Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy

by Michael J. Tougias

  Lightner asked Walbridge’s opinion of Pirates of the Caribbean star Johnny Depp. Walbridge gushed, “He was extremely nice, he was very, very easy to work with, very humble. For somebody of his status, he was just a great person to work with.”

  Walbridge said he was most impressed by the effort moviemaking took. “We’re shooting probably like a twelve-hour day, and if they can get ninety seconds of screen time, they consider they’ve had a very good day,” he told Lightner.

  Bounty had made her mark in films because, like an elegant Hollywood beauty, she had good bones. The shipwrights in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, had provided them.

  The owners of the Smith and Rhuland shipyard put out a call in early 1960 for workers for their new project. The owners had signed a contract with MGM for $750,000 to build what, at the time, was the most expensive movie prop ever. They had hired a naval architect to use the plans for the original Bounty—plans held by the British Admiralty—and expand them by about 50 percent to create a replica that could house everything the movie crew would need to sail to Tahiti and film the movie.

  Gerald Zwicker, then about twenty-four, had just returned home to Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, after spending time working with his brother in Marlborough, Massachusetts, as a carpenter. He was listening to the radio and heard about the shipyard jobs. He applied and the next day was on the payroll. The keel was being assembled, and Zwicker was on the crew that drove galvanized bolts an inch in diameter and four feet long through the keel timbers.

  Next, Zwicker was put to work assembling the ribs—the vertical wooden frames that would give Bounty’s hull its curved shape. It was heavy work, and where a job might take six men, only three were assigned to this particular task, making the task even heavier.

  Smith and Rhuland, Zwicker felt, was a good company, so unlike some of his colleagues, he didn’t complain about the hard labor. Each morning, Zwicker drove the fifteen miles from Bridgewater to Lunenburg, picking up five other workers as he went. In their eight-hour day, they took on whatever work the yard needed. When the ribs were done and shaped with sharp adzes, the men started attaching the planking, using squared, six-inch, galvanized nails and trunnels—thick dowels driven into slightly smaller holes drilled through the planks and into the frames.

  Zwicker would see the 1941 Dodge truck, driven by an older man, arrive at the yard with a load of wooden pegs for the trunnels. The man harvested the wood locally in a stand of hackmatack, a tree now called tamarack. At the shipyard, workers shaped the pegs into cylindrical trunnels.

  “The planking was maple and ash and birch,” Zwicker recalled. “It was all good hardwood. Had to be put in a steam box and steamed. As soon as you took ’em out, you had to put them on. When we put them on and fastened them to the ribs, they had to be tight on the inside. [Planks were] beveled on the outside,” to allow for caulking, he said. “Douglas fir on deck had a bevel on top because that all had to be caulked.”

  Zwicker had work that he preferred: “The laying of the planking of the deck was a lot easier than putting the ribs together and fastening that. Even planking the sides wasn’t near as hard as putting the ribs up.”

  Zwicker, now seventy-seven, recalled, “Once they had the ribs all in and the bowsprit put on, you could tell pretty well what the shape of the boat was going to be. Of course, we had all kinds of tourists in there in the summer. Sometimes they got in the way. Of course they had to ask all kinds of questions. What was this? What was that made out of? The fellow from MGM was there every day. He wasn’t Canadian. He didn’t get in the way. He’d just come through and look around and maybe talk a minute or two. It went pretty smooth. The head fellows, they knew what they were doing. They had everything pretty well organized.”

  While the rough carpentry was in progress—during the warmer months—the shipyard had a crew of about eight older men working in a separate shop, making yachts and cabin cruisers. But once Bounty’s hull was enclosed, that crew was brought inside to finish the ship’s interior.

  The whole project took about a year, and then some of the yard crew were signed on by MGM as Bounty’s crew. The voyage to Tahiti then began, and Bounty sailed into Hollywood history, a legend.

  • • •

  But now, in 2012, unlike an aging actress, Bounty could not get by on her old bones alone. Wardrobe couldn’t hide her defects. Cosmetics only went so far. She needed constant attention. She was high maintenance. Walbridge knew that, knew that she had her weaknesses.

