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Outside Magazine with the story on The HMS Bounty replica that sank during hurricane Sandy. This is long, so instead of learning about fools in DC, we concentrate on other fools. When foolish on the water, you get to pay for it quickly. When foolish in DC, it takes longer to create a disaster
On the night of Sunday, October 28, 2012, Coast Guard lieutenant Wes McIntosh and the crew of his C-130 transport plane were holed up in a hotel room at North Carolina’s Raleigh-DurhamAirport. They’d been relocated there the day before, after winds from Hurricane Sandy had forced runway closings at their base in ElizabethCity. The seven-man flight crew congregated around the TV, flipping between Sunday Night Football and the Weather Channel.
It was nine o’clock, and the Denver Broncos had just taken the lead over the New Orleans Saints when McIntosh’s phone rang: the Coast Guard’s North Carolina Sector Field Office—the regional command center in Wilmington—had received a distress email from Tracie Simonin, director of the HMS Bounty Organization. The 180-foot, three-masted ship, a replica of the famous 18th-century vessel, had lost power and was taking on water somewhere near Hatteras Canyon, a treacherous section of the Atlantic roughly 90 miles southeast of the Outer Banks.
No one knew the ship’s exact position or what kind of shape it—or its 16-member crew—was in. Since the captain’s initial email to Simonin at 8:45, the ship’s onboard electronics had failed, and communication was possible only by hand radio, the range of which is limited to line of sight. Storm conditions had intensified beyond the capabilities of the Coast Guard’s cutters and even its Jayhawk helicopters, so the Sector Field Office issued an urgent marine bulletin requesting Samaritan assistance from the handful of vessels still in the region. Only the Torm Rosetta, a 30,000-ton Danish oil tanker, was in hailing range. But it reported back that conditions were too dangerous to respond.
As far as hurricanes go, Sandy was not particularly powerful—on the weekend of October 28, it was fluctuating between hurricane and tropical-storm status—but it made up for that in size and complexity. Sandy would ultimately cover 1.8 million square miles and take on characteristics of what meteorologists call a hybrid storm: in this case, part hurricane, part nor’easter. The Bounty’s last known position—about 100 miles off Cape Fear around noon—put the vessel right in the worst of it, with winds at 60 knots and pelting rain severe enough to render even a large wooden ship invisible on radar. Sending the C-130 was risky, but Coast Guard officials hoped McIntosh could get close enough to establish communication and assess the situation. Once weather conditions allowed, rescue choppers could fly out from ElizabethCity if need be.
The plane took off from Raleigh around 11 p.m. Before long its anti-icing system failed, forcing McIntosh to fly below 7,000 feet. Then the weather radar malfunctioned. McIntosh and his co-pilot, Mike Myers, were now flying using visual flight rules in zero-visibility conditions. Wearing night-vision goggles to help them pick through layers of clouds, they descended to 1,000 feet. Then to 500 feet—right into the brunt of the storm.
By now it was just after midnight. While McIntosh struggled to steer, Myers searched for the Bounty. “I kept asking Mike, ‘What do you see? What do you see?’” McIntosh recalls. Finally, Myers shot back, “I see a giant pirate ship in the middle of a hurricane.”
The plane initiated a sharp circle so the flight crew could get a better look. The Bounty was listing at a 45-degree angle, its starboard side all but submerged. Waves the size of two-story houses crashed over the hull. …
…As the drama of the Bounty’s final hours unfolded on CNN and the Weather Channel, seamen and landlubbers alike were asking the same question: what was a square-rigged ship doing in the middle of a hurricane—a storm that had been forecast for days? Sailors pointed fingers at the captain, Robin Walbridge, insisting that his poor judgment and bravado were to blame. It’s true that Walbridge had tempted fate before. In each instance, some combination of skill and luck had returned the ship home safely.
But the full answer to why the Bounty sank was much more complex than a captain’s rash decision. It was a story decades in the making, a veritable opera of near misses and fantastic schemes involving a dogged captain, a fiercely loyal crew, and an owner who was looking to sell. And in the ship’s last act, an unlikely new character had emerged: a young woman with Down syndrome who, perhaps inconceivably, held the key to the Bounty’s future. …
… Keeping a tall ship up to snuff takes a very deep pocketbook, for everything from repairing wooden hulls and canvas sails to maintaining the generators, engines, and navigation systems hidden inside the ships’ historical exteriors. Hansen declined requests for interviews, but one thing is certain: the Bounty proved burdensome from the start. Before he bought it, Coast Guard inspectors estimated it was taking on 20 to 40 gallons of water a minute. Its brokers say it was more like 30,000 gallons an hour—enough to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool every day. When the bilge pumps failed in September 2001, it took the entire Fall River Fire Department, under the supervision of the Coast Guard, to save the ship. Hansen towed it to Boothbay Harbor, Maine, where it underwent the first of three overhauls, none of them substantial enough to receive Coast Guard classification as a passenger vessel.
And so, as Daniel Parrott, a captain and the author of the 2004 book Tall Ships Down, explained to me, the Bounty operated on the fringe of the tall-ship world, a kind of counter-culture in which vessels try to eke out a profit as what the Coast Guard classifies as moored attractions vessels, which in most cases are prohibited from carrying passengers unless they enlist as crew. The Bounty starred as a merchant ship in two Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Its website advertised sail-training and summer-camp programs, though it was classified to do neither. And according to one former crew member, it sometimes did take on volunteer passengers, including youth groups and corporate teams.
But mostly, Walbridge and his crew made do with what little income the ship fetched through $10-a-head tours, stopping in about 25 ports in the Great Lakes and along the Eastern seaboard each summer—with occasional trips to the West Coast and Europe—then wintering in Florida, Texas, or Puerto Rico. Sometimes, one of the crew told me, they had to use cash from the day’s till to buy groceries. Another crew member, Doug Faunt, said that it was not uncommon for the Bounty to have to wait to dock until more money had been freed up on the ship’s credit card. …