Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy

by Michael J. Tougias

  “I didn’t understand why we would do that,” Lucille recalls. When she asked, Howard patiently explained that you didn’t let people worry about you.

  Lesson taught—and lesson learned.

  In a sense, Robin Walbridge, the ship’s captain, couldn’t help himself. He was a teacher as well.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A HAPPY, HAPPY CREW

  This will be a tough voyage for Bounty. Here is Bounty’s current position and the weather front (Hurricane Sandy) that is approaching.

  Bounty is approx 100 miles off shore. Speed 8.6 knots on a course South by west.

  —Bounty Facebook page, Friday, October 26, 9:45 a.m.

  Sandy is generating deep convection near her center . . . but as soon as it’s generated, strong SSW-to-NNE wind-shear strips them away from Sandy’s center, and spreads “debris” clouds (which are not significant), some showers, and lesser-intense squalls throughout areas . . . all the way from FL E Coast . . . to Norfolk VA . . . and E-ward to beyond Bermuda.

  —Chris Parker, email, Friday, October 26, 5:50 p.m.

  Among his fifteen crew members—ten men and five women—aboard Bounty, Walbridge enjoyed unquestioning loyalty.

  Douglas Faunt, the oldest crew member and three years older than Walbridge, would say that the Bounty crew was his family—“closer than my family”—and a group who would risk their lives for one another. Walbridge, Faunt felt, was his mentor and someone whom he held in high regard.

  Although there seemed to always be eager applicants for crew positions, not every sailor who stepped aboard Bounty shared Faunt’s enthusiasm for the skipper when he or she returned ashore. At least one, Andrew Seguin, felt lucky to have been able to get off the boat alive.

  • • •

  In late November 2010, Seguin, from Osterville, Massachusetts, twenty-three at the time and recently unemployed, got a call telling him that Bounty was looking for crew for a voyage to Puerto Rico, leaving Boothbay Harbor, Maine, the next day. Seguin, who held a coast guard captain’s license, had studied naval engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology, a prestigious New Jersey university. There he had met Marc Castells, three years older, a computer science major.

  Seguin called Castells, who had also lost his job, and told him about Bounty.

  “You have twenty-four hours if you want to do this.”

  Seguin said, “The only information I had before getting on the boat was that it was leaving Maine and was ending up in Puerto Rico. We drove through the night to get there and literally pulled into Boothbay Harbor when the sun was coming up.” It was November 27, past the end of the hurricane season.

  Seguin had sailed a few vessels up and down the East Coast, including the seventy-four-foot, steel-hulled Liberté, from Annapolis, Maryland, to Cape Cod. Liberté was as close as he had come to sailing a tall ship. Castells had no such experience.

  “It was like a giggly feeling,” Seguin said. “Wow, I’m going to take that boat from here all the way to Puerto Rico.”

  In time, Robin Walbridge got up, and he and the crew invited Seguin and Castells to have breakfast. They got to do a bit more exploring before Walbridge held muster at the capstan.

  “Then it was ‘Here’s a list of things we have to do before we leave the dock.’ ” They spent the rest of the day helping their new shipmates tie everything down that was loose, assuring that the ship’s cannon were secured and that the dockside furniture that welcomed guests was stowed.

  When the work was done, Seguin was satisfied that Bounty was prepared to sail offshore. “We really didn’t know what to expect from the boat. There’s so many systems on the boat and it’s so complicated that it’s difficult to say it’s seaworthy unless you are a full-time crew,” he said. “We ended up leaving Boothbay under motor. Everything seemed perfectly normal. I do know that hours before we left, they were diving over the boat. The seacocks were leaking slightly.” Seacocks are valves in the hull of a vessel, below the waterline, that either admit seawater or are used for pumping out bilge water. Before the dock lines were cast off, Seguin said, the seacocks were sealed. “Motoring out the first day it was gorgeous. It was cold. There were dolphins jumping off the bow.” As Bounty headed south, the friends spent the first couple of days getting used to the routine of the ship. Each morning, Walbridge came to the weather deck and gave a speech.

