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

go southerly and get away if it decided to go south or east. That became the joke, that we were hurricane chasers.”
    The logic, Bredeson said, was that “with a hurricane, we could always know where the winds were coming from. The winds around the hurricane are counterclockwise. You watch the hurricane reports and you know where the center of the hurricane is. If you’re in the south and east quadrant, winds are going to be coming out of the west, or, higher up, out of the south.”
    That predictability made Walbridge’s choice a wise decision, according to Bredeson, and the conditions were tolerable, with winds in the forty- to fifty-knot range. Bounty was designed as a collier, a ship that hauls coal, and her stout build made her capable of handling such a breeze.
    Earlier that season, Bounty had been caught in a Pacific hurricane as the ship made its way from Mexico to Costa Rica. Cleveland, then the novice, endured three days of “crappy” weather and fatigue. But he took a lesson from his master: “You try to make sure you’re going slower than the hurricane so it’s going away from you. If one is in the vicinity, we want to follow it. We actually had a very fine sail.”
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    Those two hurricanes taught the inexperienced Dan Cleveland something about his captain’s knowledge and his thoughts about seamanship. But Walbridge often took a more active role as teacher and used his ship as a classroom, just as he had on Friday morning when he asked his crew about weather predictions two hundred years before.
    Bounty was not officially a sail-training ship as it lacked the necessary coast guard certification. But in Belfast the previous August, Walbridge had told Ned Lightner, “I consider us kind of an educational ship. We’re trying to teach the public about what sailing was like two hundred years ago.
    “This [ship] was the tractor-trailer of two hundred years ago. This was the space shuttle of two hundred years ago. People don’t understand the heritage. I like to use the analogy of a manual speed transmission. If you buy a car with a manual speed transmission, [the owner’s manual won’t] tell you to push the clutch down because everybody knows that you have to push the clutch down. So picture two hundred years from now, somebody gets in that car. They’re not going to be able to drive it because nobody told them to push the clutch down.
    “That’s kind of what’s happened,” Walbridge continued. “We’re rediscovering the very basics [of square-rig sailing]. And I think this is important for our youth to understand our basics, to understand where we came from and why we got to where we did.”
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    Walbridge was genetically wired as an educator, not a sailor. Born Robert Walbridge in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, on October 25, 1949, he came into the world as the second child of two teachers. At the time, his father was a teacher in Lyndonville, Vermont. But soon after Robert arrived, Howard Walbridge was hired to work for the state in its vocational rehabilitation office in Montpelier, the state capital.
    The Walbridges moved into a hundred-year-old farmhouse on the north edge of town, on a hillside facing east, bathed by the first sunlight of the morning. There were thirty-five acres and a three-hundred-foot-long driveway.
    Anna Walbridge, Robert’s mother, took a job teaching the first four grades in a two-room schoolhouse on the Winooski River in Middlesex, Vermont, a few miles west and downstream from Montpelier.
    But the teaching roots were much deeper than this. Robert had grandparents on both sides of the family who were teachers, and one great-grandfather was a state superintendent of schools.
    Learning was an enjoyable and constant part of life in the Walbridge family. Walbridge could remember the day when he was in the sixth grade and the family made a Thanksgiving trip to Quincy, Massachusetts, to visit Anna’s parents, the Palmers.
    The Walbridges had