Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy

by Michael J. Tougias

  Or worse.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  MUTINY IN HER BLOOD

  Normally, the ship’s engineer would have filled the day tanks in the engine room at 8:00 p.m. on Saturday, October 27. Each John Deere diesel engine that turned one of the two large propellers beneath Bounty’s hull got its fuel directly from a four-hundred-gallon day tank, which had to be pumped full once a day while the ship was at sea. But on Saturday, October 27, Chris Barksdale had filled the day tank twelve hours earlier than scheduled. That timing might be explained by his being new aboard the ship and not yet accustomed to the engine room routine.

  The odd timing might also explain why, when Claudene Christian, having just taken her place on the A-Watch at eight o’clock that night, checked the day tank, she recorded its level as “low,” not “half-low,” which it should have been.

  The timing of Barksdale’s replenishment was but one possible explanation of why the level of the sight glass was low. At Captain Walbridge’s command, both engines were running as hard as anyone had ever seen them run. Bounty was racing to the southwest, attempting to pass across the projected path of Hurricane Sandy, and consuming fuel at an extraordinary rate as the ship’s bluff bow banged against the growing seas.

  The noise in the engine room was deafening, and it was hot in there. No doubt, Christian had a reason to get the boat check completed and move on. And that may explain why Christian missed the real explanation for why the fuel level in the day tank appeared to be low.

  There was every reason to believe Christian was an observant and conscientious crew member, since in the past month she had been promoted from volunteer to paid crew. Proof was found in another observation she made in her boat-check notes. Water was coming into the engine room through an opened seam in Bounty’s side, Christian wrote. Bosun Laura Groves, not on boat check, had seen the problem around the same time.

  Little things were happening, and Claudene Christian, if she wasn’t yet voicing doubt, was becoming concerned. This would not have been out of character. Her mother, Dina Christian, saw Claudene as a bit of a worrier, even a cautious person.

  Christian’s concerns might have been calmed if, in the five months she’d been aboard Bounty, she had come to know the boss better. She’d told her mother earlier in the year that she wasn’t close to Walbridge, that he was standoffish. More recently she’d reported that the skipper “seems to be coming around. He is interested in me helping him raise money for the ship because I’m in promotions.”

  When this trip was over, Christian told her best friend, Michelle Wilton, she would get off Bounty. But she did hope to land a shoreside job with HMS Bounty Organization LLC, Robert Hansen’s holding company. It would be a chance, she told her college friend, to get her life back on track.

  Once again, when thinking about Bounty, Claudene Christian had big ideas, grand plans to go along with the perpetually bubbly personality that everyone saw and that had disguised a promising life sidetracked by too many disappointments.

  Her early life and success was well and publicly documented. Christian, who back in Boothbay Harbor had celebrated her forty-second birthday, was born in 1970 in Anchorage, Alaska, where, in 1987, she won the Miss Alaska National Teenager pageant. She was on her high school track team, competing in the pole vault. She was a gymnast whose specialty was the horse. And she was a cheerleader. At the same time, she participated in plays and performed as a singer. In 1988, she was in an opening act when singer Marie Osmond performed in Anchorage.

  Then she enrolled in the University of Southern California, where the five-foot-one-inch blonde majored in sports information, and she joined a sorority, where, as in the past, her personality had drawn friends to her side.

  Wilton was one of those friends. Christian became her roommate, and Wilton, who was not a cheerleader, found she was living with “the most fun person I’d ever met in my life.”

  Christian simply seemed to enjoy living. She was “one of those type of people that everybody wanted to be around. You’d meet her, you’d automatically become one of her friends.”

  Wilton saw Christian as unpretentious, nonjudgmental, outgoing. The cheerleader held no grudges, never spoke ill of others.

  At USC, Christian sang with a number of local bands and at fraternity parties, and taught herself how to play the guitar. Her mind was always seeing possibilities. Christian became a limited partner in a Hermosa Beach bar called Dragon.