  On the first morning, Walbridge told the crew that he didn’t worry about fire on the boat because it was old and wet. He also was unconcerned with sinking. “He said he’s had many engineers who said the boat has enough buoyancy in itself that it won’t sink,” Seguin recalled.

  “One thing that he emphasized was that man overboard was the most dangerous thing on the boat. The boat can’t sail into the wind,” so anyone in the water would quickly be left behind.

  “We did overboard drills almost every day,” Castells recalled. In the drill, a dinghy was lowered overboard and used to pick up an object thrown into the water in place of an actual man overboard.

  Then the weather worsened, and Walbridge told the crew that in these conditions Bounty could not even be turned around should someone fall into the water. For those cases of man overboard, a drum at the stern was packed with safety and survival gear, even an Electronic Position Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB), the device that, when triggered, contacts a satellite that relays a distress signal to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which notifies coast guard search-and-rescue units.

  All were taught that if they fell overboard, they could find the big drum floating in Bounty’s wake.

  The first day out of port, with calm seas and no wind, the crew was sent up the rigging to furl and set sails for practice. It was exhilarating.

  “After the sun set the first day, everyone was in really high spirits,” Seguin recalled. “It seemed like it was going to be a good trip. Even day two was not bad, with enough wind to sail the boat, a little sea-state.”

  But then, making boat checks while standing watch, the friends each noticed that the bilges contained more water than when Bounty had left the dock.

  “It becomes a blur from then on, the order of stuff going to hell,” Seguin said, laughing. “It might have been the night of day two, morning day three, when the wind started to really build up.” There were no more man-overboard drills.

  For a while, the winds were consistently in the thirty-knot range. Then one morning the winds eased. “The captain said, ‘We’ve gone through the worst of the weather.’ ”

  But the wind returned and the crew started to see sails tearing and blowing out. At one point, Seguin said, he went to Walbridge and questioned the amount of sail area Bounty was flying. “I’m a conservative sailor,” Seguin said. “It’s easier to let more sail area out than to put it away. We had four or five sails up.

  “Robin told me, ‘I’ve gone through hurricanes with three of them up.’ That’s when I was, like, ‘Okay, I don’t like this situation, but I’m not in control, so I do what I’m told.’ ”

  When the fore course sail, the lower square sail on the foremast, blew out, eight hands were sent aloft. Castells followed Chief Mate John Svendsen—in his first year aboard Bounty and his first year aboard a square-rigged ship—up the ratlines. Castells was wearing a head-mounted video camera that memorialized the event. Bounty rolled thirty degrees to each side, a huge metronome, driven by gale-force winds that blew up the shredded sections of the torn sail into canvas balloons. Overhead the sky was blue, with patchy white clouds, a beautiful day to look up. When the crew looked down, they saw a surging sea.

  And then the topmast broke and folded over its lower half.

  Seguin had stayed on deck. At first, he saw the backstays, ropes that hold the masts up and keep them from falling forward, sagging. Then he saw the mast break above where Castells was working.

  Then the weather got worse.

  “At one point, I was down in the galley and Captain Robin whispered something,” Seguin said. “T
he cook yelled, ‘What? We’re sailing directly into a force-nine gale? Don’t you think the cook would want to know?’ ”

  Seguin said he asked several times to be shown the weather faxes, but it was two watch shifts before he got to see them, and when he did, he discovered that Bounty was headed dead center into the storm.

  Meanwhile, Bounty’s bilges were filling with water. On watch, Seguin inspected the bilge, expecting to find baffles there to keep the water near the suctions for the bilge pumps. There were none. Every time the boat rolled, the water sloshed up the inside of the hull, away from the suction lines, and the bilge pump lost its prime.

  Seguin said he asked the ship’s engineer, Caleb, why there were no baffles. He said Caleb replied that a couple of years earlier, when Bounty was in dry dock, the baffles that had been there were removed to make repairs, and half of them were rotten, so they were not replaced.

