Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy

by Michael J. Tougias

  When Hurricane Sandy was approaching, Pride II was moved from Chestertown, Maryland, to Baltimore ahead of the storm.

  “All of my efforts,” Miles would say, “have been to expose the vessel to the least amount of weather possible.”

  But there was Bounty, steering into Sandy. Nobody, nobody, was out there going directly at Sandy, Miles knew. Not even the navy with its high-speed ships and not the passenger industry that went out on Sunday. They went the opposite direction.

  But not Bounty. She and her crew were following their captain’s vision and his alone. Bounty’s culture was traditional, and traditionally a sea captain’s authority was second only to God’s. To question such authority was, in the days of sail that Robin Walbridge wished to in some ways re-create, to risk severe—sometimes capital—punishment.

  As recently as World War II, the sanctity of a ship’s chain of command was in play. Such was the case on board the supply ship Pollux. In a small convoy with two other American warships on February 18, 1942, Pollux was steaming from Portland, Maine, to Newfoundland in a blinding winter storm.

  To evade German submarines, Pollux and the two other ships were zigzagging to port and starboard along a base course that would lead them to Placentia Bay in Newfoundland. With so little visibility in the thick and driven snow, the ships’ navigators, who had almost no electronics other than rudimentary and unreliable radar, had to rely on taking sun and star sights with a sextant. A severe southeast wind was pummeling the starboard flanks of the ships, driving them to port—north on the compass. In her book that chronicles the story, Cassie Brown related one navigator’s reaction:

  Lt. (jg) William Grindley, navigator of the Pollux, had had no premonition of disaster as [another crewman] had, but Grindley’s own alarm bells were ringing. After years of making landfalls in all kinds of weather, he had developed a built-in alarm clock, an uncanny sense when things were just not right, and he had that feeling now. Something was amiss.

  Because of the poor visibility he had been on the bridge for 19 hours, and during this hour before midnight he was definitely uneasy. Since 1100 hours his best efforts had not enabled him to absolutely fix their position. He recommended to Commander Turney [the officer in command] that they discontinue zigzagging.

  Commander Turney had been on the bridge for the past 16 hours and, already harassed by the numerous messages directed at them earlier, he had refused. Worry had triggered disagreement between the two men.

  Grindley had gotten three quick star sights under hazy conditions at 0620. It was less than satisfactory, but better than no sight at all. By early afternoon he had caught three sun lines; one, at 1220 hours, had not been an exact fix, and he made a notation on the report: “This position could be five to eight miles in error in any direction due to adverse weather conditions while taking sights. . . . Be governed accordingly.”

  Grindley caught one more sun line at 1400 hours as they steamed into Newfoundland waters, and radio bearings, although only approximate, established their position.

  Knowing approximately where they were was not satisfactory. In midocean, five to eight miles was nothing to be concerned about. Approaching land in bad weather, at night, that distance was something else. Commander Turney was on tenterhooks, but still would not discontinue the zigzag.

  In Grindley’s estimation the zigzag plan had too many broad changes of course, which made it practically impossible for him to correct the course to compensate for the wind and waves hitting the starboard beam. Since landfall would be made in darkness, it would be more sensible, and assure better dead reckoning navigating, if he had only to plot the straight lines of the base course. It certainly would lessen the danger of a northward drift toward land.

  He had bluntly suggested to Commander Turney that they request permission of the escort commander to discontinue zigzagging. Annoyed, Turney had refused. Under Navy rules the senior officer (Webb) [on board another ship in the convoy] was the one who determined what action to take, and no orders had been received from him, [Turney] told Grindley, therefore unless and until he received orders they would continue to zigzag.

  Grindley understood his commanding officer quite well. Those needling messages still rankled, and Turney had no intention of stepping out of line and giving the flagship the opportunity to humiliate him further in front of his crew.

  The Pollux rolled on. Quartermaster Isaac Henry Strauss and the rest of the lookouts rotating on the wings had squinted against the wind, snow and spume, watching to make sure they did not run into the Wilkes or the Truxtun [the other two ships]. Wretchedly and unspeakably cold, Strauss was torn between keeping a good lookout to avoid collision and hoping they would collide and go down and get the misery over with quickly.