  For her LinkedIn résumé, Christian listed “Promotions Manager, Church Hill Downs/Hollywood Park Racetrack, 1993–2001.” Although she still listed herself as “Owner, Cheerleader Doll Company, 1989–Present,” by the time she boarded Bounty in May 2012, all of her business efforts had long since come tumbling down.

  Claudene Christian had briefly sailed on the replica of Columbus’s ship the Niña but had no other time aboard a tall ship when in May she arrived at Bounty’s dock in a heat wave in Philadelphia. Her inexperience showed.

  Christian was dressed all in pink and white and, towing a suitcase with wheels, not toting a seabag, looked very much like one of her fashion dolls. When she was assigned a cabin, she filled it with clothes, and not the sort meant for swabbing decks. And among her many, many personal items was a hair dryer.

  Looks were deceiving. Christian, once she knew what was expected of crew, threw herself into her role as a deckhand. She told Wilton that she wanted to prove herself, so she worked her butt off.

  Bounty was nothing like her life immediately before May 2012. The girl from Anchorage, Alaska, where the sight of salt water was within a short walk; the young woman from Southern California, where the suntan beach was just to the west; this person felt landlocked living in Oklahoma, stifled and bored.

  Bounty, she told Wilton, was so different. For the first time in a long time, Christian felt at peace and happy.

  Her shipmates noticed her attitude. Dan Cleveland saw her always smiling while she was working, saw the attention she paid during muster.

  In Boothbay Harbor, Christian was under the hull working for Bosun Groves, getting dirty with the caulking. Her effort was rewarded by the warm embrace she got from the rest of the crew.

  Christian’s birthday arrived while Bounty was up on the rails in Boothbay Harbor, and she was treated to the same intense celebration when she turned forty-two as other crew members got on their birthdays, if not the same precise means of attention. For example, Anna Sprague, youngest aboard Bounty, was thrown into the water when she turned twenty and that night got her wish to sleep in a hammock high in Bounty’s rigging.

  Christian’s wish for dessert on her birthday was wine and cheese. The cook at the time got cheese and red wine, Christian’s favorite, and everyone drank with her. Then the entire crew went to a Boothbay Harbor bar that served pizza. There the crew sang with Claudene, the professional singer; danced; and performed with a karaoke machine.

  The West Coast party girl had many more opportunities with her shipmates to revel. At one port, the photographer, Kannegiesser, bought a drum set, Scornavacchi played, and the whole crew held the Bounty Bash on deck, inviting aboard the crews from other ships. In Nova Scotia, most of the crew went camping ashore at some seaside cliff caves, where they had a bonfire and sang sea shanties.

  But there was more than mere parties for Christian aboard Bounty. She told her mother that she’d found romance.

  This apparently was not uncommon aboard the ship. Laura Groves’s father, Ira Groves, introduced her and Dan Cleveland to his Florida yacht club members as a couple. Anna Sprague’s father said she and Mark Warner were an item. And Jim Salapatek said that his son, Drew, was dating Jessica Hewitt.

  Christian’s boyfriend, she told her mother, was Second Mate Matt Sanders. Dina Christian believed that her daughter was on good terms with all of her ex-boyfriends, but one relationship—the previous one—had, as Wilton understood it, driven Claudene back to live with her parents. So dating Sanders was perhaps a leap of faith.

  On that
Thursday afternoon in New London, when Walbridge offered his crew members the chance to go ashore before the ship sailed, Christian had one strong reason to sail—Sanders. But Jessica Hewitt knew that Christian also had some strong reasons to skip the voyage, so before Walbridge addressed the crew and before the dock lines were dropped, Hewitt asked Christian what she was going to do. Christian said she wanted to see the voyage through.

  By that time, Christian had already felt some pressure from her family, who urged her to quit Bounty in New London. Her father, Rex, called and said, “Look, they have that boat up for sale so I don’t know how much upkeep they are doing. So don’t do anything you don’t feel safe doing.”

  To a friend also named Rex she had sent an email: “Pumps are not the most reliable and I’d hate to be out at sea and something happens.”