  And now, as darkness overcame the Atlantic and Saturday, October 27, drew to a close, the captain was preparing to put those weaknesses to the test.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  PAST HER PRIME, LOST HER PRIME

  LOCATE THE LOW AND GO AWAY FROM IT!

  The need to be able to navigate is critical for the safety of the Bounty. . . . Even Physics has it in Bounty’s favor.

  —Bounty Facebook entry, 11:50 a.m., Saturday, October 27, 2012

  Jim Salapatek wasn’t worried about his son, Drew, on board Bounty as the ship sailed on a route across the path of an oncoming hurricane. But from the traffic on Facebook, he knew that others were worried. He talked with Bounty’s shoreside office manager, Tracie Simonin, about what they both were reading on Facebook, and then he decided to take action.

  “I told Tracie, ‘I’ll put a positive spin on this. Try to bring some hope to it.’ That’s where it started with the post ‘Riding the Storm Out . . . Day Two,’ ” Salapatek recalled.

  Except for what he’d learned through his son’s experiences on Bounty, Salapatek was a complete novice in nautical theory. But he was reading commentary in Internet forums on such websites as gCaptain and WoodenBoat Forum.

  “Some were saying they can make it,” Salapatek recalled. “I spent quite a bit of time reading this. There were two factions. The guys who said you could do it, they’re explaining how you can do it. So that’s the reason I posted those up on the twenty-seventh.”

  When Walbridge emailed Simonin, Salapatek said, “I just cut and pasted that.” Otherwise, Salapatek had no more idea what was happening aboard Bounty than any of his readers could deduce. None of them knew, for example, that dinner Saturday evening was a curry dish.

  The aroma washed from the galley in the forward end of the tween deck, seeped down to the lower deck, and occasionally wafted up through the Nav Shack to the weather deck. Bounty crew had never before had cuisine so good. Two “gourmet” meals in two days, some shipmates declared. Jessica Black, the cook three days into her job, was making friends beyond her galley walls. Her closest friend there, however, was a jack line running athwartships—from side to side—by which she kept her balance. The seas had built all day and now ran near twenty-five feet, blown by a forty-knot wind. Bounty was rolling from side to side, creating a couple of problems new for the 2012 season, if not unique in the ship’s fifty-year life.

  Having spent the whole season in relatively placid waters, the planking above the waterline was dry, not swollen with water and pressed together, each plank against its neighbors. The dryness allowed water to enter Bounty’s hull when the ship rolled enough to rock its dry topsides beneath the waves.

  The second issue was a bit more mysterious. It was the same one Drew Salapatek had noticed on Thursday morning when he was assigned to wash down the deck. Something was wrong with the ship’s pumps, the machinery that removed any seawater that came aboard and settled in the bilge.

  More water than usual was boarding Bounty. The pumps designed to remove that water were whimpering slackers.

  Bosun Groves noticed the pump problem during the day on Saturday when she volunteered to help by standing watch. She was doing a lot of galley cleaning and boat checks and noticed that the captain—who seldom strayed from his cabin except for musters—was in the engine room manning the bilge pumps. To Groves, that indicated that Bounty had too few crew members. She offered to relieve Walbridge.

  Groves discovered then that the electric pumps, attached to a piping
system that ran fore and aft to the eight compartments on the lower deck, were weak. They could not hold a prime. That is, the pumps would start sucking water from the bilge but suddenly suck air instead. Then Groves had to work a series of valves to attempt to restore the suction.

  Groves was only the latest crew member to notice the lack of prime in the pumps. She thought it might be explained by the rolling of the ship, which caused bilge water to wash up the interior planks—the ceiling—on one side and then the other. She had been in twenty-five-foot seas aboard Bounty, though, and had never experienced such a significant loss of prime in the pumps.

  Doug Faunt, AB on the A-Watch, had felt there was a problem during the voyage earlier in the week from Boothbay Harbor to New London. It took longer than usual to pump water out of the bilge, even though the amount of bilge water during that passage was minimal. But even with a decent supply of water in the bilge—in the engine room, for example—he had problems getting a prime. It just didn’t feel right.

