Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy

by Michael J. Tougias

  “C-130, this is HMS Bounty, we read you loud and clear.”

  Startled by the immediate response and the clarity, Wes gave a thumbs-up to copilot Mike Myers, thankful that the ship was afloat and its battery-operated radio was working.

  “This is C-130. Request to know position, number of people on board, and nature of your distress.”

  Wes assumed he was talking to the captain, but it was Chief Mate John Svendsen. In a calm and professional voice John gave the commander their position and explained that sixteen people were on board, that the generators were down, and they were dead in the water. He then added, “We have six feet of water on board and are taking on an additional one foot of water per hour.”

  Wes and Mike exchanged glances. This news was worse than they expected.

  “What is your plan of action?” asked Wes to Bounty.

  “We think we can make it to dawn. If we don’t have assistance at seven thirty a.m., we will abandon ship in the daylight.”

  The C-130 was still approximately fifty miles away, and although the wind strengthened with each passing mile, the commander felt it was well within the capabilities of his aircraft. Wes had flown in worse. Now he worried that if Bounty’s battery-operated radio died, he needed to be close enough to get a visual on the ship to make sure it was still afloat.

  Through his night-vision goggles Wes could see the tops of clouds, and they didn’t appear to be the cumulonimbus type known as thunderstorm clouds. Although the winds rose to eighty knots and the turbulence worsened, Wes didn’t think the weather was convective—the type that could sheer the plane’s wings off in the blink of an eye. He guided the aircraft ever deeper into the storm toward the foundering ship, asking his mission system operators if they could see Bounty on radar. They answered no, the waves were simply too big. Wes then asked Mike to take over the controls and to slowly descend toward the location of the ship, while the commander radioed Sector North Carolina, giving them a complete briefing.

  As Mike decreased altitude, the wind eased to sixty knots, yet the gusts became more frequent and severe, causing the plane to shudder and lurch. The autopilot had long since been switched off, and Mike flew by hand controls. Descending through walls of clouds, the aircraft yawed violently to the left as the wind shifted direction. As Mike countered to get the plane back on track, the clouds released their load of rain, pelting the windshield so hard the pilots felt as if it could shatter at any moment. Despite wearing noise-canceling headsets, the pilots clearly heard the roar of the pounding and now knew they really were in the grips of the monster hurricane.

  With the rain, the turbulence increased to yet another level, and the C-130’s wings flexed up and down by as much as four feet, as unseen punches rocked the plane. Anything not strapped down hurled across the cockpit and the cargo area.

  Suddenly, a gust of wind, stronger than anything yet experienced, hit the plane on the nose, shooting it upward two hundred feet. Then, as soon as the gust passed, the aircraft plummeted four hundred feet before Mike could bring it back under control. Anyone feeling nauseated earlier was now vomiting. Torrents of rain made for zero visibility, and the crew in the back could only sit tight and put their faith, and their lives, in the hands of the two men in the cockpit.

  • • •

  The Bounty crew was ecstatic to learn that a coast guard plane had made radio contact with John Svendsen and was just a few miles away. It gave them hope at a time when conditions were deteriorating fast. Maybe the plane could drop pumps, maybe it could find a commercial ship to assist in a rescue, but most important, they were no longer alone in the storm.

  In the meantime, there was still a battle to be fought on board the ship.

  Doug Faunt found himself working in the engine room and at any other jobs where electrical issues called for his expertise. He was summoned to turn off the bilge alarm. Everyone knew the water was high. The alarm contributed nothing but noise.

  Faunt was the onboard expert with radios. He attempted to use the single-sideband unit. It failed. He knew it had not been checked before Bounty departed New London. That would have been his job and he was busy installing electric lights in various cabins. There was no way of knowing now whether the radio had been functional when Walbridge announced his decision to leave the dock.

  The crew tried the satellite telephone, with little success. They had been able to send email through their Winlink system. But the older satellite telephone was not functioning.