  Dina knew about Hurricane Sandy and assumed that Bounty would not sail. But Thursday afternoon, even before Walbridge announced his decision at the capstan, the mother sent a text message to her daughter while she was touring the submarine Mississippi: “Why don’t you ask one of the guys if you can stay on the submarine during the storm. You will be nice and safe. Your Dad can come and get you.”

  Christian had made her decision, however. She replied, “Bounty loves hurricanes, haven’t you heard? The Captain has thirty years’ experience. All will be ok. We will go as far east as we can. We may be half way to Europe to get around it.”

  Once Bounty was under way but before the ship was far out to sea, Christian looked up more information about the hurricane on her phone. When she saw Jessica Hewitt, she repeated her earlier thought: “The storm looks like it will be so enormous we are going to have to go halfway to Europe.”

  Then she called her mother. Dina Christian was busy and asked if she could call back.

  Claudene sounded frantic. “No! We are out on the ocean and I’m afraid I’m going to lose reception. I gotta tell you how much I love you. I really do.” A little later, a text message appeared on Dina Christian’s phone: “If I go down with the ship and the worst happens, just know that I am truly, genuinely happy.”

  Now, two days later and hundreds of miles offshore, Claudene Christian had reason to be less than thrilled with her ship. Many little things had happened. Not all, she thought, was well.

  The seas, which at eight o’clock in the morning had grown to eight to ten feet with twenty knots of wind, began to build even more. At noon Saturday, with the winds at thirty-two knots—gale force—and the seas reaching fifteen feet, Chris Barksdale, caught by the violent and unpredictable rocking of the ship, lost his balance and, in the attempt to catch himself, injured a hand.

  Barksdale also discovered that the nuts on the engine mounts of the port generator had turned loose, allowing the engine to move. The crew turned off that engine and its generator, and Drew Salapatek turned on the starboard generator at two o’clock in the afternoon.

  By four in the afternoon, the bilge pumps were losing the battle with rising bilge water. The level was not yet critical, but the indications were of a mounting problem. Walbridge ordered the hydraulic pumps put into service.

  At the same time, Jessica Hewitt was becoming seasick—headache only, no vomiting.

  When the crew began working with the hydraulic pumps, they found them corroded and inoperative. At least until they could repair these pumps, the bilge water would continue to rise.

  At eight o’clock, after the evening meal had been served, the wind had reached forty knots—not an unusual offshore wind—and the seas were close to twenty-five feet when Claudene Christian began her rounds of boat checks. She saw seawater squirting in through the seams of the planking in the engine room, putting the condition in her report. She reported that the fuel in the day tank was low, but as events would make clear—perhaps due to the inexperience she shared with at least half of the crew—she failed to notice the problem causing the low fuel level, a detail that was right before her eyes.

  It would be another three hours before anyone discovered the problem.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ALONE

  Good evening Miss Tracie

  . . . I think we are going to be into this for several days, the weather looks like even after the eye goes by it will linger for a couple of days

  We are just going to keep trying to go fast and squeeze by the storm and land as fast as we can.

  I am thinking that we will pass each other sometime Sunday night or Monday morning

  All else is well

  Robin

  —Email from Robin Walbridge to Tracie Simonin, Saturday night, October 27, 2012

  The sounds aboard Bounty were deafening. Everywhere. With both propulsion engines running, conversation was impossible in the engine room. But with the sea regularly and repeatedly slamming the three-inch-thick planks along Bounty’s sides, an endless base-drum thumping accompanied the jarring of the ship. The timbers throughout Bounty groaned as the wind, acting on everything above the weather deck—the sails and masts—pushed in one direction, and the weight of the lead ballast in the bilge and the lazaret belowdecks attempted to maintain course in another direction. Above the weather deck, the wind was now howling through those ten miles of rope rigging as midnight came and went and Saturday became Sunday, October 28.