  Faunt had reported his concerns to John Svendsen, the chief mate, and to Captain Walbridge. Faunt had heard the skipper acknowledge, “Maybe we have some problems.” Faunt thought his concerns were taken seriously, but he wasn’t certain how seriously. Like most of the other crew members who questioned their own judgment when compared with the skipper’s, he didn’t pursue the matter.

  While he waited for the ship’s officers to take action during the trip to New London, Faunt, technically oriented, fiddled with the pumps and found that when he ran both simultaneously, he could get a prime.

  On Thursday, when Bounty left New London, Faunt still had concerns about its bilge pumps and still had seen no action taken.

  Now it was Saturday, and the pumps still performed poorly. Joshua Scornavacchi found that, when C-Watch was on duty and he had boat-check responsibility, the two electric pumps lost their prime every twenty to thirty seconds. On each hour of boat check, he had to spend half his time in the engine room, attempting to pump the bilge. He spent much of the rest of the time on watch checking the strainers at the ends of the piping system to see if they were clogged. He found no clogging at all. But even in the engine room, where normally the pumps would drain the water completely, they failed to keep pace.

  Scornavacchi reported the problem to his watch captain, Dan Cleveland.

  On his next watch, Adam Prokosh found the same issue. He thought through the problem analytically. Were changes made to the pumping system in Boothbay Harbor? No. He reviewed logs kept in the engine room and found that it was taking nearly twice as long as normal to clear the bilges. Prokosh, too, checked the strainers and found nothing. He raised the floorboards to see if the strainers were all underwater when the ship was level. They were.

  Something was amiss, and Prokosh did his duty, reporting the poor prime up the chain of command, even mentioning it directly to Robin Walbridge. Then he told Matt Sanders, his watch captain. Later, he again brought the poor prime to Walbridge’s attention, and the captain said, “I’m thinking about it.” Prokosh believed his captain and assumed that the issue would be addressed by the officers.

  But on Saturday, October 27, when Prokosh and his B-Watch were about to go off duty, his watchmate Jessica Hewitt was unable to get a prime on the starboard pump, even though plenty of water was in the bilge. She thought back to the short voyage from Boothbay Harbor to New London, recalling that even then she’d had problems with the prime. Now the problem remained unsolved, even if in some quiet corner of Bounty the officers and captain had considered it.

  As B-Watch turned duties over to C-Watch, Prokosh told Anna Sprague she could expect to find the bilge pumps difficult to prime. Sprague checked the strainers in the bosun’s locker and the aft crew quarters. They were underwater and unclogged.

  Only one crew member was aboard Bounty on this voyage who could remember a problem that threatened Bounty fourteen years earlier. Robin Walbridge was the skipper in 1998 when Bounty was passing by the coast of the Carolinas about fifty miles offshore in modest seas and a flooding began.

  It was Walbridge’s fourth season as Bounty’s skipper, and he was sailing his vessel from Fall River, Massachusetts, to Florida for her winter berth when, at nine thirty on an October Saturday night, his crew radioed the coast guard for help.

  This was in the days when Bounty took on thirty thousand gallons of water an hour sitting at the dock in Fall River, its pumps running regularly to keep the ship afloat. Of the three bilge pumps then, one was diesel-powered and mounted on the tween deck with a pickup pipe going straight down to the engine compartment, Cliff Bredeson recalled.

  At that time, there were no bulkheads below the tween deck. Any water that made it into the bilge could be sucked up and pumped overboard from that one pipe in the engine room.

  The two smaller, electric pumps in the engine compartment were meant as backup for the diesel pump. They were both powered by one diesel generator and were mounted less than a foot above the engine-room floorboards, Bredeson said.

  The main diesel pump on the tween deck stopped working, and Bounty’s crew couldn’t act fast enough to get the electric pumps working. The bilge water rose above the engine-room floorboards and shorted out the electric pumps. Now, Bounty was at the mercy of the sea.

