The League

Mystery on the Bounty

by David Ryan · November 2, 2012

The tall ship began to die early Monday morning in the hurricane-ravaged waters off the North Carolina coast. One of the HMS Bounty’s generators failed. Water flooded everywhere. The 180-foot-long, three-masted tall ship was losing power and propulsion.

By about 3 a.m., the Bounty’s once-optimistic Facebook page, which on Sunday had posted “So far so good!” in its daily updates, had issued a new message for its followers: “Your Prayers are needed.”

Ninety minutes later, the Bounty finally lost its battle with 40 mph winds and 18-foot seas. Its captain ordered all hands to abandon the sinking ship, a shocking demise for a celebrity vessel built for the 1962 film “Mutiny on the Bounty.”

The ship, which had been trying to make its way around Hurricane Sandy, carried a crew of 16. When the rescue operation ended about 10 a.m. Monday, 14 of the crew members had been saved by Coast Guard helicopters. Two people, Capt. Robin Walbridge, 63, and Claudene Christian, 42, were missing. Christian’s body was recovered Monday night, but Walbridge remains unaccounted for.

The latest word is that the search for Captain Walbridge has been suspended and that the Coast Guard will be conducting a formal inquiry into the circumstances of the sinking.

It’s too early for kibitzing, but I want to note a couple of things:

1) Moving a boat from the Atlantic Seaboard to the South is always a bit of a crap-shoot with regard to the weather. Head out too early and it’s still tropical storm season. Head out too late and your vunerable to winter gales (these unnamed storms are often as bad or worse than a tropical storm). Head out in “the window”, which is to say late October to mid-November and you could get either; a late tropical storm, and early winter gale, or both. In 2009 when we took our 38′ sloop INTEMPERANCE south we left on October 28 on a narrow forecast of reasonable weather, only to have the forecast explode in our face once we got offshore. 200 miles out we had winds into the upper 40kts range and seas 15-25 feet; with winds of 50-70 kts between us and home. The prudent choice was to press on to Bermuda, which lay another 400 miles ahead. It was awful. Which brings us to:

2) Whatever the motivations and wisdom of having Bounty offshore during Sandy, the conditions she encountered shouldn’t have put her down. Any boat that ventures offshore, whether a 20′ Flicka, a Catalina 38 like INTEMERANCE, a Tiki 38 like MON TIKI, or the 180′ Bounty has to be able to stand a gale or worse. A ship like the Bounty should thrive in 40 kts of wind, galloping along at 10 knots or better, her crew on deck admiring what a fine ship she is, or comfortably hunkered below, sipping coffee and playing cards.

3) The early word is that her engine and generator failed and she could not pump herself out and ultimately foundered. This one is scary/sickening to contemplate. A traditionally build boat like Bounty will take on water, even just sitting at the dock; at sea, with her planking working under the stress of wind, waves, and sail, that much more water comes aboard. This makes her pumps a vital part of her survival system (think of the crew of Jack Aurbrey’s SURPRISE laboring at the pumps when she’s been heavily damaged in combat). Even if Bounty had a manual system, her shorthanded crew of 16 would have a hard time keeping up, especially as the hours wore on. The loss of pumps on a ship like Bounty is a death blow.

My heart goes out to the family and friends of Walbridge and Christian. I hope the Coast Guard inquiry reveals only prudence and bravery.

David Ryan

David Ryan is a boat builder and USCG licensed master captain. He is the owner of Sailing Montauk and skipper of Montauk''s charter sailing catamaran MON TIKI You can follow him on Twitter @CaptDavidRyan

North says:

November 2, 2012 at 10:12 am

Your #3 answers your #2. Remember, Bounty was an elderly lady built in the 60’s. Even with excellent maintenance any ship (especially a traditional wooden one like Bounty) would be more than a little brittle after fifty years.

My Mum reports that there were black flags in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Bounty’s birth port. She was built to the original specs in the 1960s by shipwrights who were the last generation of traditional wooden ship builders of that style. Those men were elderly even when they built Bounty and they’ve long since shuffled off this mortal coil. Bounty may well have been irreplaceable*.

I feel for the lost crew and actually feel a little cross with myself over how sad I am over the ship herself as if we lost three people at sea instead of two. It’s probably the macabre romantic in me but I suspect that Captain Walbridge’s final thoughts in that ocean as he passed into the great beyond were “of course, how appropriate”.

