Free Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy by Michael J. Tougias, Douglas A. Campbell

working in catering, she had applied her kitchen skills for the most recent two years in the galleys of motor yachts sailing out of Florida. The smallest of these multimillion-dollar vessels was 75 feet long, the largest 150 feet. These vessels spent much of the time steaming to the Bahamas and the islands of the Caribbean.
    Black was looking for a job and had posted her résumé in a shop in Ft. Lauderdale. She got a call from John Svendsen on October 16, eight days before she arrived on board. On the motor yachts, she had been required to do a bit of deckhand work. On Bounty , she stood watch over two electric ranges and a microwave in the galley near the bow of the boat. Never was she required to stand with a regular watch. As soon as she was on Bounty ’s deck, though, she felt compelled to be a loyal crew member. When, the afternoon after she arrived, Robin Walbridge gave everyone permission to leave in the face of Hurricane Sandy, Black stayed. In part, she didn’t want to leave the boat without a cook. As it turned out, whether Bounty had a cook would be the least of its problems.

CHAPTER NINE
KEEPING BOUNTY AFLOAT
    The seas were eight to twelve feet and the wind was touching twenty-five knots, the force needed to propel a bulky ship such as Bounty , when the B-Watch came on deck at midnight as the day became Saturday, October 27. The sailing was precisely what the members of the watch had hoped for. All that was needed was to steer the course that Robin Walbridge had dictated, about 165 degrees true—dead south on the compass mounted on the binnacle before the helm. They could man that helm. They could steer that course.
    Indeed, B-Watch had, among the three assigned watch teams, the most wide-ranging experience. Watch Captain Matt Sanders was a 2001 graduate of Maine Maritime Academy. After he got his degree, he served in the tug-and-barge industry, using his training to advance. Then he took positions on schooners in the Maine windjammer fleet as a deckhand. He had joined Bounty in San Juan, about the time Scornavacchi did but with vastly greater knowledge of ships and sailing. He found Bounty to be run “professionally.” Everyone knew his job. Sanders’s job was navigator. He prepared the voyage plan for each trip, kept the charts updated, and, of course, ran the B-Watch.
    Captain Robin Walbridge was, Sanders thought, someone he could learn from, even after an academy education and more than a decade at sea.
    Sanders, thirty-three, from West Palm Beach, Florida, was joined on watch by another Maine Maritime graduate, Jessica Hewitt, twenty-five, from Harwich, a town on Cape Cod. Sanders was eleven years past college when Bounty left New London, Hewitt three years. During college, she had worked on the Maine schooner Margaret Todd and the next summer on the schooner Bowdoin as a trainee. After graduation, she worked as third mate on the schooner Harvey Gamage . She got her hundred-ton coast guard license and moved up to second mate.
    Prior to joining Bounty , Hewitt was the captain of a ferry running out of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, taking luggage and supplies between that port and Star Island in the Isles of Shoals archipelago, six miles offshore along the Maine–New Hampshire border. The island served as a summer retreat, and she drove the ferry as long as the season lasted, then joined Bounty in early September.
    Aboard Bounty , Hewitt—although she held an AB rating—was a deckhand. The AB on her watch was Adam Prokosh. He had served on several tall ships, including the Lady Washington , the Sultana , the Amistad , the Spirit of Massachusetts, and the Harvey Gamage , all in the past five years, many of them inspected vessels with higher ratings than that of Bounty .
    Prokosh, who talked in machine-gun bursts, had heard in the tall-ship community that Bounty was a “death trap.” When he inspected Bounty , he concluded that rumor was out-of-date. He decided to be part of the new Bounty , where he