Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy

by Michael J. Tougias

  But Bounty’s stout construction included not only planking on the exterior of the hull, but interior planking, called ceiling. The vertical frames were sandwiched between the two horizontal courses of planks, making inspection impossible without removing planks.

  Kosakowski told Walbridge the entire boat should be inspected to see how far the rot went. Then the most severe rot should be dug out and replaced with white oak.

  Walbridge was both shocked and furious. Six-year-old wood should not be in this condition. He called Robert Hansen, his boss, who shared the captain’s anger and whose first thought was that HMS Bounty LLC should sue Boothbay Harbor Shipyard for inferior work.

  In a brief visit to the shipyard office, Walbridge told Kosakowski what Hansen had said. But Walbridge assured the yard manager that he would defend the shipyard when talking with Hansen.

  Walbridge said the time-consuming and costly search for widespread rot would have to wait for the next yard period, in 2013. He told Kosakowski that he would have the crew paint over the places where rot had been discovered.

  Having had his advice soundly rejected by Walbridge, Kosakowski nevertheless told the skipper that he was more than worried about what he had found under Bounty’s exterior. Walbridge replied that he was “terrified.” Kosakowski later said that he had urged Walbridge to avoid heavy weather wherever Bounty went after leaving the yard.

  Before he left Boothbay Harbor, Walbridge relayed to Kosakowski the message he had given to his boss, Hansen:

  “Get rid of the boat as soon as possible.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  FROM TRUCKS TO TALL SHIPS

  Bounty Update . . . Bounty is currently 250 miles due east of the Chesapeake Bay on a Southwest course at 6.8 knots. The Captain reports that Bounty should be encountering weather from the storm sometime this evening.

  —Bounty Facebook entry, 9:44 a.m., Saturday, October 27, 2012

  Bounty’s AIS (Automatic Identification System) transmitter recorded the ship’s position at 1:21 p.m. on Saturday as N 36° 55', W 70° 25'. Earlier, Robin Walbridge had emerged from his cabin and given the order to change course. Bounty had gone far enough to the east and was at the same latitude as Virginia Beach, just south of the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.

  The skipper told his chief mate, John Svendsen, that the hurricane was going to track up the Gulf Stream and not make landfall south of Cape Hatteras, so he wanted to cut across the top of the hurricane’s path. (At that moment, Bounty was south and east of the Gulf Stream.)

  The southwesterly course, he let the crew know through Svendsen, would put the wind on Bounty’s port quarter, and the ship would track into the storm’s northwest quadrant, where the slower winds should be.

  Having delivered the order, Walbridge would normally have returned to his cabin on the tween deck on the port side, the farthest aft of seven officers’ cabins on that side. Or he might have gone to his office, directly across the deck from his cabin, also the last of seven cabins, on the starboard side. Everyone who sailed aboard Bounty knew Walbridge as a traditional captain, one who delegated the hour-by-hour running of his ship to his officers and who did not otherwise mingle with the crew.

  This fit Walbridge’s personality, his quiet, taciturn nature, his penchant since childhood for keeping his plans—and his life—closed to the outside world. His personal life was so shuttered that even his most trusted subordinates, who had sailed with him off and on for years, did not know that he had an older sister, Lucille, and another sister, Delia Mae, a year and a half younger, who lived in Poland.

  As a young man, Walbridge had devised a long-term plan for securing his financial future. The details of this, too, were private. They involved thrift and effort. His effort was channeled into long-haul trucking. He invested his trucking income in property, whose rents gave him more income even while the value of the real estate appreciated. Some of his property was in Florida. Perhaps only he knew where else he was a landlord or property owner.

  When he was in his thirties, he announced that he had retired from trucking.

  About then, Walbridge moved to the Suwannee River, on the bend between Florida’s peninsula and its panhandle, and took a job at Miller’s Houseboats. At first, he lived aboard a small sailboat. One of his jobs was teaching folks who rented houseboats from Bill Miller how to operate the vessels. The Suwannee winds seventy-five navigable miles from its headwaters in the Okefenokee Swamp to the boat rental property, a mile from the Gulf of Mexico.

