Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy (4 page)

“Dad was a very compassionate person,” said Lucille Walbridge Jansen, Robin’s older sister. “In the course of working with challenged people, Dad saw a need for them to socialize and be with others and [to] realize they were not alone. He developed the Indoor Sports Club, which met once a month. There was food involved, refreshments,” and the Walbridge children were invited. Mingling with those whom some might view as “different,” Lucille Walbridge “felt like a queen when Dad allowed me to come with him.” Her little brother, four years younger, enjoyed similar experiences.

Thus Robin Walbridge had several reasons to agree when Kannegiesser proposed the Down syndrome event in St. Petersburg. Publicity for Walbridge’s beleaguered ship was but one. He let his crew know about the Florida event and Ashley’s involvement. Reflecting on the decision to sail from New London, Connecticut, in the face of an advancing hurricane, crew member Doug Faunt later remarked that had
Bounty
not sailed when it did, “We would have disappointed all the people in St. Pete. The captain wanted to push to make that destination.”

Sandy passed
[east and north]
of Abacos
[the Bahamas]
this morning, exactly as expected.
[A buoy]
sampled
[east and south]
winds (indicating East side of Sandy) about 5 miles off Elbow Cay, Abacos, at 9am. Throughout Abacos, winds as Sandy approached were sampled
[from the northeast]
@ 45–85 knots sustained . . . and after Sandy passed . . . winds backed
[to the north-northwest]
as expected in 45–75 knots sustained range.

—Chris Parker, report, Friday, October 26, 3:00 p.m.

At about 8:00 a.m. on Friday, October 26, around the time the east and most violent side of Hurricane Sandy was hammering the Abacos Islands about a hundred miles or more off the Florida coast, the officers of
Bounty
gathered at the stern on the tween deck in what was called the Great Cabin. Eating breakfast while they talked, Walbridge, Chief Mate Svendsen, Second Mate Sanders, Third Mate Dan Cleveland, Bosun Laura Groves, and Engineer Chris Barksdale discussed the weather. The forecasts that they were getting—weather faxes off the single sideband radio and emails from Tracie Simonin,
Bounty
’s land-based office manager—continued to show the same path for Hurricane Sandy.

They talked about work that would be performed that day by
Bounty
’s crew. A yard—the horizontal wooden spar that holds the top of a square sail—would be lowered to the deck to reduce weight aloft. More sea stowing had to be accomplished so that when the seas grew and the ship rocked, no loose items would be flying across the ship’s thirty-one-foot beam and threatening the crew.

The officers also talked about the navigation plans. The engines were running hard—uncommon aboard
Bounty
. Usually, when the ship lost sight of land, the captain, for authenticity and as a means of teaching, turned off most mechanical equipment—even navigational tools—and reverted to authentic practices used in the days of sail. But time and distance needed to be made—three hundred miles to the south in the next couple of days—according to Walbridge’s plan to place
Bounty
at the same latitude as Cape Hatteras, where, if the hurricane performed as the captain expected, he thought he would be able to sail with favorable winds.

Once the officers’ meeting concluded, it was time for the daily Captain’s Muster, when all hands gathered around the ship’s capstan, a giant winch in front of the third, or mizzen, mast, which hauled lines when the force needed was greater than what the deckhands alone could provide.

Muster was the one time in any normal day when all the crew saw Walbridge, a time when the skipper might tell a joke or two, but when, invariably, he would use the opportunity to teach his young followers—he called them future captains of America—something new about seamanship.

Walbridge was a modern-day Socrates. He taught by asking questions. On this day, the question was “Two hundred years ago, how would sailors know a hurricane was coming?”

