Comments on: What happened to the HMS Bounty? After Hurricane Sandy sinks tall ship, many questions remain

By: Charles Wilton

Charles Wilton — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 20:48:00 +0000

Bounty foundered in gale force conditions not Hurricane force. Therefore there is reason to suspect she was not structurally or mechanically well found, and should not have put to sea in adverse weather.

By: AlexG55

AlexG55 — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 23:01:00 +0000

Incidentally, the last voyage of the original Bounty might have been with a crew of 9. There were 18 Tahitians (6 men, 11 women and a baby) on board as well as Fletcher Christian and 8 other mutineers, but given that the Tahitians may have been kidnapped I’m not sure how much part they took in sailing the ship.

Of course, that was in the South Pacific…

By: jetfx

jetfx — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 20:59:00 +0000

Ha ha, thanks for out pedanting me.

By: George Herbert

George Herbert — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 20:25:00 +0000

Navy ships at facilities elsewhere routinely sortie in the face of oncoming hurricanes. I don’t know what they did at Norfolk this particular time, but you will not see many ships sitting at anchor in Pearl Harbor or the Japanese ports or Guam or US Navy facilities on the Gulf Coast when there’s a hurricane coming in. They, and most of the civilian shipping, move out both to get around the hurricane if possible and to stay away from shore.

Again, if you stay in port, a serious wind and wave surge like that and you drag your anchors and end up wrecked on shore in port. Ships aren’t tied down in port better than all those yachts you see piled up on people’s front yards in New Jersey now. Bigger lines, but proportionally bigger wind exposure from the larger hull and superstructure.

Again, it’s not clear why they were near shore and not out at Bermuda sitting it out. Being at sea and charging up into the worst of the storm is not a good idea, often. Being at sea and sailing around the hurricane is best.

By: KBert

KBert — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 20:07:00 +0000

By that thinking, all of Norfolk’s Naval vessels went out to sea?!
This Bounty is a ‘working’ boat? What job was it responsible for that warrants the loss of life?
The idea of staying in port may be naive, but 2 sailors would likely be alive today.
Finally, the ship wasn’t fit for the conditions, it foundered/sank and had to be abandoned!

By: KBert

KBert — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 20:01:00 +0000

Only speaking of this case and/or others that fit these fundamentals. Where the decision isn’t based on any other, over-riding concern. Yes, I feel very strongly about this, sailors losing their lives because of (who knows what)
What happened here is imo inexcusable.

By: trackofalljades

trackofalljades — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 17:27:00 +0000

These caps lock angry pronouncements are very confusing. It’s fine to be upset by an avoidable loss of human life, but why do folks need to make generalizations that contribute nothing and make no sense?

“Saving a boat is never worth a life.”

This is ridiculous. What if the boat that gets saved carries a number of other people to safety? What if the boat is carrying medical supplies that people somewhere need? What if the boat itself is critical to someone’s defense, or represents a priceless cultural treasure? Of course no such situation existed in this case, but there are dozens of others one could propose, so of course sometimes saving a boat is worth a life, or several lives. Just not in this case.

By: Tom McCluskey

Tom McCluskey — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Exactly this. Though to be fair, those steel Cape Horners could have smaller crews because they had split topsails, rather than full topsails that had to be reefed down in hard weather.

By: KBert

KBert — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 13:53:00 +0000

No, they’d all be alive/well/dry if they’d never left port.
Obvious!

By: creesto

creesto — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 13:01:00 +0000

What, what? Its a boat. That sails…sheesh

By: Ipo

Ipo — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 12:55:00 +0000

Three crew per watch should have been enough to motor the bounty with her two John Deere 375 hp (280 kW) diesel engines. As they were.
So they needed about nine people for comfort.

By: Ipo

Ipo — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 12:26:00 +0000

What happened to the HMS Bounty?
She was burned and scuttled in Bounty Bay, Pitcairn on January 23rd 1790.

By: Ipo

Ipo — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 12:11:00 +0000

They turned south west. Inshore. They crossed the (known to them) path of the storm to get squeezed between the capes and the storm.
I don’t get that part. They’d have been SAFER OUT AT SEA.

There, right at the edge of the continental shelf the gulf stream, 90 miles wide, runs north east at peak velocities of
greater than 2 m/s (5 knots), colliding with the storm’s swell, creating seas.
The heavy seas must have made it necessary to head into, to take on less water over the sides. You can only hold that heading when making way, engines running.
That explains the course deviation in her final hours.

Just my speculation.