*Which is not to knock modern wooden ship building, it’s faster, safer and stronger but still the old ways have allure.Report
- David Ryan in reply to North says:
  
  November 2, 2012 at 10:28 am
  
  When Phil Bolger was commission to draw a replica of Rose (which went on to play SURPRISE in Master and Commander) he refused to draw her to the original specs because in his estimation they were unsafe. From the Bolger Yahoo group circa 2000:
  
  Phil did “Rose” from lines which were archived as Thomas Gillmer did “The Pride of Baltimore”. Per request, Gillmer drew Baltimore as close to the original as possible, which proved to be a colossal error. Because of the inadequate stability of the original and the clone hull, the boat capsized and sank a few years ago taking most of its crew to the bottom. Now there’s a new Pride of Baltimore not designed by Gillmer. The hull was designed to modern hydrostatics for safety, but the rest of the boat looks a lot like the original.
  
  Phil was a keen student of history, but a clear-eyed one too. About Herrreshoff’s beloved 12 1/2 he wrote:
  
  People used to be more casual about boats that could be dangerous when mishandled than we’re expected to be now. They treated foundering potential about the same way we do the consequences of 40-knot speed and meatchopper propellors.
  
  That in turn reminds me of an Auden quote I saw recently:
  
  “The old pre-industrial community and culture are gone and cannot be brought back. Nor is it desirable that they should be. They were too unjust, too squalid, and too custom-bound. Virtues which were once nursed unconsciously by the forces of nature must now be recovered and fostered by a deliberate effort of the will and the intelligence. In the future, societies will not grow of themselves. They will be either made consciously or decay.
  
  Report
  - North in reply to David Ryan says:
    
    November 2, 2012 at 10:41 am
    
    I agree with you entirely, thus my aside. Modern ship building is in every way superior to the industry that came before and I would never assert otherwise.
    
    And yet… and yet… I heard and old song down on fisherman’s wharf, can I sing it just one time…
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y5hZ5XPG3cReport
    - David Ryan in reply to North says:
      
      November 2, 2012 at 11:15 am
      
      The thing that makes Phil Bolger so interesting as designer and philosopher is that his work drew generously from the past, and he would never dismiss the idea that part of boat design is romance or whimsy. Quoting the last paragraph of the introduction to Boat with an Open Mind:
      
      “History is a deep mine of such unexpected options in boat design, of beautify of which is that the requirement is hardly ever so sharply defined that the designer has to master a critical optimum. Even in the obvious matters of speed and weatherliness, an inferior options isn’t usually bad enough to prelude use of an out-of-the-way idea offering some convenience, or simply amusement. The category of Entertainer includes boat designers along with classical musicians and strippers.”
      
      Report
      - North in reply to David Ryan says:
        
        November 2, 2012 at 11:45 am
        
        I laughed out loud at that last quoted sentence.Report
- George Turner in reply to North says:
  
  November 2, 2012 at 7:35 pm
  
  I think large wooden shipbuilding might at some point have a renaissance (assuming white oak and other good woods don’t go all wacky) due to cheap, accurate, CNC milling, as long as woodbending also improves (perhaps using high-pressure, high-temperature ammonia which temporarily plasticizes cellulose).
  
  A few decades ago I bought a huge book of line drawings of the Bounty, and have a plank-and-frame model of her under semi-perpetual construction.
  
  It’s a shame this incarnation was lost, along with two souls, but perhaps one lesson is that maybe such replicas should try to combine the old with more of the new, perhaps akin to something Disney would build as a wooden facade over a modern hull (ie. composite hull planked on both sides).
  
  I think perhaps there’s a final mission for this Bounty, too. Since they have the site of the wreck on GPS, it shouldn’t be at all hard to find it and watch the wreck change over time, recording the stages in the disintegration of a period wooden ship. Does anyone here know the water depth where she sank?Report
Mike Schilling says:

November 2, 2012 at 11:51 am

Claudene Christian

Any relation?Report
- Glyph in reply to Mike Schilling says:
  
  November 2, 2012 at 11:53 am
  
  My understanding is yes:
  
  http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/10/former-usc-song-girl-killed-in-sandy-shared-love-of-sailing-on-social-media-.htmlReport