  Doug Faunt, exhausted at the end of his watch, descended from the helm to his stateroom on the port side of the tween deck and found that water was raining down from above. Water always came through the weather deck, found paths through the deck caulking even when Bounty was moored in port. Faunt had built a plastic tent above his bunk, but his bedding nevertheless was wet.

  It didn’t matter. Faunt needed sleep, and he would make do.

  Jessica Hewitt was on watch now, dealing with her mal-de-mer headache, doing boat checks. Mechanically, everything was running that should have been. The starboard generator was in use, contributing to the engine room cacophony. But Hewitt could not get the electric pump to keep a prime on the starboard side. Then she noticed the day tank was running low. Looking closer, she saw that the sight glass was broken. She told her watch captain, Matt Sanders, who said she should report the damage to the engineer. So Hewitt sought out Chris Barksdale, and his response was remarkably calm.

  “Oh, yeah,” Barksdale told Hewitt. “Someone must have broken it and not told me.” He did not offer any suggestions or say he was working on repairs of the sight glass.

  Like other crew members’ concerns about the loss of prime in the bilge pumps, Hewitt’s report of the sight-glass problem up the chain of command seemed to be received with nonchalance, as if it were not truly an issue in need of immediate action. No crew member reported a diesel odor or saw spilled diesel.

  Around this time, Adam Prokosh was passing through the Nav Shack, lit in the darkness by the screens of the various instruments. He noticed one instrument in particular: the AIS, a device something like a chart plotter on whose screen a constellation of dots would indicate the presence of all the commercial ships within a certain range.

  The AIS was blank. Not one other ship on the Atlantic Ocean was anywhere near Bounty.

  Prokosh, a voluble man seldom reluctant to share an opinion or observation, was sufficiently dumbstruck that he did not report his finding up the chain of command. Bounty was utterly alone, and Prokosh was at this moment given to understatement. The message from the AIS was, he thought, “a little alarming.”

  • • •

  If Prokosh was left speechless by the realization that his ship was alone at sea, seasoned tall ship captain Daniel E. Moreland had been completely shocked a few hours earlier when he’d learned Bounty was offshore, headed toward—not away from—Hurricane Sandy. Moreland, skipper of the Picton Castle, a steel-hulled, square-rigged ship about the same overall length as Bounty, had several days before decided to keep his vessel in port, changing long-established plans.

  The Picton Castle had been scheduled to sail to the West Indies by way of Be
rmuda, leaving Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, on October 19. By Tuesday, October 23, Moreland held muster on his ship and told the crew they were not sailing. Instead, he instructed his crew to begin planning for life at the dock.

  “A ship and its crew cannot possibly be safer at sea,” he said.

  Then as the weekend arrived, Moreland learned that his friend Robin Walbridge had left port. I can’t imagine for the life of me why he would leave in those conditions, Moreland thought. That sixteen mariners were offshore in the same patch of water as Hurricane Sandy was, to Moreland, mind-boggling.

  In the tall ship community, Bounty was thought to be a bit of an outlier—not really in the same game as the scores of tall ships that were sail-training vessels. Moreland knew that improvements were being made on Bounty, that a lot of money was being spent on her. The ship was looking better than he’d ever seen her in the fifteen years he had known Walbridge. And the crew was doing a good job.

  Moreland, with forty years of experience on the ocean, many of them on tall ships—some wooden—put it this way: “A car is safer in a parking lot.” Being in the North Atlantic in late October 2012 was simply a bad idea. The track of the hurricane wasn’t important. There was no safe place out there.

  Jan Miles, the “partner captain” of the Pride of Baltimore II, learned of Bounty’s location late on Saturday. He drew a blank, couldn’t understand it. Here was the largest storm in geographic spread ever forecast. So many questions had no answers.

  Safer at sea? Miles thought. A navy ship or a large cruise ship, perhaps. One that could make twenty knots and in twenty-four hours would be nearly five hundred miles away.

  But a sailboat? Pride of Baltimore II had a simple hurricane plan. Avoid them, and don’t go to sea when they are out there.