  “Once we got into the thick of the storm, I don’t know how far we were rolling, but it was huge,” Seguin said. “There’s stuff all over the floor. At the same time, the timbers of the boat worked endlessly in bone-crunching moaning, creaking [so loudly] that you pretty much have to yell, not over the motors but over the boat.”

  Seguin recalled a time when he awoke to go on watch and met one of his shipmates whose face was parted in a huge grin.

  “Guess what I did last night,” the fellow said. “I saved the boat. I put out a fire.” The crewman didn’t say where the fire was, but later in the day, when he was doing boat checks, Seguin lifted an engine cover. The day before, it had been yellow. Now it was white from fire-extinguisher foam. Seguin learned from Castells, who had been on watch at the helm when the fire was extinguished, that the shipmate who saved the ship never told anyone in authority.

  This bothered Seguin, but probably not as much as the story he said the engineer told him. Two wires had been shorting when anyone stepped on a certain floorboard in the crew quarters. The engineer said he didn’t know what the wires were for, but his solution was to pull them out.

  Upon hearing this, Seguin said, “I was prepared to end up in the life raft.”

  Seguin noted that Walbridge stayed in his cabin except when he gave his morning talk. He ran the boat by delegation. Seguin was unsettled by the fact that Svendsen, to whom Walbridge entrusted command of the day-to-day handling of his ship, had, as recently as two years earlier, been a dive boat captain. This was not the sort of credential Seguin expected of the person second-in-command of a massive tall ship.

  As Bounty neared Bermuda, with the bilge pumps overwhelmed, Seguin came up behind Walbridge, who was writing an email to home base. In it Walbridge wrote that things were not going so well and requested that parts be sent overnight to Bermuda.

  “This is not what he’s telling everyone,” Seguin said.

  In a last-ditch effort, old bilge pumps were hauled out of a forward hold and dragged back to the engine room. The crew spent two hours hooking one pump to the bilge manifold system. It was time wasted. The pump never worked, Seguin said.

  Bounty did dock in Bermuda and Seguin and Castells informed Walbridge they were leaving. The skipper was pleasant when he accepted their resignations. Ashore, the friends paid for lodging and airfare home. They were told on the dock that when people applied for their berths on Bounty, they were told that the two friends had left because they were seasick.

  CHAPTER SIX

  BECOMING ROBIN WALBRIDGE

  December 1951. A Volkswagen Bug, one of the first imported, was headed from northern Vermont to a Boston suburb, a family Christmas trip. In the backseat were a six-year-old girl and her brother, two months past his second birthday. The boy was silent. So far in his short life, he hadn’t spoken a word. His sister thought he was difficult to fathom. His parents were getting worried about the child’s learning ability.

  As the Volkswagen slowly negotiated the winding country roads on the way to the grandparents’ home, the girl was mulling over a quandary. The family was spending hours—long, boring hours—to travel from Montpelier to Quincy, Massachusetts. If she compared the distance they had to cover to, say, the entire world, it was not that far. How, then, was it possible that in one short night—Christmas Eve—Santa Claus visited the home of every child in the world? She struggled with her puzzle until she couldn’t bear it. Then she asked Dad, who was driving. Dad was honest with his children.

  “Every little girl’s father is her Santa Claus,” he said.

  Amazed, she turned to her brother. “Did you hear that? Daddy is Santa Claus.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” the toddler said. “I knew it all the time.” And from then on, Robert—not Bob or Bobby—Walbridge, having apparently waited to select what he judged was the right moment, spoke in complete sentences.

  • • •

  Concealed by Robert’s two-year silence was a level of analysis most adults don’t imagine in two-year-olds. He spoke and the evidence was revealed. Both the analysis and the silence would continue, however, and lead to startling convictions as the boy grew.

  His sister Lucille adored Robert and perhaps understood him as well as any adult. She saw, when he was four, that he had already selected a course for his life.