  Laura Groves had spent time nailing boards over the Great Cabin windows that had blown out earlier. She organized a crew—Claudene Christian, John Jones, Anna Sprague—that gathered tools and battery chargers from the bosun’s locker and secured five-gallon paint buckets there. But then the sole boards began floating, moving, threatening injury or worse. Groves and her crew took everything they had gathered to the tween deck, storing some of it in the galley.

  Although there was no official proclamation, the bilge and the lower deck were surrendered to the rising water well before midnight.

  • • •

  Up in the C-130, Wes still had on his NVGs and hoped he might see the ocean when the plane descended to a thousand feet, but the cloud ceiling was lower than that. He took the controls back from Mike and put the plane in a racetrack pattern, coaxing the C-130 slowly downward toward a five-hundred-foot altitude. Going lower than that was not an option, not with the aircraft rising and falling precipitously with each sudden wind gust. He had been told Bounty’s masts were approximately 150 feet tall, and he didn’t want to verify that information the hard way.

  Suddenly through a break in the clouds the commander saw waves, large waves, some cresting at an astonishing thirty feet. But what really got his attention was that the waves were coming from all directions, as if the giant rollers were battling one another for supremacy. The night-vision goggles made the scene especially eerie: the waves and sky were a dark green, but the streaking foam and churning wave tops were bright and clearly visible, clashing and smashing into one another. Wes wondered how in the world any vessel, much less one taking on considerable water, could stay afloat in such chaos.

  Up ahead and off to the right, a beam of light rose from the ocean, and Wes carefully banked the plane in that direction. A sailor on Bounty was shining a handheld flashlight at the aircraft. Mike, sitting in the right seat, saw the ship first and with awe in his voice said, “There she is.”

  The ship was out of Wes’s line of sight, and he asked the copilot what it looked like.

  “Well,” said Mike, “it looks like a big pirate ship in the middle of a hurricane.”

  As the C-130 roared past Bounty, Wes made a wide turn to bring the aircraft back over the ship. This time Wes had a perfect view of the vessel, and he thought how Mike’s description was perfect. The ship was listing about forty-five degrees to starboard, and enormous waves smashed into her, sending spray up into the sky, where it was snatched by the wind. This is surreal, Wes thought, the ship looks like it’s part of a movie set.

  His glimpse lasted only a couple seconds before the aircraft zipped past Bounty, but Wes had seen enough to know that the ship was in far worse trouble than merely taking on water. It seemed to the commander that the very next wave might put the vessel completely on its side.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE DANGEROUS HOURS

  Midnight came, and in the blackness off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, it was Monday, October 29, 2012. Bounty’s entire crew was gathered on the tween deck. The water was six feet or more above where the engine-room sole boards, now floating, once made a floor. Giant, lethal waves sloshed within the fore and aft crew quarters, the bosun’s locker, the lazaret, and all the other compartments at that level. Everywhere below, sole boards slammed into bulkheads and interior walls, unrestrained.

  On the weather deck, conditions were worse. Bounty heeled steeply to starboard, her deck slick, as if greased, with salt spray, her bow bucking up and plunging down. There was no n
eed to be on deck. There were no sails to man, no forward progress to threaten a collision.

  Everything that could be salvaged from the compartments below the tween deck had already been brought up. It was piled in heaps in the galley and to the rear of the stairway leading up to the Nav Shack and the weather deck above.

  The only work left was to man the trash pump, and only a few hands were needed in that increasingly futile endeavor.

  Everyone was exhausted. Sleeping had been difficult to impossible for more than twenty-four hours, and the situation wasn’t going to improve. Walbridge gave instructions for everyone who had no duties to get some rest.

  If no one had announced it, almost everyone knew: Bounty was doomed.

  The coast guard had told the ship that although the call had gone out, no ships were closer than eight hours away, and none were headed toward Bounty bringing dewatering pumps. The old collier was on its own, and the water kept rising. Robin Walbridge acknowledged the fate of the love of his life, if only obliquely. He let the crew know that when—not if—the water rose to the tween deck, everyone would be required to get into an immersion suit.

