UPDATED 8:10 a.m. Searchers have found no sign yet of missing Capt. Robin Walbridge, the last of the 16 people who were aboard HMS Bounty before it went down Monday in hurricane Sandy off the eastern U.S. coast.
"I haven't received any information as of yet," Petty Officer 3rd Class David Weydert, spokesman for Fifth Coast Guard District in Portsmouth, Va., said early Tuesday morning when asked if searchers had found a life-jacket or anything belonging to the missing man.
"Hopefully he's still wearing his life-jacket."
The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Elm and a HC-144 Ocean Sentry medium range aircraft scoured the waters by air and by sea Monday night and into Tuesday morning for Walbridge.
"At first light, it (the plane) is going to be returning to base and a HC-130 aircraft, which is a four-engine high-range aircraft, is going to take over the search," Weydert said.
He didn't yet know the size of the search area, but said the cutter crew and plane flying overhead would've been following a search pattern that got larger and larger as time passed.
One crew member of the tall ship HMS Bounty died in a North Carolina hospital Monday night and while the fate of the vessel’s missing captain is still in doubt, 14 others were alive and safe after a dramatic ocean rescue during hurricane Sandy.
A helicopter crew searching the storm-lashed waters off North Carolina located crew member Claudene Christian and whisked her to hospital but she died at about 9:30 p.m. Atlantic time, said spokesman Patrick Detwiler of Albemarle Hospital in Elizabeth City, N.C.
“She was unresponsive when we located her," Petty Officer 1st Class Brandyn Hill of the U.S. Coast Guard command centre in Portsmouth, Va., said in an interview at about 7:15 p.m.
Coast guard helicopters and an HC-130 Hercules searched the roiling seas throughout the day for Christian and Bounty captain Walbridge, who lives in St. Petersburg, Fla.
“At this time, we’re continuing our search efforts to try and locate him,” Hill said.
He said later Monday evening that the air search had been called off for the night due to poor visibility but would resume today. The coast guard cutter Elm had arrived and was to search for Walbridge throughout the night.
The Bounty’s crew of 16 had to abandon ship in the pre-dawn darkness Monday morning after the historic replica vessel began taking on water in extremely rough seas.
Monday evening, Hill said the Bounty was submerged but at least one of its masts was visible.
Christian, 42, was a former Miss Teen Alaska whose parents now live in Oklahoma. Her Twitter page says she joined the Bounty crew in May.
Walbridge, captain of the Bounty for more than 20 years, turned 63 last Thursday, the day the ship left New London, Conn., for its winter port in St. Petersburg.
Walbridge’s wife, Claudia McCann, told CBC News her husband was trying to skirt the hurricane.
Christian’s mother, also named Claudene Christian, of Vian, Okla., told CBC News her daughter contacted her before heading out on the voyage.
“She says, ‘We’re heading out and I just wanted to tell you and Dad that I love you.’ And I said, ‘What are you saying that for?’ And she said, ‘Just in case something happens.’ ” The younger Claudene Christian posted a photograph of herself on the deck of HMS Bounty on her Facebook site. She is a descendant of Fletcher Christian, the master’s mate who seized control of the original Bounty from Capt. William Bligh in 1789.
“I’m sure my ancestor would be proud,” Christian wrote on Facebook. “However, this time, there will be no Mutiny on the Bounty . . . at least not at the hands of me, a new generation of Christian family sailors.”
She was in Lunenburg this summer when HMS Bounty visited, and she met some of the men who built the vessel in 1960 at the Smith & Rhuland shipyard in Lunenburg.
The ordeal for the crew of the 54-metre, three-masted Bounty began Sunday night.
The ship contacted its New York owner, HMS Bounty Organization LLC, via satellite phone at 8:30 p.m. Sunday to say it was “trying to steer clear” of hurricane Sandy as it approached, Tracie Simonin, director of the Bounty organization, said in a telephone interview from New York on Monday morning.
But the Bounty started to take on water, Simonin said.
“One of our pumps was not working properly,” she said. “We just could not dewater it fast enough — water, normal sewage water that a boat of this entity takes on — and once the pumps stopped working, the generator stopped working. They just could not keep up.”
Simonin contacted the coast guard, and the rescue service in Portsmouth later received a distress signal from the Bounty. Its emergency beacon indicated its location, about 145 kilometres southeast of Hatteras, N.C., and about 250 kilometres west of the eye of the hurricane.
An HC-130 Hercules aircraft was dispatched to the scene to establish communications with the Bounty crew, Petty Officer 3rd Class David Weydert of the coast guard said Monday morning.
The Bounty was originally thought to be carrying 17 people, but the coast guard later said the manifest showed 16 aboard.
