McIntosh turned the C-130 straight into Sandy's eye wall. Seventy-mile-an-hour winds rattled the crew, tethered to the aircraft with safety harnesses?the only thing preventing them from being flung around the cabin like pinballs. "Everybody in the back was puking," McIntosh says. But they were prepared to drop a pump, life rafts, anything that might buy the 16 sailors onboard the Bounty more time. Below, 20- and 30-foot waves collided from all directions. Visibility was less than a half-mile. McIntosh, 33, had flown nine years as a Navy pilot and two more in the Coast Guard. But he'd never seen conditions as bad as this.
As the plane approached the Bounty's coordinates McIntosh descended to 1000 feet and then 500, the lowest he was willing to go knowing that the masts reached more than 100 feet into the air. Finally he saw a single beam of light rising from the vessel's deck. It looked eerie, he says, "just like a big pirate ship."
Five days earlier, on Wednesday, Oct. 24, the Bounty sat safely at port in New London, Conn. The vessel had been built for the 1962 Marlon Brando film Mutiny on the Bounty, based on the true-life saga of 18th-century British captain William Bligh and his mutinous mate, Fletcher Christian. To make room for 70-mm movie cameras, the replica was 30 percent larger than the original?180 feet from bow to stern. The Coast Guard considered it an "attraction" vessel and permitted tourists onboard only at dock. The ship was not authorized to take paying customers to sea, though volunteers and unseasoned hires often sailed as crew. One of the newer members was Claudene Christian, 42, who claimed to be Fletcher Christian's great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter. "I LOVE MY SHIP," she'd tweeted in June along with a picture of herself high in the Bounty's rigging. Fellow greenhorn Chris Barksdale, 56, a handyman from rural Virginia, had boarded the ship in September as the engineer.
On Thursday, Capt. Robin Walbridge, 63, gathered his crew on deck. Federal meteorologists and local news stations were detailing the approach of a "Frankenstorm," a sprawling, slow-moving hurricane in the Bahamas on an uncertain collision course with the ?Eastern Seaboard. The plan was to skirt the storm as it headed north, Walbridge told his crew, and get a push to St. Petersburg, Fla., from the wind at its back. Anyone who wanted to stay ashore was welcome to do so, he said. He wouldn't think less of them. Nobody took him up on his offer.
In the 72 hours that followed, the captain's hubris would be roundly criticized by many mariners. "They left New London . . . on Thursday . . . That they'd choose to take this risk is ?criminal," one Maine skipper wrote at Wooden? Boat.com. The Bounty's public Facebook page was updated with a message from the captain. "Rest assured that the Bounty is safe and in very capable hands. Bounty's current voyage is a calculated decision . . . NOT AT ALL . . . irresponsible or with a lack of foresight as some have suggested. The fact of the matter is . . . A SHIP IS SAFER AT SEA THAN IN PORT!" The post was accompanied by a 2-year-old photo of the Bounty looking as though it were about to be swallowed whole by towering seas.
To Chris Barksdale, Walbridge was a soft-spoken yet strong ?leader. He'd captained the ?Bounty for 17 years. Before that he was the ship's engineer. Barksdale quickly noticed that the captain seemed to enjoy mentoring the crew, and that he had a gentle way of letting people know just how he wanted things done, like his habit? of saying, "If I were you, I'd . . ." before going on to give what was essentially an order. Soon after Barksdale joined the crew, Walbridge promoted Christian from volunteer to deckhand. It was her birthday, and her joy at the accomplishment was palpable.
By Friday, when the ship hit rough weather 100 miles off the Maryland coast, the Bounty was storm-ready. Rigging was lashed to the deck, supplies secured, and mainsails reefed in. The ship had two 375-hp John Deere diesel engines and three bilge pumps, two electric ones and a hydraulic spare. Barksdale's job was to keep them running smoothly. On Saturday, the Bounty was heeled over so hard he had to walk at an angle to keep upright. On Sunday morning, when the eye of the storm reached the border between the Carolinas, the ship was taking on water. At first Barksdale wrote it off as the nature of the beast?wooden boats leak. But then he noticed the seepage above the ship's waterline, at the point where the side of the boat met the floor of the main deck. As the day wore on the bilge pumps kept getting clogged, the result, Barksdale guessed, of water washing detritus from recent onboard construction into them. Early in the afternoon the captain himself came down, shut off the pumps, and cleaned out the gunk. "There was a very, very short amount of time when we didn't have the bilges running," Barksdale says. "I haven't been able to figure out exactly why we were taking on more water than we were pumping out." By late afternoon the ship was heeled over so much that Barksdale guessed the part of the ?vessel where the seepage was greatest was probably submerged in the ocean. "Because of the way the ship was rolling, all the water that was in the engine room, in the bilge, would roll up to the side and come back down." The engines quit first, then a generator. It was after nightfall when the crew lost the second generator. "It just got flooded out," Barksdale says. As Sunday night turned to Monday morning there was little left to do but watch the water rise.
Flying overhead in the C-130, McIntosh stayed in constant contact with the ship. The water was now rising 2 feet an hour. "They told us it was seeping in through the wooden beams," McIntosh says. "It wasn't coming over the top; it was coming through the sides." The Bounty's officers thought they could hold out until 8 am, when Coast Guard helicopters could deliver the sailors to safety in daylight.
Down in the ship, the crew was getting into bright red neoprene immersion suits. Barksdale had never put one on before. "Nobody was panicking," he says. "The captain was going back and forth, making sure everybody was okay." The ship was listing to starboard, so the crew was gathered on the port side, feet wedged up against the main deck or the rigging. One crew member had injured his back, and Christian had taken charge of finding a safe place for him to lie down. "She was acting like a mother hen," Barksdale says. The engineer just waited. Someone handed him an orange and he ate it. Like his shipmates, he had barely slept in 48 hours. He was still standing on deck at about 4:30 am when the Bounty heeled hard to starboard. "If it wasn't 90 degrees, it was close," he says. "We all went into the ocean."
One thousand feet above, the Herc was enveloped in clouds. Every transmission from the ship had sounded calm, professional, in control. Then, at 4:45, an urgent voice came over the radio. "We're abandoning ship. We're abandoning ship!" McIntosh heard.
"Roger that. What are your plans for life rafts?" the pilot radioed back. He waited, but there was no further word from the ship.
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