Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy

by Michael J. Tougias

  The C-130 barreled out of the clouds at 150 knots, and Bounty appeared below them, lying flat on her side, like a once-proud racehorse that’s been put down. Everyone in the aircraft stared out rain-slashed windows trying to pick out survivors. Debris littered the ocean. One of the crew members shouted, “I see a raft!” Then another hollered, “There’s a second raft at two o’clock!”

  In addition to the two rafts being carried away from Bounty on the enormous waves, the crew also saw multiple strobe lights blinking in the water, but they couldn’t see people. It was an awful sight for the crew members to take in, especially not knowing if survivors were attached to the strobes or in the rafts. Worst of all, the strobes spread out in all directions around the crippled ship, and soon they would be far apart.

  As the plane zoomed past the debris field, Wes banked it to return to the site, trying hard not to grip the controls too tightly as the aircraft groaned and shuddered, battered by varying wind gusts. Keeping the plane in any kind of steady flight was impossible, and the altitude indicator jumped wildly. Wes gave the ocean a wide berth, trying to keep the plane as close to five hundred feet as possible.

  Myers radioed Sector, “We’ve visually confirmed that the ship has capsized, it’s on its side. We have seen two rafts, and many strobe lights in the water, but unsure where the people are. We are deploying the ASRK.”

  Wes gave Vargo the okay to open the ramp door and told him they were circling back to Bounty, and Wes would give the command when to drop two rafts.

  A thousand feet of line connected the two rafts, with the hope that a survivor could grab the line and pull himself or herself to safety. Vargo and Laster began opening the ramp, and the roar of the wind was deafening. Each man wore a harness with a tether fixed to the aircraft wall. Should they slip and fall, this would keep them inside the aircraft and prevent them from free-falling into the sea. They double-checked each other’s harness and tether, just to make sure.

  Moving the rafts to the open cargo doorway, the two men fought back their motion sickness as best they could. The rear of the aircraft took the brunt of the turbulence, and the men found it impossible to stand without holding on to the walls of the plane. Nausea got the best of one of the men, and he vomited, causing the rain-soaked floor by the ramp to become even more slippery.

  Over the headset, Wes alerted Vargo and Laster that they were coming up on Bounty and to get ready. Normally Wes would have his drop master release the rafts about thirty yards upwind of the target, but that’s based on twenty-knot winds and an altitude of two hundred feet. Now, at an altitude of five hundred feet with sixty- and seventy-knot buffeting gusts, the commander knew the drop should happen farther upwind. He used the information provided by the computer along with his own experience to estimate the proper distance ahead of the target where the release should take place.

  When Wes saw Bounty almost directly below them, he waited about five seconds then ordered, “Drop! Drop! Drop!”

  Vargo and Laster shoved the first raft out of the plane, counted off two seconds, then pushed the second into the black void. The two-second interval between the rafts was to ensure they did not become tangled. They wanted the rafts to land in different spots with the tether between them. Usually the drop master can see if his drop is accurate, but with pelting wind and darkness the rafts were swallowed by the night before they hit the water. The two men inched back away from the doorway, thankful to have avoided a mishap at the outer lip of the ramp.

  Wes circled back around and through his NVGs could see that the two coast guard rafts had landed just where he had wanted them to, near the debris field. But the wind wasn’t going to allow them to stay there for long. Although the rafts had drogue chutes designed to drag aft and slow their drifting, the rafts still blew end over end.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE FIRST RAFT

  Order had turned into chaos. Human voices were shouting where before the only sounds were from savage nature and its assault on the foundering old ship. In an instant, the sea rose from the starboard bulwark, enveloping half the crew, from deckhands to deck officers.

  The order that had marked life aboard Bounty had vanished. In its place was the bedlam of unrestrained nature.

  The drills that had been so much a part of Bounty’s order—the practice and repetition that had made it seem to Adam Prokosh that Bounty was a finely organized vessel with great communication—all that regimentation evaporated.