At about 5:30 or 6 a.m. Monday, “the crew told the coast guard that they were going to have to abandon the ship,” Weydert said.
“They all donned cold-water survival suits, life-jackets and boarded two 25-man lifeboats before launching away from the Bounty.”
The vessel and the canopied life-rafts were being tossed about in 5.5-metre waves and hit by winds of more than 60 kilometres an hour, he said. Visibility was about 1.5 kilometres, he added.
In the life-rafts, the Bounty crew had radios and some emergency communications equipment, Weydert said.
The first of two MH-60 Jayhawk helicopters from Coast Guard Air Station Elizabeth City arrived on the scene at about 7:30 a.m. Atlantic time. One lifeboat carried seven crew members and the other, about 1.5 kilometres away, carried six. One person floated alone in the water.
Survivors told coast guard officials that three of the crew were thrown overboard while they were getting into the liferafts. One man was able to swim to a life-raft but two others were pulled away.
Seconds after pilot Steve Bonn stabilized the Jayhawk helicopter, rescue swimmer Daniel Todd leapt into the raging ocean. He swam to the raft of six people, grabbed onto it and spoke to put all at ease.
“Hey, I’m Dan. How’s it going?” Todd said, according to the Virginian- Pilot newspaper.
Battling nine-metre waves, Todd began taking one person at a time from the life-raft to the rescue basket that flight mechanic Neil Moulder operated from above in the hovering helicopter.
“It was like swimming in a washing machine,” Todd, who was in the water 45 minutes, told the Virginian-Pilot. “Those were the biggest-sized waves I’ve ever been in and the most people I’ve hauled into the helo.”
With a cabin full of nine survivors, the helicopter headed home.
Another Jayhawk picked up the remaining four from a life-raft and the person in the water.
The 14 were flown to Elizabeth City, where paramedics checked them out.
Listed as rescued are: Daniel Cleveland, 25, John Svendsen, 41, Matthew Sanders, 37, Adam Prokosh, 27, Douglas Faunt, 66, John Jones, 29, Drew Salapatek, 29, Joshua Scornavacchi, 25, Anna Sprague, 20, Mark Warner, 33, Christopher Barksdale, 56, Laura Groves, 28, Jessica Hewitt, 25, and Jessica Black, 34.
A third helicopter and a Hercules began to search for Christian and Walbridge. One of the choppers involved in the earlier rescue also returned to the scene, Hill said.
Simonin said the crew members are from all over the U.S. and are trained, experienced and paid sailors. Most of them were in Nova Scotia when the ship visited during this summer’s tall ships festival, she added.
Walbridge has been with the Bounty for more than two decades and “knows that ship inside and out, which is why we have the utmost confidence in him during this time,” Simonin said.
Walbridge and the crew were aware of the weather and received updates from the National Weather Service every four hours, Simonin said. The administrator of an online HMS Bounty forum posted Friday that the ship was heading to Florida after spending some time in Connecticut with members of the U.S. navy on board.
“While we were there this week, we took out the crew of the USS Mississippi for a sailing lesson,” the post says. “They were part of our crew climbing the rigging and furling sails. It was great! Thank you for joining us.”
The Bounty was planning to avoid the storm by sailing east before heading south, says a Facebook post from Thursday. By Saturday, the ship reported it was 400 kilometres east of Chesapeake Bay, and a post said the captain expected to encounter bad weather that evening.
At 9:30 a.m. Monday, the forum administrator posted: “This is a sad day. The storm hit the ship pretty bad. One of the generators failed and the ship was taking on more water than it wanted. Distress call was sent out.”
The post went on to say: “To our wonderful Captain Robin: You did a great job and the very best that you could. Thank you for your efforts and keeping the crew safe. God bless you, sir.”
With files from Eva Hoare, Beverley Ware and Ian Fairclough, staff reporters
HMS BOUNTY
- Square-rigged, three-masted ship
- 55 metres
1960: built by Smith and Rhuland of Lunenburg
1960: launched from Lunenburg
1962: appears in 1962 Marlon Brando film Mutiny on the Bounty
1986: media mogul Ted Turner buys the ship
1993: Turner donates it to the Fall River Chamber of Commerce in Fall River, Mass.
2001: sold to Long Island businessman Robert Hansen
2001: ship takes on water, begins to sink at its berth in Fall River, Mass.
2001: Long Island-based HMS Bounty Organization buys the ship to use it for educational programs
2006: appears in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
2006-07: ship undergoes extensive renovations
2010: ship reportedly listed for sale for more than US$4 million
Click
here for more information on HMS Bounty and the original HMAV Bounty, commissioned in 1787.
Orca whale sighting off Digby (Tania Taylor-Campbell)
The killer whale is not a species common in east coast waters. (Tania Taylor-Campbell)