Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy Read Online Free PDF

2012.
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    On that day, August 9, Bounty had pulled up to the municipal dock in the hillside community of Belfast, Maine, with preparations under way to welcome visitors. The past week or so had seen dense fog on Penobscot Bay. In Belfast, one of the northernmost ports on the bay, it was a grim morning, the tips of Bounty ’s three masts blurred by the sagging belly of the low, gray overcast. Bounty , big and dark with a blue band on her topsides, dominated the waterfront, where normally the largest visiting vessels were small cruise ships.
    Ned Lightner, host of a local public-access television program, knew that Bounty was coming. Her visit was the subject of conversation in the local government. The city harbormaster, Kathy Pickering, had lobbied for the visit. Lightner, whose program, Somewhere in Waldo County , would often tackle such subjects as the purchase of a new fire truck, was delighted to have a more exotic topic. He thought some of his homebound listeners might appreciate a video tour. He contacted Walbridge, who agreed to allow filming.
    Lightner arrived around seven thirty that morning. Much of the Bounty crew was still asleep, and at first Lightner didn’t know that the captain was the older fellow up on deck, holding a cup of coffee.
    Walbridge, soft-spoken as always, was perfectly affable when he greeted Lightner. They began talking, and the camera rolled with a mast and webs of rigging as a backdrop.
    About eleven minutes into the interview, Lightner asked, “Have you ever run into some pretty nasty weather while at sea?”
    “Actually, I’m going to answer that with a no,” Walbridge replied in his somewhat gravelly voice. “We say there’s no such thing as bad weather. There’s just different kinds of weather.”
    Lightner, laughing, changed his question. “Have you run into stormy seas?”
    “We chase hurricanes.” Walbridge grinned. “You try and get up as close to the eye of it as you can and you stay down in the southeast quadrant, and when it stops, you stop. You don’t want to get in front of it. You stay behind it. But you also get a good ride out of a hurricane.”
    Lightner speculated that Walbridge must have sailed in some pretty towering waves.
    “The biggest waves that I personally have ever been in have been about seventy feet. That’s a pretty good sea.” Walbridge said that particular ride in the wake of a hurricane was no more uncomfortable than “you and I standing right here.”
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    Dan Cleveland understood that his captain’s comments were not bravado because in his first year aboard Bounty , he had twice seen how Walbridge dealt with hurricanes. And by observation, Cleveland had learned.
    Before he boarded Bounty in 2008 as a deckhand, Cleveland had no nautical experience. That year, the ship took a Pacific tour. On the way back to the Atlantic Ocean, Bounty transited the Panama Canal and entered the Gulf of Mexico, where a Category 1 hurricane was stalled between the Yucatán Peninsula and Cuba, blocking Bounty ’s progress to the north.
    Walbridge ordered Bounty ’s crew to heave to, a maneuver in which the ship faces into the wind, trimming its sails to back-wind them while steering in the opposite direction. Heaving to parks a vessel, which then will drift slowly with the wind while riding at a relatively comfortable attitude.
    The storm was moving north at four knots. The ship made a knot or two. Cleveland saw that the point was to avoid overtaking the storm.
    Another crew member for that voyage, Cliff Bredeson, explained that the problem was that while Bounty needed to pass through the gap between the peninsula and Cuba, the hurricane was in the way. Under Walbridge’s direction, Bredeson said, the crew “poked our nose up into the hurricane as far as we were comfortable so as the hurricane moved north, we could be as close getting to the gap as we could. We were in the southeast quadrant. If things got bad, we could