  It was a tribute to Walbridge’s foresight that Bounty had at least thirty of what are popularly called survival suits—neoprene, red Gumby suits that provide flotation and warmth and visibility—in a deck box on the weather deck or stored in a cabin on the port side of the tween deck, aft of the Nav Shack stairway. The small suits—the ones to fit Claudene Christian, who stood five feet one inch, and Laura Groves, five-four—were in the red bags, medium in orange, and large in green. No one was assigned to a specific suit, but there were more than enough to choose from.

  While the water was still below the tween-deck sole, Chief Mate Svendsen told Bosun Groves to distribute seasick pills to the crew. She began making the rounds, offering a pill to each crew member. Walbridge, who was having trouble walking but was still mobile, declined. Barksdale, already seasick, took one and vomited.

  Then the bosun, who had earlier organized a crew to collect essential goods from the lower deck, organized another crew to locate safety gear. They brought all of the life jackets from a cabin and tied many of them together so that, thrown into the water, the orange fabric of the jackets would make a large, visible target for possible rescuers. They filled plastic construction bags with bottles of water, canned food, personal dry bags, and tied them closed so they would float.

  The power was failing and then returning, so the work was conducted under the light of individual headlamps. Almost no one was napping. Barksdale was still working on the trash pump, aided by a couple of crew members. Prokosh was still lying on a mattress on the starboard side of the Great Cabin, forward from the Nav Shack stairs. Third Mate Dan Cleveland was keeping watch in the Nav Shack companionway, and Svendsen and Sanders were taking turns manning the VHF radio, keeping communications alive with the circling coast guard C-130.

  People were vividly aware of their precarious situation, and fear was unsettling the once-happy crew.

  A few hours earlier, Joshua Scornavacchi had been having fun. The fore course had ripped and he was up in the mast, rain like hail blinding his vision, wind driving his arms and body against the rigging. It was thrilling, awesome.

  Now was different. Scornavacchi was nervous, uncertain, although the situation was clear. The water was almost to the tween deck, and the time was almost at hand when the crew—and he—would pull on the immersion suits he had helped bring out of storage from a tween-deck cabin. But when would it happen, the evacuation? He didn’t know.

  Most of all, though, Scornavacchi was tired. Thinking was difficult. The morning before, the captain had promised a day without work parties. But then, things began happening, events that demanded work. Man the pumps constantly. Climb the rigging. Steer the boat until it was hove to, and then, as the boat rocked and tilted, give the hard physical effort demanded for even the smallest movement across a deck.

  That was Sunday, all day. Now on Monday morning the work was ongoing. Scornavacchi still did not nap. He went to help with the trash pump.

  Meanwhile, some water accumulated on the low side of the tween deck, where Prokosh lay on a mattress. Claudene Christian, who had been visiting him regularly, giving him updates, helped him to his feet and supported him as he climbed the sloped deck to a cabin on the port side. There he was put in a bunk somewhat drier than the soggy mattress.

  At about three o’clock in the morning, Walbridge called his crew together near the Nav Shack. Standing on the stairway and looking down—as he had done four afternoons before from the Nav Shack roof in New London—he asked them to brainstorm, to answer a question: At what point did we lose control?

  One thing was clear to Laura Groves: two seams in the topside planking were open. One was in the engine room on the port side. The other was above a mop closet above the waterline forward on the starboard side. For hours on end, water had been squirting and hissing through those seams, water that remained inside Bounty’s groaning hull while the bilge pumps sputtered ineffectively. She knew this, but she did not attempt to answer Walbridge’s question.

  Nor did anybody else offer Walbridge an answer. Indeed, most of the crew were so mentally wasted that few even knew a question was being asked.

  The meeting broke up, and many in the crew, unwilling to embrace sleep, gravitated to the only place with some action still: the trash pump. Now the pump was on the weather deck, and Barksdale and others worked feverishly, yanking the pull cord, attempting to start it. Suddenly, the pump sputtered to life.

  The crew cheered wildly.