  When he arrived at Miller’s, Walbridge was calling himself Robin, and no one was contracting that into a nickname. Everyone at Miller’s liked the new guy and appreciated his skill—shaped in his teens when he rebuilt all those old cars—as a mechanic.

  Bill Miller’s evaluation of his employee was the kind that makes for a good résumé: “He was a very, very smart individual. There wasn’t much he couldn’t do, and there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t try to tackle.”

  In his time at Miller’s, Walbridge even dove into the political muck keeping the Suwannee from being dredged, Miller recalled. Walbridge had no success. The river still needs dredging, Miller complained.

  In time, Walbridge moved out of his boat and into a house trailer, but while he was living aboard, he acquired a pet parrot. His boat was small. His parrot was smart. Walbridge wanted his ship to remain tidy, so he taught the parrot to go outside to relieve itself. This was a fatal error.

  One day, Walbridge climbed his mast and was working up there with a scrub brush, Miller said. The bird, having learned its hygiene lesson, came outside. Walbridge lost his grip on the brush, which plummeted toward the deck. It reached the parrot first, Miller said, and there his bird tale ends.

  In the off hours, Walbridge and Miller played chess. The former trucker dominated these contests, and when his time at the houseboat-rental business was over, Walbridge had allowed his boss to win precisely once. Miller chuckled at the memory.

  In the late 1980s, the man who as a boy had no use for a classroom other than as a place to sleep began teaching adult-education classes in the area of Cedar Key, Florida. He took his lessons west along the coast to Apalachicola, Florida, where he offered night courses to commercial-fishing-boat captains. The idea was that when they earned a captain’s license, they could take paying customers aboard and increase their incomes.

  Kristin Anderson, a Northerner, had come to Florida in 1985 to escape the cold. In Wisconsin, she had sailed on other people’s boats in the short sailing season. In Florida, she bought a used foam-and-plastic sailboat, got a life jacket and a bailing bucket, and, with a jug of drinking water, set out to learn to sail.

  Someone challenged Anderson to take the captain’s course, and when she did, she discovered Robin Walbridge was an excellent teacher, who feasted on the success of his students. They became friends.

  In 1990, when Anderson helped in an effort to bring the Governor Stone, a Gulf Coast schooner, to town, Walbridge became a volunteer captain. He moved to Apalachicola for a while, bought some houses, renovated them, and filled them with paying tenants.

  “He’d blow into town once in a while and call on me,” Anderson recalled. On one visit, Walbridge took Anderson and another woman out on the Governor Stone. It was tied at the land end of a thousand-foot-long pier. Walbridge began teaching the women how to dock the boat. His teaching was deliberate. His explanations were clear. His voice was calm, never raised, and he almost never took the helm but stood back and pointed out the waving of a flag, the effect of the wind atop the masts.

  “We spent the entire afternoon and we never got beyond the end of the pier,” Anderson recalled. “It was fantastic. He was such a good teacher.”

  In 1993, Walbridge returned to Cedar Key as the skipper of the schooner New Way, a vessel operated by VisionQuest. The goal of the group, one newspaper reported at the time, was “to teach youngsters how to break out of a cycle of failure and become successful by taking risks and trying new activities.” The first lessons
Walbridge taught were the names of all the lines on the New Way and how to tie mariner’s knots.

  Later, Walbridge was skipper aboard the Heritage of Miami, an eighty-five-foot schooner used by the Boy Scouts of America in its High Adventure program. The boat sailed from Islamorada in the Florida Keys to the Dry Tortugas, seventy miles west of Key West, on weeklong tours every week.

  Barbara Maggio, whose husband, Joe, was the well-known force behind the schooner, was amazed at what Walbridge accomplished each week. She was particularly impressed the week the son of Vermont’s first director of the state’s Division for the Blind and Visually Impaired took a group of blind Scouts sailing for an entire week.

  Schooner sailing was fine, but like any tall ship enthusiast, Walbridge was looking forward toward the next, bigger vessel. He got his opportunity in 1993 when Joe Maggio told Richard Bailey, skipper of the square-rigged ship Rose, about Walbridge.

