HMS Bounty

[shane_mayhem]

Just saw the news that the crew of the HMS Bounty has abandoned ship off the coast of North Carolina. All crew are accounted for and are in survival suits in a lifeboat. The Coast Guard is en route and I hope they get to them soon

Comments

[shane_mayhem]

The thing to remember is that for a lot of wooden sailing ships, it's safer at sea in a storm than in port. Neither is safe. But in port, she definitely would have been smashed up. Of course, it's always a risk of life. But you can't know what the captain knew, what information he was going on, and what exactly led up to the emergency. Most reports state that the generator went out and the ship lost power, including the pumps of course. Did the generator go out due to the storm, or was there another factor? In any case, the crew did everything right in the emergency. With the water well over Bounty's cap and taff rail, they waited to abandon, as we are all taught, "when the ship abandons you." I obviously wasn't there and I'm not a captain by any means, but it's making me angry, all of the people who know nothing about the tall ship community so quick to criticize the maneuvers the captain was making and the crew themselves for being "idiots" when in reality, we don't know exactly what happened and we might not for days or even weeks yet.

The captain is still lost, at this point, so we may never know from his point of view what was happening. Stop casting blame on the folks in this community, please, until we know all the details. And even then, people have certainly done "stupider" things and lost far more life and property at sea. It is a tragedy, and there will be an investigation, but remember that no matter what, at least one person has lost her life, and a great tall ship is lost to us forever today.

[duikermeisie]

I'm not blaming the victims (crew), any more than I would blame the crane operator on the Deepwater Horizon for the explosion. I know firsthand how damn difficult it is to be in a situation like that, to make the judgement call and to face the pressure from the beach. I DO blame whoever made the mad, lunatic, asinine decision to sail the vessel straight into a tropical cyclone!

I bet you dollars to donuts it came from the beach. Not from the Bounty.

I know the old saw about ships being safer at sea than in a port. That's only true up to a point.....and that point being, is where you are sailing to safer than staying buttoned up in harbour? New London is THE best hurricane hole in the northeast south of Boston. I know, I've ridden out a vicious nor'easter there, and my old NOAA ship rode out Sandy there. There are four excellent hurricane holes along the CT to Mass coast--New London, Providence, Woods Hole, and New Bedford. New Bedford even has a hurricane wall. Barring that, if you do sail, the idea is you sail AWAY from the storm. Bounty could have sailed east to Nantucket and anchored out in the lee of the island, she could have sailed east into open water, or even taken the Cape Cod Canal north and anchored out in Mass Bay.

I should mention that it's always safer for the CREW to be on high land.

What you DON'T do is exactly what she did.....sail directly into the dangerous semicircle of a tropical cyclone, cross the T of a tropical cyclone, and sail into the Gulf Stream with a northerly gale (4kt current opposing storm force winds = ship-eating monsters).

What we DO know, from Bounty's FB page, is that she was scheduled to be in St Petersburg for a fundraiser on Friday. In other words, SOMEBODY made the call to leave a safe hurricane hole and violate every rule of prudent navigation and kill two people for MONEY. As a professional mariner who has been going to sea for a decade, who rode out Katrina at sea, who has vomited her way through many a nasty nor'easter and ridden out hurricane-force blows in the roaring forties, this ENRAGES me.

I'm not blaming the crew. I'm blaming whatever jackass made the decision to sail in the first place.

[shane_mayhem]

As far as we know right now, it was the captain's decision. The captain and crew were receiving weather information every four hours, and nobody knows exactly what happened when they made the turn. A lot of conjecture about who was behind the decision is not helpful right now. Anyone can sit back and call someone lunatic and asinine but the fact remains that we don't have all the information and the captain is still missing. You can think whatever you want. I'm not saying I know what caused this, either. I'm not saying that I know what was behind the decisions or what influenced them. I'm saying that, after suffering through all of the fucktarded Twitter comments as we were following this live trying to figure out what was happening to a ship and crew that we love, I've had it with the judgement calls. I'm waiting until the investigation is closed.

[shane_mayhem]

I apologize for sounding harsh. It's been a rough 48 hours for us, and I can't even imagine what it's been like for the crew and their families...