A large blanket, indeed, covering most of the Atlantic Ocean between the US East Coast and Bermuda.
“So, whatever your plans are in the next week-or-so, you MUST have a PLAN for what you’ll do if Sandy brings 70–80k Hurricane Force winds (and maybe VERY LARGE surge of water) to your area.”
At 4:42 p.m. on Thursday, about an hour before Bounty left City Pier, Parker emailed his clients with his latest insights: “Obviously, Sandy is the BIG STORY!” Landfall, he predicted, would be somewhere along the Delaware-Maryland-Virginia coast, possibly New Jersey sometime on Tuesday, October 30.
Parker had a number of clients who, like Bounty, were making southbound voyages at the time. Many of them were “snowbirds”—live-aboard sailors who headed for warmer harbors when autumn arrived—and they sought refuge. One of them had pulled into a marina in Atlantic City, where he was protected behind the tower of a casino.
Other weather experts had come to a similar conclusion about the storm. Weather router Herb Hilgenberg, who provides sailors with free weather reports from his home base in Burlington, Ontario, had among his regular listeners the crew of the Maine-based schooner Harvey Gamage. Captain Christopher Flansburg had sailed the schooner south to Fernandina Beach, Florida, on a voyage to the Dominican Republic and was two days into the next leg when he learned from Hilgenberg that Sandy was forming. He turned the schooner around and docked in Jacksonville, Florida, for the next ten days.
By Thursday, October 25, when Bounty left City Pier in New London, Hilgenberg’s reports had steered three sailboats to anchor in Bermuda, where they remained for the duration of the hurricane.
Like Hilgenberg, Parker had no clients at sea that Thursday.
• • •
The open ocean came into view around midnight. As Bounty approached the flashing white light on a tower at the end of Montauk Point, Long Island, the B-Watch came on duty—Second Mate Matt Sanders, deckhands John Jones and Jessica Hewitt, and able-bodied seaman Adam Prokosh. They found the seas calm and the skies clear. For an hour at a time, each watch stander steered Bounty by its big wooden steering wheel, called the helm, located aft of the rear mast (or mizzen) and used in Hollywood movies as far back as the 1935 film Mutiny on the Bounty starring Clark Gable. They also stood watch for an hour on the foredeck, where they were responsible for spotting traffic or obstacles, spent another hour doing boat checks in the engine room with bilge-pumping duties, and were on standby for an hour, in case their labor was needed.
In the six hours since leaving the dock, all of Bounty’s crew members had been on duty. Walbridge had told the new thirty-four-year-old cook, Jessica Black, to hold off on the evening meal. So she put the chili on simmer in the galley, which was located at the forward end of the middle, or tween, deck, and pitched in with the others. Everyone was “sea stowing,” securing everything on deck and belowdecks to prevent items from dislodging in the violent rocking of the ship during foul weather.
Tables on deck had to be tied down, and sails needed lashing. Prokosh organized the work on the top, or “weather,” deck knowing that if a piece of sail even as small as a handkerchief caught the wind in heavy weather, the entire sail would yank free and havoc would ensue. Walbridge had trained the crew to have the storm sails—smaller than sails used in moderate weather—ready in the case of rising winds. Prokosh oversaw that work, too.
When all was done and dark had settled over Bounty, the crew went down to the tween deck and then forward to the galley, where the steaming chili awaited them. Perhaps the hard work had primed their appetites, but all aboard felt Jessica’s cooking had exceeded their expectations.
During the meal the A-Watch was on duty—their hours were always from eight until twelve, day or night. Chief Mate John Svendsen, the watch captain, did not have much tenure aboard Bounty. Walbridge had hired him in February 2010 as an able-bodied seaman. While he would say he had spent most of his life on the water, Svendsen’s primary maritime employment before Bounty was as a dive instructor and dive-boat operator in Hawaii. He had sailed for a year aboard a modest tall ship, the Californian, a ninety-three-foot topsail schooner based in San Diego, and aboard another vessel operated by an environmental organization.
Svendsen was recognizable aboard Bounty by his shoulder-length, smoothly groomed, brown hair and his square build. At forty-one, the Minnesota native was articulate and measured. He was aware that aboard a tall ship there was much to learn, and he had once even searched for mentors in the maritime industry. But aboard Bounty, he was second-in-command. Only Robin Walbridge stood above him, and there was talk that when Walbridge retired in three years, Svendsen would replace him.