  Had Walbridge recognized in time the imminence of disaster, perhaps there could have been an orderly evacuation into the life rafts. But the captain with the unquestioned expertise thought he and his crew could make it to daylight. When they could not, all the planning and the practice were worth nothing. If they were going to survive, the crew members now had only themselves and their will to live—and a couple of life rafts that plunged overboard with the rest of them—to give them any hope.

  One group of seven would find one raft. A separate group of six would locate another raft. But in the darkness and the tumult—in the utter confusion as each man and woman went from membership in the Bounty family to struggling mortal amid thrashing rigging and surging seas—their paths to those life rafts were anything but obvious.

  • • •

  The new yards that Dan Cleveland had fashioned in Boothbay Harbor had been stored on deck, to the port side of the capstan and near the Nav Shack companionway. Several crew members, when they arrived on the steeply pitched deck in their immersion suits, used these long shafts to brace their feet. Anna Sprague and Mark Warner were sitting there, not far from the Nav Shack, as was Second Mate Matt Sanders. Claudene Christian came from the mizzen fife rail, where she had been lying back next to Josh Scornavacchi, and joined Sanders. Cleveland and Laura Groves were in front of this group, near the companionway, and then Captain Walbridge emerged from the Nav Shack and stood with his third mate and bosun. Everyone was settled in, knowing that when the order was given, they would abandon ship.

  Then Bounty rolled to starboard and the water rose. Sanders saw Walbridge hit the water and watched the captain get washed back and forth by the wave action, but Sanders was unable to move, to give aid. His feet were trapped in the yards.

  “What do I do? What do I do?” Christian pleaded with her struggling friend.

  “Claudene, you just have to go for it! You have to make your way aft and get clear of the boat!” Sanders shouted, and he watched Claudene make her way to the fife rail. A second or two later he freed his feet, and he, too, headed aft, toward the helm. Claudene was out of sight and Sanders climbed past the big wooden wheel and leaped off Bounty’s stern.

  Sprague was able to stand on the yards when the deck tilted to vertical. Without contemplation, she jumped in the water, landing in front of where the mizzenmast was in the water. There she reunited with Warner and, moments later, John Jones, and they saw a life raft canister and talked about deploying the packed raft.

  Without warning, the mizzenmast began to rise, surfacing directly under Jones, whose legs straddled the spar as the ship rolled to port and the mast hoisted him into the air.

  Doug Faunt had been one of the first on deck in his immersion suit, working his way back to the helm. As the water rose around him, he swam away from the ship, but not clear of its rigging. Twice he was shoved under. He feared being drawn under permanently if the swamped ship plunged to the depths. Now things appeared like pictures in a slide show, disconnected except for the setting, coming over what period of time—seconds, minutes, hours—he did not know. He looked up and saw the broken spanker gaff, a ragged sword poised over his head. He saw a life ring that seemed to be still attached to the boat, then a life-raft canister that he could not open. Then he saw an inflated life raft and swam to it. Low as he was in the water, he could not see the raft’s canopy. He hung on to it, though, and the raft, riding on rough waters, separated his shoulder.

  Jessica Black had come on deck shortly after Faunt. As she passed through the Nav
Shack, Svendsen had strapped on her life vest. She ended up with her feet braced against the mizzen fife rail, near Scornavacchi, and then she was in the water, grasping for things to hold on to. She came upon Scornavacchi, who was near a life-raft canister. She tried to rip the raft’s tether to deploy it, but she lost her grip and drifted away from the raft and Scornavacchi. She was aware of where one of the masts—probably the mizzen—was slashing into the water and wanted to escape it, so she swam. Then she thought, I’m clear of the ship, but where’s the life raft?

  Some of the waves were bigger than others as Black swam blindly. When she rose to the crest of one huge wave, she looked down and saw before her, as if at the bottom of a hill, a life raft. She still had her life vest, but the waist strap had detached and the vest was beside her. Sighting the raft ahead, the cook stiffened her body and surfed down the face of the wave toward the raft, thinking as she went that if she was not precise, she could overshoot—and lose—the chance for survival that the raft presented.

