Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy

by Michael J. Tougias

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  OH, THE WATER

  Bounty Update 2 for 10/28 . . . Bounty looks to be sailing thru the tail end of the rain storms.

  Last reported coordinates as of 2 PM EST

  N 34 degrees 22' W 074 degrees 15'

  Speed 10.3 knots

  —Bounty Facebook entry, 1:52 p.m., Sunday, October 28, 2012

  Jessica Black had the hot dogs and mac and cheese ready on the tween deck at noon Sunday when the A-Watch ended its shift. The four watch standers turned the helm over to their replacements on the B-Watch in the shrieking and howling of the rigging and the rearing and plunging of the bow and went below to the thundering inside the ship’s hull.

  Bounty, which had earlier been making ten knots—double her normal cruising speed—was now getting by on one engine, the starboard unit, because the port engine had stopped running. The starboard generator was powering the bilge pumps. The ship was heeled to port more often than not since she was on a starboard tack.

  Doug Faunt, a retiree who could have been anywhere he wanted doing anything that he pleased, was feeling his age when he got off watch. He grabbed some lunch, but then, ready for some rest, he headed across the Great Cabin to his stateroom on the port side, just aft of amidships. It would be an uncomfortable nap. His bunk was soaked.

  Anna Sprague, once baptized by her father in the Savannah River, had just gotten up at noon, having napped since eight o’clock, when her morning watch ended. She got a bowl of mac and cheese and, hearing no work parties were scheduled, settled in to await her next watch at four o’clock in the afternoon.

  Jessica Hewitt woke just before noon for her next watch. She talked with Claudene Christian, who told her the electric bilge pumps were running constantly, as was the portable hydraulic pump. Hewitt knew the pumps were finicky and she didn’t feel she was competent with them. If there was a problem with the pumps, she would hardly recognize the issue, so she was not particularly alarmed. She joined Adam Prokosh on the helm, which now, in the towering seas, required the strength of two crew members.

  The seas seemed to be getting worse by the hour.

  At about this time, Christian, whose cabin was near Faunt’s, approached him. The normally ebullient woman was serious. She had noted problems—basic machinery problems—on board, but, she told Faunt, when she tried to raise her concerns with the ship’s officers, she felt ignored.

  Faunt attempted to assure Christian that their leaders were aware of the problems and were seeking solutions.

  Joshua Scornavacchi had several hours to wait before his next watch, and although Walbridge had told the crew there would be no work parties, the young outdoorsman saw work to be done. He climbed down the ladder to the engine room and set to work removing debris from the bilge so the pumps wouldn’t clog. The many wood chips might have been causing the pumping problems. But when Scornavacchi inspected a strainer at the end of one bilge hose, he didn’t see any blockage.

  On the weather deck, Prokosh and Hewitt were at the helm and looked up and saw the fore course—the same sail that the crew had furled earlier—ripping down the middle. Prokosh yelled an alert that brought the injured Walbridge to the deck. A call for all hands went out as the captain relieved Prokosh on the helm and began assembling a team to deal with the flailing canvas partway up the foremast.

  Laura Groves was in her cabin in the lazaret when she heard the call. She scampered to the weather deck, joining in the shouting that rang through Bounty’s cabins as each crew member called out the message. It was near two o’clock in the afternoon. The wind was now blowing at fifty knots, howling through the rigging, although in the engine room, all other sounds were overwhelmed by the hammering of the diesels. Scornavacchi, working down in the bilge area, was only aware of the loud protests of the ship’s timbers. They screeched like enormous rusty hinges when, as the ship rolled side to side, the bulkheads worked against the deck. But over all this, Scornavacchi heard, from above, the latest call for all hands. He began hollering, “All hands! All hands!”—as he had learned to do during his six months aboard. Anytime anybody said an order, crew members were required to call it back to assure they had heard it. For serious events, such as man overboard, the rule was to call it out loud over and over. That was happening now. The alarm was being broadcast.

  When Scornavacchi arrived on the weather deck, Walbridge was selecting crew to go aloft as he and Hewitt wrestled with the helm. He wanted only the most experienced men aloft, he said. He chose Drew Salapatek, John Jones, Josh, and Adam, and they scurried across the slanting deck to the starboard rigging and began to climb.