The able-bodied seaman on the A-Watch was an unpaid volunteer, Douglas Faunt, from Oakland, California. Though Bounty carried paid crew who received about $100 a week and some officers who received a bit more than that, at sixty-six Faunt was retired and not only didn’t need the money, but also enjoyed being able to sail at will and not on command.
Faunt had made a fortune selling a business and was now spending his money as he pleased. He rode motorcycles, traveled the world, and, being something of an electronics whiz, participated in ham-radio contests that took him to far-flung locales. But on Bounty Faunt found something—someone—who made the experience stand out above all other adventures: Robin Walbridge. Faunt loved him and saw Walbridge as a logical thinker, a consummate teacher, and someone that others should emulate.
Also on the A-Watch were deckhands Mark Warner, thirty-three, of Milton, Massachusetts, and Claudene Christian, forty-two, originally from Alaska and a former Miss Teenage Alaska. Of the two, Christian was known as the outgoing one with a “bubbly” personality.
Christian claimed to be a distant relative of Fletcher Christian, the master’s mate aboard the original Bounty who, in Tahiti in April 1789, led a mutiny and seized control of the ship from Captain William Bligh. Christian didn’t need to mention her notorious ancestor to attract attention, however. A petite blonde who had been a cheerleader at the University of Southern California, she once got the idea for a business—fashion dolls with cheerleader outfits from specific colleges and universities. In a sour ending to the Cheerleader Doll Co., Christian was sued by Mattel, maker of Barbie dolls. Before she reached Bounty’s decks, she had returned to live with her parents in Oklahoma. She shared with her college friend Michelle Wilton that she didn’t want to be there, was bored, and wanted a new start in life. Single and over forty, she felt that her life had hit a dead end. Then in May, with no significant tall ship experience, she joined Bounty’s crew as a volunteer and loved life aboard. For the first time in a long, long time, she told Wilton, she felt at peace and happy.
Among the four A-Watch crew members, Faunt had the most tall ship experience, having for several years sailed off and on aboard Bounty and other square-rigged ships. By any measure, the watch was the oldest on board, with an average age of over forty-five years.
• • •
Prokosh was pleased to be sailing toward a hurricane with the four members of the A-Watch and the other eleven crew members who stayed aboard Bounty for her voyage to Bounty’s 2012–2013 winter dock in Galveston, Texas. Yes, with only sixteen aboard, Bounty had her smallest crew since leaving San Juan in April. But these sixteen, Prokosh thought, they are the right ones. They have stuck with Bounty the whole season, they know the boat well, and they really will give it their best.
CHAPTER THREE
A VOYAGE WITH PURPOSE
MY REVISED FORECAST: Landfall in S New Jersey, between Cape May and Atlantic City . . . during the night [Monday, October 29], and before Dawn [Tuesday, October 30] morning.
I caution either [of two computer models] could easily be correct.
Further, regardless where Sandy makes landfall, the entire region may see a long-duration (1–2 day) wind event, with nearly-uniform winds of 60–80 knots sustained (gusting 80–100k)—anywhere within 300 miles of Sandy’s landfall in all directions (600-mile-wide swath of des
tructive winds and potential Storm Surge).
—Chris Parker, October 26, 2012, 6:36 a.m.
Chris Parker’s forecast did not reach Bounty’s Nav Shack. HMS Bounty Organization LLC had not chosen to buy Parker’s service, at a fee ranging up to $195 a year.
At the time of Parker’s report, Bounty was sailing with both diesel engines hammering at full throttle, on a course of about 165 degrees from true north, about forty miles south of Montauk Point. She carried instruments for gathering weather information, including a single-sideband radio, on which she received faxed weather reports; a satellite telephone, from which she could call home base in Setauket, Long Island; a radar to view approaching weather; and Winlink 2000, a ham-radio-based email service.