  Her aim was accurate, and when she reached the raft, she found Faunt.

  Joshua Scornavacchi had come on deck feeling incredibly restricted in his oversize immersion suit and feeling depleted from the work required to get into it. Just outside the Nav Shack, he encountered Cleveland and Groves, shouting orders, attempting to direct traffic. Their words were swept away in the howl of the wind. He moved to port and aft, waiting for the ship to roll to port, moving when the deck became more level. He moved the short distance to the mizzen fife rail, where he lay with his back on the deck, his feet braced against the rail.

  Scornavacchi knew that Claudene Christian had left the Nav Shack behind him, and that she followed him to the fife rail. They had boarded Bounty the same weekend in May in Philadelphia, Christian for the first time, Scornavacchi the second. During the five months since, when Scornavacchi would nap on Bounty’s deck, Christian would check on him. Now she checked, smiled, and then, crouching, waited for the moment and scurried aft, where some crew were tying all the gathered emergency supplies together in one giant bundle. The heap had over a hundred life jackets lashed with other supplies.

  Scornavacchi, who had put some gear in an empty immersion-suit bag and clipped it to his harness, watched Christian until she reached the other group. Around him crew members were in the midst of motioning others toward the stern, the life rafts. Then he looked up at the sky, the racing, silver-lined clouds, and closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, he saw the ship rolling swiftly to starboard, bringing him to a standing position on the fife rail. Unfolding before him, the ship and the sea were conducting an uncoordinated evacuation of Bounty. Some crew members slid down the deck into the water. Some were holding on to lines or rails and dangling in space. These were not individuals, just red immersion suits. He couldn’t tell which suits contained which friends.

  Scornavacchi controlled his descent, climbing down to a spot between the mizzen and main masts. Frozen in place, he saw someone already in the water, another jumping overboard. He jumped, too, and when he did, someone—a woman still on the boat, he didn’t know who—reached out and tried to grab his hand. Instantly he saw that the sea was littered with ship debris, pieces of wood, trash—a sloshing soup like, he thought, the bowl of an unflushed toilet. He reached to grab some floating debris and it was torn from his grip. In that first instant in the water, he felt himself being sucked under the ship, felt his boots being yanked from his feet inside his suit. In fact, he was being pulled bodily beneath the surface. A snarl of Bounty’s lines had wrapped around his ditch bag and was pulling him down. His survival gear was threatening to kill him.

  In his work as a white-water rafting guide, Scornavacchi had learned to escape when he found himself getting sucked under by down currents. The technique was to swim while executing a barrel roll. Holding his breath, he tried the maneuver now, but it didn’t work because he couldn’t get the bag untangled from the ropes that held it and couldn’t undo the shackle that fastened it to his harness.

  Salt water mixed with diesel fuel in Scornavacchi’s mouth. He ran out of breath, started coughing underwater, and involuntarily drew that foul mixture into his windpipe, perhaps his lungs. He felt his muscles quit working and believed he was drowning.

  Anger filled him. He had promised his mother and his eleven-year-old brother that he wouldn’t drown, and now he realized he would never see them again. Thoughts raced through his mind. If he was drowning, then everyone else from Bounty was probably dead. He couldn’t understand why they hadn’t boarded the rafts sooner. They should have gone to the rafts and paddled away.

  Then the voice came. Maybe, he thought, it was God. It said, It’s not your time yet. At that moment, the ditch bag released itself from his harness and he swam to the surface, where he saw the big mound of emergency supplies. He swam to it, clutched at it with his hands, tried to climb atop it, away from the snares of the sinking ship.

  From out of the dark, Jessica Black appeared. It seemed she was asking him what to do. He urged her to climb the pile with him. But just then the mainmast—he knew its bottom section alone weighed over six tons—slammed down on the pile, launching Scornavacchi into the air. When he fell back in the water, Black was gone.

  Alone, he tried to swim away, but got another line wrapped around his leg. He removed it, then saw the mizzenmast in the water nearby. He grabbed the spar and tried to pull himself away from the ship along it, to escape the debris, but the mast began to rise from the water as the ship rolled. In rising, it lifted him out of the water thirty feet.