“I don’t think they would have known at all that a hurricane was coming,” replied Joshua Scornavacchi, twenty-five, who had been on board most of the time since San Juan. Walbridge didn’t agree or disagree. This was part of his teaching technique. He allowed people to think out the solution to a problem and encouraged them to try their ideas, even when those efforts resulted in mistakes, as long as the mistakes were not dangerous. Then he would urge that person to teach others what he or she had learned. Moreover, crew members, even the greenest, found Walbridge willing to listen to what they had to say. But everyone, regardless of his or her experience, found that the captain was several steps ahead in his thinking. Respect for his deep knowledge was widespread, a dividend of not only the life Walbridge had led but his singular personality. At least superficially, this explains why no one left
Bounty
back in New London. If he or she stayed aboard long enough, as Third Mate Dan Cleveland had, a crew member learned to believe what the captain said. But you had to experience Walbridge’s expertise in the context of life aboard
Bounty
. Taken out of that context, Walbridge was capable of being misunderstood, as he had been during an interview one day in the summer of 2012.

•  •  •  

On that day, August 9,
Bounty
had pulled up to the municipal dock in the hillside community of Belfast, Maine, with preparations under way to welcome visitors. The past week or so had seen dense fog on Penobscot Bay. In Belfast, one of the northernmost ports on the bay, it was a grim morning, the tips of
Bounty
’s three masts blurred by the sagging belly of the low, gray overcast.
Bounty
, big and dark with a blue band on her topsides, dominated the waterfront, where normally the largest visiting vessels were small cruise ships.

Ned Lightner, host of a local public-access television program, knew that
Bounty
was coming. Her visit was the subject of conversation in the local government. The city harbormaster, Kathy Pickering, had lobbied for the visit. Lightner, whose program,
Somewhere in Waldo County
, would often tackle such subjects as the purchase of a new fire truck, was delighted to have a more exotic topic. He thought some of his homebound listeners might appreciate a video tour. He contacted Walbridge, who agreed to allow filming.

Lightner arrived around seven thirty that morning. Much of the
Bounty
crew was still asleep, and at first Lightner didn’t know that the captain was the older fellow up on deck, holding a cup of coffee.

Walbridge, soft-spoken as always, was perfectly affable when he greeted Lightner. They began talking, and the camera rolled with a mast and webs of rigging as a backdrop.

About eleven minutes into the interview, Lightner asked, “Have you ever run into some pretty nasty weather while at sea?”

“Actually, I’m going to answer that with a no,” Walbridge replied in his somewhat gravelly voice. “We say there’s no such thing as bad weather. There’s just different kinds of weather.”

Lightner, laughing, changed his question. “Have you run into stormy seas?”

“We chase hurricanes.” Walbridge grinned. “You try and get up as close to the eye of it as you can and you stay down in the southeast quadrant, and when it stops, you stop. You don’t want to get in front of it. You stay behind it. But you also get a good ride out of a hurricane.”

Lightner speculated that Walbridge must have sailed in some pretty towering waves.

“The biggest waves that I personally have ever been in have been about seventy feet. That’s a pretty good sea.” Walbridge said that particular ride in the wake of a hurricane was no more uncomfortable than “you and I standing right here.”

•  •  •  

Dan Cleveland understood that his captain’s comments were not bravado because in his first year aboard
Bounty
, he had twice seen how Walbridge dealt with hurricanes. And by observation, Cleveland had learned.

Before he boarded
Bounty
in 2008 as a deckhand, Cleveland had no nautical experience. That year, the ship took a Pacific tour. On the way back to the Atlantic Ocean,
Bounty
transited the Panama Canal and entered the Gulf of Mexico, where a Category 1 hurricane was stalled between the Yucatán Peninsula and Cuba, blocking
Bounty
’s progress to the north.

Walbridge ordered
Bounty
’s crew to heave to, a maneuver in which the ship faces into the wind, trimming its sails to back-wind them while steering in the opposite direction. Heaving to parks a vessel, which then will drift slowly with the wind while riding at a relatively comfortable attitude.

The storm was moving north at four knots. The ship made a knot or two. Cleveland saw that the point was to avoid overtaking the storm.

Another crew member for that voyage, Cliff Bredeson, explained that the problem was that while
Bounty
needed to pass through the gap between the peninsula and Cuba, the hurricane was in the way. Under Walbridge’s direction, Bredeson said, the crew “poked our nose up into the hurricane as far as we were comfortable so as the hurricane moved north, we could be as close getting to the gap as we could. We were in the southeast quadrant. If things got bad, we could go southerly and get away if it decided to go south or east. That became the joke, that we were hurricane chasers.”