  Thirty seconds later, the pump—and then the crew—fell quiet.

  Now the muted conversations on Bounty centered on one theme. The crew would wait until daylight, then conduct an orderly transfer into the two twenty-five-man life rafts mounted at the stern on a grating just in front of the aft caprail.

  Scornavacchi, waiting in the area where he had helped pile the immersion suits, looked into the last cabin on the port side—Walbridge’s state room. He saw the captain holding a picture, staring at it. It seemed to be a portrait of Claudia McCann, his wife.

  Walbridge was in his late forties when he found McCann, the woman who would earn his trust, who could accept life on his terms. For most of his first four decades, he had been rebelling against the most significant woman in his life, Anna Palmer Walbridge, his mother. For many years, he thought she was the worst of mothers, a person who was too far removed from her own childhood to comprehend what it was like to be a child or to be her son.

  Robin Walbridge remembered that when he was a child his mother had once gotten him up before daybreak to see a circus train arriving in town, watch the elephants raise the big top, and eat frozen peanut butter sandwiches she had made in haste. He resented her for disrupting his sleep when he was ten to watch the Sputnik satellite pass overhead. He carried a grudge because, when he was sixteen, she had made him promise he would finish high school.

  He believed his childhood was a miserable one, and when he left home, he did not return to see her. But then, in his late thirties, a woman he was seeing asked him why he hated his mother.

  He realized he had no good answer, and so he invited his mother to visit him. It had been so long that he didn’t recognize her at the airport.

  There the bitterness evaporated, replaced by a warmth that always had been in the captain’s heart, a warmth subsequently fanned by monthly phone calls. When he stopped hating, he began using his native talent for analysis, coming to realize that his mother had her own issues and, as a mother, she did the best she could raising her children. If he had children of his own, he would want to give them the same good experiences that his mother gave him because she shaped him into an adult who liked himself.

  This was the man whom Scornavacchi saw gazing at a photograph of a woman. He did not intrude on the skipper’s private thoughts. He moved on.

  Moments later, Prokosh, who had been in the bunk on the port side
for only a few minutes, got the word that Walbridge had issued the order: Put on your immersion suits. He crawled across the slant of the deck to a suit and, lying in pain from his injured back, shook it from its bag, unrolled it, and began pulling it over his shoes.

  His pain was too intense for him to stand, so Prokosh waited for the water to actually rush into the tween deck—waited lying on the deck boards while, around him, the rest of the crew milled about like a race of obese beings in their ridiculously bulky suits.

  The officers pulled on the legs of the suits and zipped the fronts up to their waists, leaving their hands free to help the rest of the crew, who now assembled by the Nav Shack stairs, the only reasonable place to leave the tween deck when encumbered this way.

  Each crew member selected from the pile of suits one that fit him or her. Scornavacchi, who would have fit in a small suit, chose a medium to be sure that Claudene and Laura were well suited. The crew members helped each other stretch the neoprene to stuff their hands into the gloved arms. Even now, calm prevailed. There was no urgency to get on deck. Bounty was riding evenly, if on a severe tilt, with the water now at least ankle deep on the high side of the tween deck, deeper to leeward.

  As was often the case aboard Bounty, word spread among crew members, this time suggesting that climbing harnesses and life jackets were to be worn outside the immersion suits. The coast guard, circling above now in the C-130, routinely asks a vessel in distress whether its occupants are wearing life jackets. In this case, jackets would be redundant since everyone aboard was inside the greater protection of a Gumby suit. There was no direct order from Walbridge to don a life jacket, but most crew members heard the spreading word. At the same time, the explanation circulated that harnesses would allow them to clip together once they had abandoned ship. They could bring along personal “ditch” bags, shackled to the harness, so they could save possessions they felt were vital.

  Getting into harnesses and life jackets once the crew members were inside the immersion suits was cumbersome and demanded more cooperation. One crew member had a multitool that had a set of pliers. He used this to help tighten harnesses that the wearers were unable to adjust on their own.