  “Jump!” a male voice yelled.

  Scornavacchi didn’t want to jump but he did, landing in a clear patch of water.

  In the distance, he saw a life-raft canister, so he swam as hard as he could and reached it. As he worked to undo the canister, Johnny Jones—the Dudester—appeared and tried to yank the raft’s tether to deploy it.

  Jones and Scornavacchi worked on the raft canister but couldn’t get it open. So they pushed it toward a spot where they thought there might be other crew members. High above, weird-looking clouds raced south and east. Down in the troughs between the waves, it was quiet, a startling absence of sound after the hours on end aboard Bounty amid the cacophony of the ship and the storm. Scornavacchi asked Jones if he had seen anyone else. He hadn’t. All that was certain was that the two of them were alive.

  Then the cook reappeared and grabbed on to the canister. But just as quickly as Jessica Black had arrived, a huge wave snatched her away again.

  Now Jones told Scornavacchi that he had seen lights underwater, near where the ship was. They thought of returning to the ship to see if the lights meant other survivors, but they abandoned the idea because they could barely hold on to the canister, and they still were struggling to get it open.

  As they fought to open the canister, an inflated life raft floated toward the two men. They swam to it and found Warner and Sprague already holding on to it.

  Individually, the four each tried twice to climb into the raft. The opening was too high, and merely closing their hands in fists to hold on was close to impossible, draining all their strength.

  While they were clinging to the raft, Sprague heard, from the direction of the ship, a woman calling.

  “Help me! I’m caught,” the voice pleaded. Sprague didn’t know who it was. But the ship was far away. There was no way to get to it, Sprague thought.

  Instead, she and her crewmates around the raft thought hard about how they could climb to the safety above the rubber tubes. Someone suggested Sprague might be the lightest. If the three men could push her high enough, perhaps she could crawl into the raft’s door. It took time, but it worked. Sprague now pulled on Warner’s harness, and although his immersion suit was weighed down by seawater, he clambered into the raft. The two inside the raft hauled Scornavacchi inside, and while they were bringing Jones aboard, Scornavacchi crossed the raft and looked out the far door. There he found Sanders, Faunt, and Black clinging to the si
de. The work was slow. It took half an hour or more in all. In the end, seven were aboard this twenty-five-man raft, sprawled across the floor.

  They knew they were not yet safe. But each thought about the other nine crew members and wondered. Through the open door, they could see Bounty. They were being driven away from their ship, and they saw no one else in the water. Were they alone?

  “Do you think everybody made it?” someone in the raft asked, the question they all were thinking.

  Now Second Mate Sanders took charge: “Yep. They all made it.”

  Scornavacchi and Sprague now asked everybody to hold hands while they prayed. Then they asked if anyone else wanted to pray.

  “I don’t have faith in God,” Faunt said, “but I have faith in the coast guard.”

  Now Scornavacchi began singing a sea shanty about going home, one the crew had sung in every port, the “Mingulay Boat Song” composed in the 1930s by Sir Hugh S. Roberton. It begins, “Heel y’ho, boys, let her go, boys.”

  The sailors would sing and then pray, but the ride was less than peaceful. Suddenly, a huge wave would hit the raft and fold it like a taco, throwing the seven into a heap on one side. Nor was there the silence they had experienced in the troughs. Back atop the waves, the sea was loud, violent.

  The raft would unfold as the sailors spread themselves around and resumed casual conversations laced with jokes.

  Bang! They were folded into a taco again.

  They quickly adjusted to this new maritime routine. Fold, flatten, resume talking, as if nothing had happened.

  And every once in a while, over the raft noise, they would find hope in a sound from above: the drone of a C-130.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THE SECOND RAFT

  Third Mate Dan Cleveland was near the Nav Shack companionway when he heard John Svendsen tell Robin Walbridge that the bow had gone underwater. Cleveland could not then have imagined how he and Laura Groves would find the same haven. But they did.