  During the compass checks, which had to be entered in the logbook, Strauss was in and out of the chartroom, where the tension between the captain and the navigator was becoming quite unbearable. Once Strauss heard a snatch of the conversation as Grindley maintained that very possibly they were standing into danger.

  The navigator was correct. But his superior officer, heeding the tradition of honoring the chain of command, did nothing. Inevitably, the Pollux—as well as the Wilkes and the Truxtun—veered off course until dead ahead they saw snow-covered cliffs rising from the sea. All three vessels smashed onto the rocks.

  In the ensuing evacuation, which Brown describes in Standing into Danger, 203 seamen died in the freezing seawater when they attempted to make their way from the stranded Pollux and Truxtun to shore. That was more than half of the men involved. The culture of the maritime chain of command had claimed them as victims.

  At its birth, the aviation industry adopted the maritime culture in its cockpits. When in 1979 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) found that the majority of aviation accidents resulted from human error, a move was made to change the culture.

  “What they had to do is mandate a methodology for charging the captain of the plane to listen and charging the copilot to talk,” said Jan Miles. “Then they trained the two officers to listen to each other. Then they created this training regimen. It was important to break down the mythology of vertical command structure.”

  The training was called Crew Resource Management or Cockpit Resource Management. The goal of CRM is to promote among crew members the willingness to question authority. In the maritime tradition, subordinates were not encouraged to question their supervisors, and supervisors frequently disciplined those who did. CRM attempts to alter this traditional outlook in a manner nonthreatening to either supervisors or crew.

  In time, many in the maritime industry adopted a similar policy, called Bridge Resource Management. But not Bounty.

  • • •

  The darkest hours for Bounty’s crew were when Prokosh looked at the AIS, at a time far from sunset, when dawn seems so distant when looking out at the sea—any sea, but particularly a sea ripped by a storm.

  Faunt slept restlessly if at all in his portside cabin on the tween deck. On the deck below, Scornavacchi awoke for his four o’clock watch and discovered that the sole boards in the crew quarters were wet with seawater that splashed up from the bilge. Gripping whatever was in reach so he wouldn’t be hurled against a fixed object and injured, Scornavacchi made his way to the weather deck, meeting his watchmates. Then he began boat checks and, in the engine room, found the broken sight glass on the day tank.

  He could have been the first to notice because no one from the B-Watch mentioned the problem to him when he took over. But Scornavacchi did the right thing, reported the problem to his watch captain, Dan Cleveland.

  Cleveland said, yes, the officers were aware of the problem. Then Scornavacchi passed the information along to his watchmate Anna Sprague, who would do the next boat check.

  At this point, green crew members who at times came to the weather deck to experience the storm firsthand were mostly below in their berths.

  Jessica Black, who would normally have risen a
t five o’clock to begin preparing breakfast, got to remain in her berth an hour later on Sunday morning. She had followed Walbridge’s advice and prepared meals in advance so that when it got rough, there would be something to feed the crew. For this morning, she had made French toast, which she could simply reheat in the oven.

  But when she got to the galley, Black found smoke coming from the oven, which was turned off, and smelled burning plastic. She told the skipper, who flipped a circuit breaker off. The smoke stopped.

  An investigation revealed that water was dripping on a switch. Doug Faunt was summoned, and he wrapped the switch with electrical tape, making it water resistant for the moment.

  By seven o’clock Sunday morning, the wind was blowing a steady fifty knots and the seas had grown to a uniform twenty-five feet. The bilge pumps were running constantly, but they were still not holding their prime.

  Those who could eat breakfast did. But everyone was now suffering from fatigue, and the day was just starting. Walbridge declared there would be no work parties so that those off watch could rest.