  Hewitt was offended. Walbridge had limited his call to men. But she joked instead, “What about me?”

  The wind was hitting sixty knots in the rigging. It had caught a fold in the furled sail and created a bubble and was pushing the sail, adding strain on the mast and the steering.

  As the men climbed the rigging and looked out from the ship, they saw waves towering thirty feet, twice as high as the height of Bounty’s cap rail above the water while docked. Spindrift was everywhere, a white lace of blowing foam that streaked from the breaking wave tops in long tendrils into the deep troughs between the peaks. Looking out, the climbers saw waves, and beyond them, more waves, grayness and froth marching away from them on the lee side toward the horizon.

  The wind was at their backs, and they didn’t have to hold on with their hands because the wind was plastering them against the rigging. But if they turned and tried to look into the wind, they were blinded by driving rain. It felt like hail, stinging needles of rain.

  They couldn’t see because of the wind and they couldn’t hear. The wind roared and howled, and there was no chance at communications.

  Once they reached the fore course, they couldn’t hold on to the sailcloth. As they pulled at the cloth, the wind would yank it from their grip. The sail rebelled against their touch, jerking hard enough that they felt they would be flung from their tenuous perches on the footrope.

  The men had taken extra gaskets with them—lines to tie the sail tight against the yard. But they lacked the strength to secure the sail, and eventually they let it go and the wind ripped the heavy fabric as if it were cheap toilet paper.

  Dan Cleveland was down on the deck, overseeing the men’s work high in the rigging. He signaled the crew to return to the deck. It was getting dangerous and they had no hope of corralling the ripped fore course. Looking down, they saw Cleveland look aft and then run toward the stern. Following his path with their eyes as they descended the shrouds, they saw what had drawn the third mate. The spanker, a fore-and-aft sail mounted on the aft side of the mizzenmast and used to stabilize the ship’s track, was flailing out of control. The sail was mounted on a wooden boom at the bottom and a wooden gaff along its top. That gaff had broken in two places, making three sections of gaff, each with a piece of sail connected to it. All three were flying like kites just above the aft deck. By itself, the spanker and its broken gaff was not a serious hazard, even in these conditions. But wooden blocks—pulleys—were attached by ropes to the gaff and were swinging in lethal arcs like medieval weapons.

  Once on the deck, the four climbers crouched and scampered back to the mizzenmast, where the whole crew was now gathered in an attempt to control the treacherous spanker gaff. Scornavacchi grabbed a line—called a vang—designed to control the gaff. The wind gusted, lifting the scrap of sail attached to the gaff, hauling light, wiry Joshua Scornavacchi up off the deck. Adam Prokosh, heavier than his mate, grabbed the vang, too, and he also found himself suspended in the air over the deck. Four other crew members grabbed the vang, and finally, with Scornavacchi hooking his toes under the lip of the doghouse roof over the Great Cabin, they pulled the shattered rigging to the deck, where they tied it down.

  Two sections of gaff were still unrestrained. Cleveland climbed the shrouds on the port side—Bounty’s low side—and lassoed the remaining sections. Scornavacchi, wearing a helmet camera on a h
eadband, had caught the whole adventure on video. He was having a blast, with the sort of excitement that he had until now experienced only in his dreams.

  When the excitement subsided, Scornavacchi climbed down the forward stairs from the tween deck to the fo’c’sle and then, spinning the wheel on the steel door, into the claustrophobia-inducing bosun’s locker. He found water three inches above the sole boards in the locker, and when the boat rolled, if he did not have a grasp on a fixed object, he would feel his body rise in the air, seeming to float, or he would smash into a bulkhead. He collected tools and climbed back to the tween deck.

  Laura Groves went aft to the lazaret to resume her nap with her bunkmate, Dan Cleveland. He got a wake-up call at three forty-five to go on watch, but she remained in her bunk. At about four o’clock a large wave slammed into Bounty’s rear corner, near where she was napping. It was loud, like a dump truck hitting a house, and water was coming in the Great Cabin windows. Groves went on deck to report this problem to Cleveland.