That Walbridge and Hansen had not engaged a professional weather router to guide their ship’s voyage—not even the free service provided by Herb Hilgenberg—may have spoken more to Walbridge’s noble attitude and lifelong habit of self-reliance than to penury. But as with any wooden-tall-ship operator, Walbridge fought an ongoing battle for funds and was always selecting which of the ship’s many pressing needs would absorb the limited cash on hand. It was a difficult and lonely role. Richard Bailey, skipper of the tall ship Rose in the 1990s when Walbridge was his mate, recalls his own feeling of being not “just the hired captain, but the chief visionary of the project, always trying to increase revenue just so you have more money to spend. I think you become very alert to financial opportunities but also to financial losses or failures.” Needing to make the economics work creates pressures.
Walbridge had left Rose in 1995 to take the helm of Bounty and had been her skipper ever since. But he and Bailey had stayed in touch. Walbridge, a year older than his former boss, told Bailey about his fund-raising schemes and dreams, among them a plan to make frequent stops in Copenhagen, Denmark, where Bounty had drawn huge crowds. If you could do that often enough, you could make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Bailey got the impression that Bounty was surviving on a rather low budget.
Some of Walbridge’s big dreams worked out. Thanks to her role in the Pirates of the Caribbean films, in 2005 Bounty was able to dock in Bayou La Batre, Alabama, where the Steiner Shipyard was building boats for the same films. There, she got completely new rigging, replacing much of her ten miles of rope. The crew did the work but the materials and dock fees had been paid for by Disney, Walbridge told friends.
• • •
Not every deal is a blockbuster, though. Some income walked up Bounty’s gangplank one person at a time. The ship was licensed by the US Coast Guard as a “dockside attraction” only and was not permitted to engage in the more lucrative business of taking customers sailing. Although at times the HMS Bounty Organization LLC had made stabs at qualifying for a coast guard sail-training license—and at times advertised that it would take paying customers sailing—no such license had ever been earned.
So Walbridge’s chore was to find ways to lure people off the dock in any city the ship visited, and a unique opportunity surfaced in January 2012 when Bounty was at its 2011–2012 winter dock in San Juan.
An Ohio photographer and event promoter, Gary Kannegiesser, wanted to become a private contractor who would take photographs of visitors in every port where Bounty docked. Since the primary source of Bounty’s income—other than the money spent on the ship by its owner, Robert Hansen—was the $10 fee visitors paid to board the ship, Kannegiesser’s scheme could be a nice addition. Once Bounty was inspected by the coast guard at a new dock, guests began walking the deck, climbing down to the tween deck, and imagining where, in Captain Bligh’s day, various events would have occurred. If they had known Bounty’s recent history, they might silently have visualized Johnny Depp swaggering over the same deck boards now under their feet. They would be primed, Kannegiesser believed, for a photo op.
Kannegiesser suggested that he take pictures of visitors standing at Bounty’s impressive wooden helm and sell them copies. He wanted a two-year contract, hoping to cash in during the 2013 season when Bounty was scheduled to join other tall ships for a tour of the Great Lakes.
Robert Hansen had flown to San Juan and Kannegiesser met with him and Walbridge aboard Bounty. “Bob was a businessman and he thought it [the idea] was cool, but he left the decision-making up to Robin,” Kannegiesser said. “Robin felt, ‘I really don’t know if I want to tie up the crew so they can have pictures taken.’ He was lukewarm. Very cordial, but lukewarm at best.”
During a break in the visit, Kannegiesser and a colleague who had made the trip with him went to a restaurant. At a nearby table sat an Alabama woman, Connie DeRamus, and her friend. The women were in Puerto Rico on vacation, and they eavesdropped and heard the men talking about Bounty. DeRamus’s friend began asking questions about Bounty, and soon all four were conversing.
DeRamus had one topic she liked to discuss: her twenty-nine-year-old daughter, Ashley, a blond young woman with Down syndrome. For years, DeRamus had thought of building a clothing line around Ashley, garments that would take into account the unique figure of Down syndrome girls and women, whom department-store clothing seldom fit. She told the men about her dreams.
“That’s a great idea,” Kannegiesser said. “Why don’t you do it?”
They continued to talk, and Kannegiesser began envisioning a role for Ashley DeRamus that would connect her with Bounty. He had in mind a concession on the dock beside Bounty where silicone bracelets promoting Ashley by Design—the name DeRamus had chosen for her daughter’s clothing line—could be sold. He imagined a charitable, nonprofit organization under whose auspices the bracelets would be marketed and which would raise funds for the needs of Down syndrome children and adults.