  This voyage was beginning to have the look and feel of the 2010 trip to San Juan, except this time Bounty wasn’t overtaken by the weather. Robin Walbridge had chosen it. He had given the orders. He had selected the route, the time to make the turn to the southwest so that Bounty could race across the hurricane’s track, get on the good side. Alone, he had chosen all of this and assumed, without apparent contradiction, that his plan was well conceived, that doubters were misguided.

  Seventeen years earlier, when he’d made the bold decision to step up to the rank of square-rigger captain, there had been no doubters, certainly not Walbridge himself, who by then believed he had acquired enough knowledge for the job. Nor was he surrounded by individuals qualified to independently assess his credentials. Like his current crew aboard Bounty, the movers and shakers in Fall River, Massachusetts, who in 1995 sought out Walbridge as their captain knew little about tall ship sailing. They had a few expert advisers to guide them in the hiring. Beyond that, they chose to trust their new captain explicitly.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  LANDING THE UNQUESTIONED CAPTAIN

  Fall River, Massachusetts, is a seaport twenty miles from the ocean, on Mount Hope Bay, at the northeastern corner of Narragansett Bay. It is home to the largest collection of US Navy ships on display anywhere. The city had hosted tall ship festivals, and the Fall River Area Chamber of Commerce—the local business-booster organization—had been a big part of those celebrations.

  After the city organized a couple of tall ship festivals, the members at the chamber were sitting around when one of them, Phil Roderick, said, “Wouldn’t it be great if Fall River had its own tall ship?”

  Collectively, the members imagined the name FALL RIVER on the transom of some handsome tall ship visiting ports around the country. What a promotional tool! Spreading the word about their city on the bay. It was only a daydream, though. In 1992, no tall ship sprang to mind that was capable of filling the bill.

  Six years earlier, in 1986, yachtsman Ted Turner, whose sailing credentials included victory in the 1977 America’s Cup race in nearby Newport, Rhode Island, had purchased MGM/UA Entertainment Company for $1.5 billion. With it he acquired the company’s film and television library, and he got Bounty. Turner liked boats, but he was willing to get rid of this now-twenty-six-year-old movie prop. So in 1992, he sent out a request for proposals to about twenty communities that had hosted Bounty, including Fall River.

  “They were kind of fishing to see who could take it over,” recalled Tom Murray, who at the time ran the Fall River Area Chamber Foundation Inc. “When Turner contacted us, we were kind of already primed for it. We had a core crew of guys who went to work on it and put together an operating plan without knowing what they were doing.”

  But why would Fall River, a somewhat down-at-the-heels mill town past its prime, be attractive to Ted Turner?

  If he was thinking about the ship alone, there was the city’s protected harbor as well as an organization willing to take the ship.

  “Of course Turner would be looking for a tax deduction,” Murray said. “We did something nobody else did.” The group applied to the Internal Revenue Service for a “private letter ruling.” In the application, they placed a value on Bounty of $3.5 million. “When that private ruling came through, that guaranteed [Turner’s company] would be able to take a $3.5 million deduction on its tax return.”

  Turner sent his pal Bunky Helfrich to Fall River to make sure the city could handle the ship. The chamber members took Bunky to the city’s Marine Museum for a short visit. They couldn’t extract him on schedule, but that was okay because now Bunky had “warm fuzzies about the place,” Murray said. “Come in with the private letter ruling, it was a slam dunk. They gave us the ship.”

  Bounty arrived in Fall River on June 18, 1993, under the command of delivery skipper Jay Bolton. It was officially owned by the Tall Ship Bounty Foundation Inc., a charitable nonprofit formed by Murray’s Fall River Area Chamber Foundation Inc.

  “We were the rookies, as far as owning a ship,” Murray conceded. “Our initial plans were to have it as a dockside attraction, with a long-term plan to have her sail to festivals to promote the city. Our early budget was peanuts compared to the long-term plans. We were hoping to do a very aggressive sailing-school program.”

  Underneath all the plans was a simple, overriding goal: to put the name Fall River on the stern and generate publicity.

  The payoff was immediate. Across the country, newspapers large and tiny announced Turner’s gift to the city: a total of 7.9 million copies of various newspapers ran articles mentioning both Fall River and Bounty.