  Bailey was a year younger than Walbridge, and the age difference would usually have concerned Bailey. “His résumé was what made me accept his candidacy. He was a little old for a tall ship. You imagine the mates will be only marginally older than deckhands, who are eighteen,” Bailey explained. “I had previously had the experience of finding that deckhands of age twenty-five or thirty had a hard time interacting with mates younger than them.” But he found Walbridge not only fit but “he was also personable, a very agreeable kind of guy.”

  Walbridge held a hundred-ton master’s license when he arrived aboard Rose. He wanted to get some time on bigger ships to upgrade his license, Bailey said. The captain of less complex schooners, Walbridge happily began his life on a square-rigger as an able-bodied seaman, just a regular crew member. “Within a few months, he moved up through the ranks. I think we may have bumped him up to first mate in ’94 when I was gone,” said Bailey.

  Walbridge quickly demonstrated that he had immense aptitude as a sailor and equally immense aptitude for anything mechanical. “We came to rely on him for his opinions about mechanical issues. The second year, we put a piston rod through the side of an engine, and he got it fixed in forty-eight hours,” Bailey said.

  In the summer of 1994, Bailey got to know something about Bounty. He had taken leave from his helm—and promoted Walbridge to first mate—and was asked to run Bounty for short trips here and there. In the fall of that year, Bounty—owned by an offshoot of the Fall River, Massachusetts, Chamber of Commerce—needed someone to skipper the ship to St. Petersburg. Bailey assembled a crew and took Bounty as far as Wilmington, North Carolina, where it was to stay for a few weeks.

  “While it was laid up in Wilmington, they asked me if I knew someone who could be the ship keeper while it was there,” Bailey said. “I knew Robin was available. I called him and he came down and familiarized himself with the ship.” Then Walbridge became Bounty’s caretaker. The job was lent some adventure when, during the night, someone cast off Bounty’s dock lines, and Walbridge, alone on board, managed to get his drifting charge back alongside the dock.

  Rose had been Robin Walbridge’s only schooling in tall ships before he took over Bounty in Wilmington. There were differences. Rose was fourteen feet taller than Bounty, with a bit greater tonnage. But the biggest difference was the type of hull. Rose was a replica of a frigate, a naval gunship. As a ship designed to haul coal, Bounty was round and strong, and Captain Bligh’s mentor, Captain Cook, had chosen the collier over the frigate because it lacked the frigate’s array of gunports, openings through which heavy seas could wash over the vessel.

  Bailey often joked that Rose was like a horse, Bounty like a cow. But when the chance came in 1995 to become master of the bovine Bounty, Robin Walbridge committed himself to a long-term relationship.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  AN AGING ACTOR

  Riding the Storm Out . . . Day 2

  I’m sure that Bounty’s crew would be overwhelmed by all the prayers and best wishes that have been given. Rest assured that the Bounty is safe and in very capable hands.

  Bounty’s current voyage is a calculated decision . . . NOT AT ALL . . . irresponsible or with a lack of foresight as some have suggested. . . . The fact of the matter is . . . A SHIP IS SAFER AT SEA THAN IN PORT!

  In the next few posts I will try to quell some fears and help to explain some of the dynamics that are in Bounty’s favor.

  —Bounty Facebook entry, 11:30 a.m., Saturday, October 27, 2012

  Bounty had crossed the Gulf Stream sometime before Robin Walbridge ordered the course change Saturday morning. She was sailing in warmer water southeast of the stream, even as she headed southwest, back toward the East Coast. During the afternoon, she was making a speed of seven knots on the GPS that was mounted in the Nav Shack. That was about the same as her average speed since leaving Long Island Sound. The ride was still comfortable, even in the building seas and winds that had reached twenty-five knots. That wasn’t a surprise to the crew, but might have been for others.

  Some detractors who knew little about Bounty dismissed her as a “movie prop,” but her construction was anything but throwaway. On his occasional stints aboard Bounty during the 1990s, Richard Bailey, skipper of the Rose, found her “stoutly built by Nova Scotia craftsmen who knew what they were doing. A lot of effort and thought went into building her.”

  Bounty had needed her young strength because MGM was intent on filming its movie Mutiny on the Bounty on location in Tahiti. They asked a naval architect to design a ship capable of the voyage halfway around the world. Bounty left Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, sailed through the Panama Canal, and crossed much of the Pacific Ocean before it was on scene.