  From time to time, a visitor or a relative would hand the boy a coin or two as a gift. Robert would take the change, slip it in his trousers pocket, and thank the person. “That’s for my truck,” he would tell the gift giver, who would assume that the boy had his eye on some special toy.

  Lucille knew otherwise. Robert had decided that when he grew up, he would be a long-haul trucker. He was saving for his first rig. (The idea of that vocation probably didn’t pop into his imagination uninvited. Howard Walbridge loved to drive, and he would often say that in another life he would be a long-haul trucker and see the world.)

  Three years later, in the old farmhouse whose shelves were stacked with books and world atlases and dictionaries and various games, chessboards began appearing on every flat surface, as if delivered by elves, and on the boards were chessmen positioned as if in the midst of battle. Robert, age seven, had discovered the game and had, by mail, begun competing with other players from around the country. Quiet as always, he made no announcements but, with a passion that would last a lifetime, immersed himself in the game, exercising and strengthening his analytical powers.

  In four more years, in the winter of 1960—when hundreds of miles to the northeast the shipbuilding firm of Smith and Rhuland was building the tall ship Bounty—Robert Walbridge began haranguing Lucille to turn over an acre of land on which she had been raising corn. She was fifteen now, he ten, and she had been harvesting her corn and selling it to raise money for college. She saw no need for Robert to have that land. There were thirty-four other acres on the Walbridge farm.

  Robert didn’t say why he wanted that particular land. Like most rural New Englanders, he was taciturn. It’s a cultural thing. But with Robert Walbridge, it was different. Unlike other children his age, he kept his own counsel, always.

  Howard Walbridge was aware that his daughter was under siege. He may have decided to intervene because he wondered what his son was up to. In a family meeting, he noted that Lucille had been raising the same crop on that acre for some time. Now might be the moment to move her crop to another location so the nutrients were not drawn out of that acre, he suggested. The family listened, and although Lucille may have sighed, she relented.

  Robert now had his acre, in front of the house and adjacent to the roadway—Vermont Route 12—that climbed past the driveway. He had thought ahead, had a plan, and that’s why he wanted this specific plot.

  Montpelier had a public swimming pool, a quarter mile beyond the Walbridge farm. To get to the pool, every kid in town had to walk past Robert’s land. No one in the family knew what he planned to plant there. They knew which catalog the seeds came from but didn’t know what crop the seeds would become.

  As summer progressed, the land turned green with vines supporting yellow blosso
ms. Small pumpkins followed, and by autumn, all those passing children had selected the pumpkin that would be theirs at Halloween. Robert’s profit from his one acre was over $1,000, ten weeks’ pay for many grown men in 1961.

  The pool up the street was the closest water to the largely landlocked Walbridge family. The grandparents from Quincy had a summer home in Post Mills, Vermont, near Lake Fairlee, where the children had access to a canoe and rowboats. The home was within walking distance of the lake, which at the time had a good beach. Most weekends during the summer, the family drove the forty miles from Montpelier southeast to the lake, where the birthdays of Lucille and her younger sister, Delia, were celebrated.

  The three Walbridge children got to see salt water from time to time as well.

  Anna Walbridge’s parents, the Palmers, lived on Hilda Street in Quincy, about a mile from the beach, and the family visited there often. “It [the beach] was the family’s escape from the city,” said Lucille.

  “Mom would tell us to smell the salt air, feel the slippery seaweed, examine the seashells. We had countless numbers of picnics down there. Dad also liked the sea but not as intensely as my mother. In the whole family, Mom seemed to have the most intense liking for the sea.” She also loved a poem by John Masefield:

  I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,

  And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,

  And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,

  And a grey mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking.

  Like a mantra, someone in the family was always reciting the poem along the thin beach in a bay of the Atlantic Ocean.

  On these visits to Quincy, Lucille Walbridge had, in addition to the beach, a favorite excursion. Although nearby Boston was filled with historical sites, Lucille’s compass always directed her gaze toward Old Ironsides, the USS Constitution, the historic tall ship docked near the heart of the city.