  Around this time, Walbridge had given the order to turn to a port tack to put the bilge water on the starboard side, closer to the bilge pump strainers. Jessica Black began serving more macaroni and cheese for the dinner meal. Contained in bowls, the food had a chance of being eaten as the seas built even larger and the crew struggled to remain upright. Their efforts were aided when Walbridge went to the watch and directed Cleveland to heave Bounty to, a maneuver that would hold the ship relatively in place, facing into the seas, putting the ship on a more even keel. Walbridge wanted to take a break from moving, not for the convenience of diners, but to allow the crew to solve some of the mounting problems.

  The starboard generator—the only one operational by midafternoon—was surging, and the electrical current throughout the boat was uneven. Walbridge ordered all nonessential electrical circuits turned off.

  Meanwhile, the fuel filters on all of the engines needed to be changed, and the crew discovered that the filters supplied back in New London would restrict the fuel flow too much or did not fit in the ship’s engines.

  Cleveland brought Bounty around into the wind, instructing his watch to set the remaining sail so that the wind would blow the bow in one direction while the helm was turned to steer in the opposite direction. When the maneuver was completed, Bounty settled in this attitude and, now on a somewhat more even keel but rocking in the big waves, began slowly drifting with the still-violent wind and seas.

  Sometime after the B-Watch had been relieved by the C-Watch, Matt Sanders went into the engine room to see what he could do. He found Svendsen and Walbridge there. The captain, seriously injured several hours earlier, nevertheless worked with the pumping systems, attempting to keep the bilge water below the sole boards, which it had already reached. Sanders had never seen that much water in the bilge. He made up his mind to remain in the engine room as long as it took to dry out the boat.

  An hour later, Sanders found debris in the screen of the hydraulic pump, which was struggling to get water out of the engine room. He cleaned it, removing some old line that was wrapped around the pump’s impeller—the paddle wheel that moved water through the pump. Twenty minutes later, he had to clear the pump again. Sanders was also opening and closing valves on the electric-pump manifold and finding that when the boat rocked, which it did regularly in these seas, the pump lost its prime.

  Oh, the water. It continued to accumulate, and Chief Mate Svendsen was more than concerned. He went to Walbridge and suggested that it was time to let the coast guard know about Bounty’s condition. Walbridge told him he felt it was more important to focus their efforts on getting the machinery running.

  Svendsen went on deck with the ship’s satellite telephone and attempted to call home base on Long Island. He seemed to have a connection. He thought maybe he was talking with Robert Hansen. But the wind roared and he could not be certain. So he shouted out Bounty’s coordinates several times. Then he called some telephone numbers that the ship had for the coast guard. Svendsen knew Bounty was in distress. He hadn’t been able to convince Walbridge. He didn’t know whether he had reached anyone on the telephone. He hoped for the best.

  The call had gone through. Tracie Simonin had heard John Svendsen’s voice, had recorded Bounty’s coordinates, and by eight thirty, she had called a coast guard number and relayed the message.

  The ship was ninety miles off Hatteras, floating in an eddy of cold water on the southeast side of the Gulf Stream.

  No one ashore knew the exact nature of the ship’s distress. In fact, few aboard Bounty knew everything that was happening on Bounty’s various decks. The string of small events that had been accumulating all day was growing into a tangled ball as darkness overcame the ship on Sunday night.

  Simonin and Bounty still had email contact. The coast guard told the office manager to tell the crew to activate their EPIRB, and she followed those instructions. Soon an electronic signal was radiating from the ship, triggering a passing satellite, which relayed the ship’s position to antennas ashore. Now the coast guard had a live indication where Bounty was—and that she was still floating.

  At nine o’clock Sunday evening, Robin Walbridge finally sent an email acknowledging problems aboard Bounty.

  “We are taking on water. Will probably need assistance in the morning. Sat phone is not working very good. We have activated the EPIRB. We are not in danger tonight, but if conditions don’t improve on the boat we will be in danger tomorrow. We can only run the generator for a short time. I just found out the fuel oil filters you got were the wrong filters. Let me know when you have contacted the USCG [coast guard] so we can shut the EPIRB off. The boat is doing great but we can’t dewater.”