  A helicopter, two coast guard cutters, and two navy ships were joined by a commercial tugboat, all of the vessels responding to Bounty’s location, delivering five portable pumps to the Bounty’s crew of twenty-two, according to a newspaper report at the time. Bounty was boarded by a navy damage-control team, which helped pump Bounty enough that the crew could steer her into port in Charleston, South Carolina, the newspaper reported.

  “Investigators say the ship began taking on water after it ran into a storm and caulking between the planks was loosened,” the news report said.

  “ ‘It was not a phenomenal storm,’ said Lt. Jeff Carter, a senior investigating officer with the Coast Guard. But the weather was rough enough to bang it around,” the newspaper reported. “ ‘After the caulking loosened, water began to seep inside. The main dewatering pump, which operates on diesel fuel and had evidence of wear, failed.”

  Bredeson remembered that once Bounty was in Charleston, a series of steps were taken to replace the existing bilge system. After Robert Hansen bought Bounty in 2001, Bredeson said, at least six bulkheads were built, dividing the space between the tween deck and the bilge deck “just to stop water from running from one section to the other with no restrictions at all,” said Bredeson, who last sailed on Bounty in 2009. On that transatlantic voyage Bounty had pumping problems of another form.

  Bounty’s bilge pumping system had been thoroughly revamped and was in the same configuration that it would be in 2012 when she left Halifax, Nova Scotia, for Londonderry, Northern Ireland. It had two diesel engines powering two electric generators that each ran its own electric bilge pump. And it had two hydraulic pumps that ran off the main propulsion engines, one fixed in place in the engine room and operating through the manifold system that could pump individual compartments separately, and the other hydraulic pump somewhat portable.

  Before the 2009 voyage, Bredeson said, “We had flooded the ship intentionally just to see what our dewatering system would manage. It was within our expectations.”

  But problems arose once Bounty was at sea.

  “The shipyard had left a great deal of garbage in the bilges and that affected our pumping ability” by clogging the piping, Bredeson said. “That was just a cleaning job, cleaning out the pumps and the filters and that sort of thing. That went on for several days.”

  While cleaning the debris made for a rough trip, Bredeson said, “that was an education for us, for sure. I know this time [in the shipyard in 2012] they cleaned bilges every day so the bilges were very, very clean. I was impressed with the bosun’s effort to clean it.”

  Still, there was that trip to Puerto Rico in 2010, the very next year, when Bounty hit rough weather, took on water, and had difficulty keep
ing the bilge pumps—the same ones it had in 2012—primed. The problem then was the rough weather, the rolling ship, the dry topsides dipping down into the ocean with each roll to the side. Most experienced wooden-ship sailors might have anticipated this scenario, particularly when they were accustomed to offshore sailing.

  The same scenario had caught one coastal captain by surprise a few years back when he piloted his modest schooner out on Long Island Sound for a short delivery. Eric Van Dormolen, the captain of the Mary E, sailing out of Essex, Connecticut, had a charter scheduled in New York City, about 110 miles to the west, an opportunity to make some money for his boat, a restored Maine coastal schooner, and what Van Dormolen calls the UPS truck of its day.

  In its day, the Mary E was made for offshore work, and every day its planks would get wet and stay swelled, Van Dormolen said. But in the charter service on Long Island Sound, that seldom happened.

  “I was sailing from Greenport [Long Island] going toward New York City, and I had some dirty fuel. So I shut the engine down. It was very rough out. What was happening was the boat was not used to seeing swells, eight-foot swells. Every time we would go underwater, a little bit of water would spray in [between the dry planks]. That would weight the boat down. Every wave we hit, we would go under a half an inch.”

  Van Dormolen called the coast guard and then managed to sail the Mary E into New London harbor with just two other crew members.

  “If the engine didn’t die, I wouldn’t have had an issue,” Van Dormolen said.

  But the engine did die, and although he lost the New York charter, the skipper and his schooner dodged a much greater problem: sinking.

  • • •

  In 2012, caught in the leading winds of Hurricane Sandy, Robin Walbridge hoped he could still make the couple of events planned at his destination. But water was coming in and his bilge pumping system wasn’t keeping up. The problem was enough to pull the skipper out of his quarters. If he did not resolve these issues, he would have to write off those events.