  The reality of life at sea then was substituted for by the imagination of Hollywood. It is somewhat instructive to compare the portrayal of William Bligh—played by Trevor Howard—in that movie with Bounty’s skipper in 2012, Robin Walbridge.

  In MGM’s version of the tale, Bounty set sail in 1787 from England, a ship in the Royal Navy commissioned for a commercial venture. She was to take on a cargo of breadfruit harvested in Tahiti and deliver it to the Caribbean, where plantation owners wanted to experiment with the plant as food for slaves. Breadfruit had replaced rice in the Pacific as the crop of choice. Up to two hundred of the grapefruit-size, coarse-skinned fruit grew on one eighty-five-foot-tall tree. The implications for the Caribbean, where plantation owners were apparently seeking a better profit margin through the stomachs of slaves, were promising. Thus far, MGM’s film dealt with fact.

  But then the plot took liberties, creating a despotic Bligh against whom audiences could jeer and a handsome, sensitive Fletcher Christian—Marlon Brando—whom they could cheer.

  Filming in Ultra Panavision 70 for the first time, the cameras—powered by large generators in Bounty’s hold—framed Bligh in a series of wrathful acts.

  First, he snatches more than his share of cheese, and when he’s confronted by an ordinary seaman who accuses the skipper of the pilferage, Bligh orders the man whipped for showing disrespect to a superior.

  Brando’s Christian is offended, but Bligh states, “Cruelty with a purpose is not cruelty, it is efficiency.”

  Bligh—who had served with Captain Cook in his earlier expeditions—has choices of routes to get to Tahiti. The longer route is east around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. He attempts the shorter, more treacherous route, around South America’s Cape Horn, but after failing to make the rounding and wasting precious time, Bligh eventually takes the eastern route and pushes the crew to get back on schedule, cutting their rations rather than stopping to resupply.

  All may not be forgotten by the crew when they reach Tahiti, but they become preoccupied with the willingness of the local women. Even Christian falls for one, the daughter of the local king.

  Bligh, however, is stewing. The breadfruit plants are dormant and not ready for harvest, and while his crew frolics and three members attempt to desert—they’re stopped by Christian and imprisoned by Bligh—the captain’s fury grows.

  Once the bre
adfruit is finally harvested, Bligh loads the hold with twice as many plants as planned. That means that water that should have been shipped for the crew must now be used to water the plants, and the new water rations add fuel to the crew’s displeasure, leading one crew member to attack Bligh, who orders the fellow keelhauled and killed.

  Then Bligh discovers Christian giving a sick seaman water and strikes his mate, who returns the blow. Bligh issues a death sentence, to be carried out at the next port.

  So Christian—Brando—leads a mutiny, sets Bligh adrift in a boat with the crew members loyal to the captain, and steers Bounty back toward Tahiti and its ladies, whom the mutineers take to the Pitcairn Islands, where they hide from the British authorities.

  Walbridge was unlike the fictional version of Bligh, in most respects. Quiet, calculating, and self-assured as he was, Walbridge seldom if ever disputed another crew member’s ideas. He simply had ideas of his own. Five years before Walbridge assumed Bounty’s helm, the ship starred in a second movie, Treasure Island, starring Charlton Heston as Long John Silver. The film was the product of Turner Network Television and was meant for cable-television distribution. The film was panned by critics, so Walbridge was well served to have missed it.

  Now the ship’s days in a starring role were over. Bounty was thirty years old, well beyond middle age in ship years. So her future roles were in the supporting-actress category. She was not selected for the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie. But she played the role of the Edinburgh Trader in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. She also appeared in the opening of The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie.

  Walbridge, the captain who eschewed attention for himself when visitors came aboard Bounty, was pleased with his ship’s movie roles. In August 2012, he told Ned Lightner in Belfast, Maine, “I actually have to say for myself personally I really like the movie industry. I find everybody in the industry really respectful. One of the big questions I hear all the time is ‘How much damage did they do to the ship?’ Things like that. I find them very, very respectful of the props, of the ship, of the people.”