Eventually, Robin Walbridge agreed to Kannegiesser’s photography scheme, and Kannegiesser decided to begin slowly. When the season started in April and Bounty sailed north from Puerto Rico, the photographer and a crew of five boarded a recreational vehicle, joining Bounty at its first stops in St. Augustine and Jacksonville, Florida.
DeRamus’s friend Kim lived in Jacksonville. Her home on the St. Johns River had a pool. Kannegiesser and his crew stopped there for a break from travel and discussed how to make the photo operation at the next port—Savannah—more functional.
“Then Kim and I decided to go to Savannah and help out,” DeRamus said. “I just brought Ashley’s bracelets along because I could, and I set up a picture of her and [an] Ashley by Design [sign]. We just had that sitting on the corner of the photo table. It ended up that a remarkable number of parents stopped by to see what it was all about.”
DeRamus recognized then that having her daughter present would help boost donations to the nonprofit.
“The idea evolved [from] actually talking to the captain about Ashley,” she said.
DeRamus and her friend stayed with Kannegiesser through the next two ports, Charleston, South Carolina, and Wilmington, North Carolina. DeRamus was busy the next few weeks, and not until the end of May did she and Ashley return to Bounty, in Greenport, New York, Bounty’s registered home port. By then, Kannegiesser had an agreement from Walbridge that Ashley could set up a small area near the photo booth to sell bracelets and tell her story.
At first, DeRamus says, she didn’t know which of the crew members was Bounty’s skipper. “Robin was so humble and unassuming that he never announced to anyone that he was the captain,” she said. “He was always wearing a Bounty T-shirt or sweatshirt, cruising the deck, talking with visitors.”
From Greenport on, the recreational vehicle, with Kannegiesser, DeRamus, Ashley, and the five photo employees, arrived at every port where Bounty stopped. There was a swing north up the Hudson River and then a voyage south to the Chesapeake Bay and Annapolis, Maryland. Next was a stop in Philadelphia, in the midst of a hundred-degree heat wave that kept visitors away in droves, and then Bounty returned to Long Island, where it docked at Port Jefferson, below the bluffs of Setauket, home to the ship’s corporate offices as well as her owner, R
obert Hansen.
The ship, her crew, and the photo team visited Plymouth, Boston, Gloucester, and Newburyport, Massachusetts, and sailed to Star Island in the Isles of Shoals, six miles offshore from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Two weeks later, they were in Nova Scotia, where they visited Lunenburg, Bounty’s birthplace.
Along the way, DeRamus saw Walbridge developing what she later described as “a kind of rapport” with her daughter. To DeRamus, Walbridge seemed sweet and compassionate.
DeRamus also said she and her daughter developed a friendship with everybody in the crew. “They were just really genuinely nice people, but they were sailors and they weren’t into giving tours of the ship and stuff, except for Claudene,” DeRamus said.
When Kannegiesser’s summer help went home near the end of the season, Claudene Christian was recruited to become part of the photo crew. In port, she donned the Tahitian-print dress provided by DeRamus and helped with Kannegiesser’s and DeRamus’s operations.
In Plymouth, Massachusetts, Walbridge welcomed Ashley and Connie DeRamus on board as crew members. They sailed to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and then, watched over by other crew members, Ashley sailed on Bounty without her mother for the better part of a week, handling some of the duties of sailing a tall ship, perhaps a first for a person with Down syndrome.
In every port, Ashley was at the dock with her colorful bracelets, taking donations. “We got anywhere from one dollar to twenty dollars for donations, depending on the persons,” her mother said. “We had a table set up where we had printers for the photo operation. The people who had the pictures taken at the helm would come back to our table. We had an extra little extension table at the end of our photo booth. She [Ashley] had a sign explaining what she was doing.”
Meanwhile, Kannegiesser’s brain was churning out ideas connecting Bounty and Ashley. He and Walbridge talked of bringing Down syndrome children aboard for voyages the following summer, 2013, on the Tall Ships America fleet tour of the Great Lakes.
Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy Page 2