  Tracie Simonin got that message and again called the coast guard. Just a few minutes later Bounty’s electronics started to fail—like everything else on the ship—and communication was sporadic. The only way to reliably communicate with the vessel would be through its battery-operated, handheld radio, whose range was limited to just a few miles.

  • • •

  Commander Billy Mitchell, the Response Department head for Sector North Carolina, faced his first big decision. He thought: We’ve got a vessel out in a hurricane, taking on water with no power, and that is about all we know. We need to get direct, reliable communications with the vessel to find out just how bad the situation is. But to do this we need to be on scene, and the safest and quickest way would be to send out a C-130. Mitchell didn’t like his choices. To send out the C-130—the coast guard’s fixed-wing aircraft used for searching—would be dangerous, but to wait for improvements in the weather might be too late for the Bounty. If only we knew exactly what was happening on the ship. Why does the captain think they can make it to morning if they are taking on water in the middle of a hurricane? Is he underestimating the seriousness of their situation?

  Mitchell and his team teleconferenced with the officers at the Fifth District and at Air Station Elizabeth City. They immediately activated the AMVER (Automated Mutual Assistance Vessel Rescue) program, which allowed them to locate and identify any ships registered in the system that might be near Bounty and could offer assistance. The program originated after the sinking of the Titanic, when the need for a coordinated effort by ships to help one another became clear. AMVER has been incredibly successful, saving thousands of lives, particularly when an emergency occurs far from coast guard resources. But in a hurricane as well forecasted as Sandy, most large ships were far from the storm. Just one ship, a thirty-thousand-ton Danish oil tanker, the Torm Rosetta, was anywhere near Bounty, and it responded that the seas were so bad it would be unable to assist in the rescue.

  No coast guard cutters were at sea in the area, and sending one to Bounty would take many hours. Besides, with conditions the way they were, the cutter itself could become a casualty of the storm. After much discussion among SAR officials regarding the risks versus the gains of launching a C-130, the decision was made. They would launch the aircraft and let the pilot judge
the winds firsthand and see how close he or she could fly to Bounty and try for direct communications.

  • • •

  C-130 commander Frank “Wes” McIntosh was sprawled on the bed in his hotel room watching Sunday-night football. His aircraft had been prepositioned at Raleigh-Durham International Airport, where potential crosswinds would be less troublesome than at Elizabeth City. He and his crew of six were staying at the Courtyard Marriott Hotel adjacent to the airport so they could get to the plane quickly. But the thirty-three-year-old pilot with the mild Southern accent thought it might be a quiet night. With the hurricane dominating the news for the last three days, he surmised all vessels would either be in port or far away from the swirling storm.

  When his phone rang at 9:15 p.m., Wes realized he was dead wrong. On the line was the Elizabeth City operations duty officer, Todd Farrell.

  “Hey, Wes,” said Todd, “we got a case for you. The HMS Bounty, a one-hundred-and-eighty-foot-tall ship, is reportedly taking on water and having generator problems about ninety miles southeast of Cape Hatteras. Communication with the vessel has been lost, and we’re probably going to need you to fly out and establish comms with them. So start mobilizing.”

  “Okay, we’ll get ready.”

  • • •

  Wes McIntosh seemed destined to be a pilot. Growing up in Beaufort, South Carolina, he watched F-18 military jets fly to and from the nearby Marine Corps Air Station, wondering what it would be like to be in one of those planes. His family also attended Blue Angels air shows, and he pictured himself in a cockpit, guiding a streaking aircraft across a cloudless sky. So it was no surprise when, a few years later, after graduating from Georgia Tech on an ROTC scholarship program, he accepted a commission in the navy and immediately started flight school. Once he earned his wings and graduated, he started flying E-6Bs—modified Boeing 707s whose primary mission was to function as a communications platform in case of a ballistic missile attack on the United States. After three years of flying E-6Bs, Wes went on to be a flight instructor in military training aircraft, logging fifteen hundred hours of training sorties in three and a half years. At the end of that tour he had a choice: stay with the navy in a series of nonflying roles of increasing management responsibility or transition to the coast guard, where he could continue flying. The decision was easy—he wanted to stay in the sky, and in 2010 Wes joined the coast guard as a pilot of C-130s.