  “And that’s what we were looking for, because the ship wherever it went was a front-page story. That’s why we did it, a very selfish purpose why we did it,” Murray said.

  The chamber was prepared to send Bounty off to distant ports now, but they were also thinking beyond that to a sail-training program. They began that first year with a program for adults and had a sail-training program for youth in the works.

  “So that became the single-minded focus of the group. The gold standard would be to have it as a sailing school,” Murray said. The chamber envisioned the young people aboard Bounty learning life lessons because the ship doesn’t discriminate. “You make a decision and the ship responds. Whatever they [students] do, the ship’s going to hold them accountable.”

  • • •

  Jay Bolton was only Bounty’s delivery captain. In the next two years, the Fall River owners continued to sign fill-in captains whenever they wanted to send the ship on a tour. Richard Bailey, captain of the Rose, was one. But they needed a full-time captain. On their board they had a couple of seasoned tall ship skippers to help guide their search. Ernst Cummings had been the captain of the coast guard’s tall ship, Eagle, when he was in uniform. Another adviser to the chamber members was Hugh Boyd, the Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, seaman who took Bounty on her first voyage to Tahiti. While most of the chamber guys were not tall ship guys, they believed they could rely on Cummings and Boyd to give them good advice in the hiring of a new captain.

  Bounty stayed in Fall River her first winter, 1993–94. But even in a protected port, winters can be rough on a wooden ship. The following year, Bounty was sent south, with Richard Bailey as fill-in skipper, to Wilmington, North Carolina. There, Robin Walbridge took over as dock captain and caretaker until the ship sailed to St. Petersburg, Florida.

  Phil Roderick—the chamber member who had first dreamed about having a tall ship with FALL RIVER on the transom—owned a winter home in St. Petersburg, and he boarded Bounty every day when she was tied to the city-owned pier. Roderick negotiated the dock rentals and any other needs Bounty had, and in that role he met Walbridge. When Murray visited St. Petersburg, Roderick introduced him to Walbridge and then vetted the aspiring skipper’s credentials. He discovered Walbridge had worked for the Adventure Scouting program in Miami,
where the owners had high praise for him.

  Walbridge had more tall ship experience than any other potential candidate except Ernst Cummings, so he was brought to Fall River to meet the board of directors. He didn’t ask for a high salary, which appealed to the chamber, and so he became Bounty’s full-time captain.

  Murray found Walbridge likable, smart, pleasantly amusing but not at anybody’s expense, a clever guy who was easy to talk to.

  “I thought he was competent,” Murray said. “He and I would talk regularly, oftentimes every day. I was the office guy. Robin was stellar to work with. It was a full-time job and he always had the best interest of the Bounty at heart. I thought he was very agreeable with the crew, and I thought he was very pro-education.”

  Walbridge fit in perfectly with the chamber’s sail-training plan for Bounty.

  In the spring of 1995, Robin Walbridge became Bounty’s captain, and he steered his ship as its owners wanted, becoming an asset to the organization. The chamber was already sold on sail training and its use as a way to spark investment in Bounty. Sail training had a wholesome ring that could appeal to financial backers. The historical skills could be taught and the tactics of how a ship was run, Murray said. All to the better.

  “But really, it was about, number one, getting the city promoted.”

  • • •

  Unknown in Fall River at the time of Walbridge’s selection, Bounty’s new and vibrant path was about to be joined with that of another legendary tall ship. In Boston, a new commander took the dormant helm of the USS Constitution, Old Ironsides, the ship made famous for her defeat of eight British ships in the War of 1812. Michael Beck had commanded Pegasus, the navy’s fastest ship, before seeking the helm of Constitution in 1995. When he was interviewed by a retired vice admiral for the job, he said he wanted to sail Constitution, and when—at the same time that Walbridge was becoming Bounty’s permanent captain—he took command, Beck announced that Constitution, a commissioned naval vessel built in 1797 and last sailed in the 1930s, would sail on her two hundredth birthday in 1997.