scornavacchi—was on duty on the weather deck, and at the forward end of the tween deck, the evening meal was being prepared in the galley.

  The seas had been between three and four feet, the wind ranging from ten to fifteen knots, but by now, everything aboard Bounty was lashed in place and prepared for the coming storm. The big diesel engines thrummed two decks below the helm. Those on watch rotated through all four positions during their four-hour duty. Up front, the person standing forward watch had a clear view ahead of the gathering darkness. Another watch stander spent an hour in the bowels of the ship, checking the bilges and monitoring the engines. The fourth person was on standby, and this evening that duty called for little effort.