The logic, Bredeson said, was that “with a hurricane, we could always know where the winds were coming from. The winds around the hurricane are counterclockwise. You watch the hurricane reports and you know where the center of the hurricane is. If you’re in the south and east quadrant, winds are going to be coming out of the west, or, higher up, out of the south.”

That predictability made Walbridge’s choice a wise decision, according to Bredeson, and the conditions were tolerable, with winds in the forty- to fifty-knot range.
Bounty
was designed as a collier, a ship that hauls coal, and her stout build made her capable of handling such a breeze.

Earlier that season,
Bounty
had been caught in a Pacific hurricane as the ship made its way from Mexico to Costa Rica. Cleveland, then the novice, endured three days of “crappy” weather and fatigue. But he took a lesson from his master: “You try to make sure you’re going slower than the hurricane so it’s going away from you. If one is in the vicinity, we want to follow it. We actually had a very fine sail.”

•  •  •  

Those two hurricanes taught the inexperienced Dan Cleveland something about his captain’s knowledge and his thoughts about seamanship. But Walbridge often took a more active role as teacher and used his ship as a classroom, just as he had on Friday morning when he asked his crew about weather predictions two hundred years before.

Bounty
was not officially a sail-training ship as it lacked the necessary coast guard certification. But in Belfast the previous August, Walbridge had told Ned Lightner, “I consider us kind of an educational ship. We’re trying to teach the public about what sailing was like two hundred years ago.

“This [ship] was the tractor-trailer of two hundred years ago. This was the space shuttle of two hundred years ago. People don’t understand the heritage. I like to use the analogy of a manual speed transmission. If you buy a car with a manual speed transmission, [the owner’s manual won’t] tell you to push the clutch down because everybody knows that you have to push the clutch down. So picture two hundred years from now, somebody gets in that car. They’re not going to be able to drive it because nobody told them to push the clutch down.

“That’s kind of what’s happened,” Walbridge continued. “We’re rediscovering the very basics [of square-rig sailing]. And I think this is important for our youth to understand our basics, to understand where we came from and why we got to where we did.”

•  •  •  

Walbridge was genetically wired as an educator, not a sailor. Born Robert Walbridge in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, on October 25, 1949, he came into the world as the second child of two teachers. At the time, his father was a teacher in Lyndonville, Vermont. But soon after Robert arrived, Howard Walbridge was hired to work for the state in its vocational rehabilitation office in Montpelier, the state capital.

The Walbridges moved into a hundred-year-old farmhouse on the north edge of town, on a hillside facing east, bathed by the first sunlight of the morning. There were thirty-five acres and a three-hundred-foot-long driveway.

Anna Walbridge, Robert’s mother, took a job teaching the first four grades in a two-room schoolhouse on the Winooski River in Middlesex, Vermont, a few miles west and downstream from Montpelier.

But the teaching roots were much deeper than this. Robert had grandparents on both sides of the family who were teachers, and one great-grandfather was a state superintendent of schools.

Learning was an enjoyable and constant part of life in the Walbridge family. Walbridge could remember the day when he was in the sixth grade and the family made a Thanksgiving trip to Quincy, Massachusetts, to visit Anna’s parents, the Palmers.

The Walbridges had one of the first Volkswagens in Vermont, but on this trip they drove their powerful French car, a Citroën. The two-lane road crossing the heart of New Hampshire was dark as the car climbed and descended the many hills.

“Dad being my dad was commenting on the cars, talking about cars,” Lucille Walbridge Jansen said. “As we started going up a hill, we passed a Volkswagen, and Dad was explaining how the Citroën had a twelve-volt battery and the VW only six volts,” and how the power of the two batteries were different and how cars were built to travel at a certain optimal speed. The Citroën passed the Volkswagen going up a hill, and Howard explained that was because the Citroën had so much more power.

“Then going down the hill, these guys passed us,” said Lucille. “And Dad commented that they were exceeding the safe speed for that VW to be going. We also observed that they were drinking and they were feeling quite victorious in their behavior. I remember seeing a beer can. They certainly were not hiding the fact.