By: AlexG55

AlexG55 — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 11:49:00 +0000

I don’t know where to start:
There’s no such thing as a “three-masted brig”
Reefs aren’t ropes that flatten the sail, they’re used to make the sail smaller.
As far as I know, when running before a storm you get rid of the courses before the topsails.
Sailing ships three times the size of Bounty routinely survived worse weather than this with smaller crews- look up the steel-hulled Cape Horners. These didn’t have motorized winches (well, they did, but they were only usable in port for loading and unloading), though they did have muscle-powered mechanical winches.

More importantly- we know what sank the ship. It was a bilge pump failure. 18-foot waves are not a problem for a ship the size of the Bounty even if they start breaking- a 25-foot breaking wave beam-on would be, but not an 18-foot one.

By: Ipo

Ipo — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 11:39:00 +0000

At her size about 250 tons of it. Engines don’t weigh remotely enough.
Calling a ship a boat is like calling a barn a shed.
It’s just funny.
If it has a “captain”, not to be confused with “skipper”, it’s generally a ship.

By: Ipo

Ipo — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 11:06:00 +0000

Flyboys.

By: Ipo

Ipo — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 11:03:00 +0000

The HMS Bounty was scuttled in Pitcairn. The Bounty was a replica of it. There is another replica in Hong Kong, also named Bounty. Neither of them ever were Her/His Majesty's Ships.

By: vance_tam

vance_tam — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 09:54:00 +0000

A three-masted brig requires at least 40-50 people to safely sail in bad weather. Each mast can carry two or three square sails and several narrow triangular sails to each side (though infrequently). As you can see in the photo, the top masts were broken off. In a heavy storm, it was normal practice to remove the top masts and sway them down to the deck to avoid having them snap off. A ship would use typically run with a single sail (the lowest sail on the most forward mast) and that sail would have several reefs (ropes that provide strength to the canvas) to make the sail flatter so it would spill air and not shred. Losing a sail in a vicious storm could result in the wind blowing the ship so that it is the beam on to the incoming waves and being broached (being buried by a large wave) and snapping off the masts. Though the masts and yards (the cross-pieces from which the sails are slung) are vulnerable to high winds even in good weather. My bet is that they were broached.

In an extreme case, the ship might furl all sails and put a drogue sail, or sea anchor, (an open-ended cone of sail) into the water off the bow. The drogue would help keep the bow of the ship pointed into the storm. At that point, all a person could do would be to pray.

Hundreds if not thousands of sailing ships have gone down in storms in those very waters between 1500 and 1900.

I’m not familiar with the amount of mechanization on that particular ship. They might have had motorized winches to hoist and furl sails and make other adjustments to the rigging. If not, I can guarantee you that 16 people was not a sufficient number to safely take to sea when trying to outrun a gale/hurricane.

By: Nathan Hornby

Nathan Hornby — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 09:18:00 +0000

I laughed at ‘sailboat’.

By: George Herbert

George Herbert — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 08:47:00 +0000

Contrarian thought here. I’m a Naval Architect by education (though not current profession) and intermittent inshore sailor.

Harbors ARE more dangerous than at sea in many storms, and the idea that crews would go sit it out in a nice comfy hotel on dry land is sort of naive. For fishing boats maybe. Working ships, not so much. They’re designed to take pretty much any storm, and for severe storms they do sail out of the way preferably to hunkering down in port.

In port, in shallow water, more waves are breaking, and dragging anchor puts you up on shore or a dock at the worst time. Rescue from a ship driven ashore even in port in the teeth of a storm may be impossible.

Not heading out to say Bermuda seems to have been a mistake, but the idea of staying in port doesn’t make a lot of sense either.

By: KBert

KBert — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 04:51:00 +0000

People kill themselves all the time by…
When you’re responsible for others lives and safety, you are operating under an entirely separate paradigm.
If I want to take my schooner out to frolic in a major storm, that’s my business.
If I convince my family it’s a sensible idea for them to come with me… not!

By: KBert

KBert — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 04:35:00 +0000

What happened is exactly the reason “not to be out to sea”
Also consider, 40 knot winds and 18 foot seas are not that big a deal; IF the ship and its systems/rig are sound and the captain AND crew know what they’re doing.
To founder (as opposed to getting wrecked) in these conditions points to ignorance or fool-hardiness.
The decision to leave port cannot be justified by ANY argument.

By: KBert

KBert — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 04:28:00 +0000

Saving a boat is NEVER worth a life.
There is NO excuse for this. The storm was obvious, the ship could have been sunk in harbor and probably salvaged.
This insane decision resulted in the loss of the ship, 2 lives, and the rest were incredibly lucky.
Let alone the risks to the rescuers!

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 04:27:00 +0000

People kill themselves all the time by staying in massive fire zones so that they can hose their roofs.

By: KBert

KBert — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 04:22:00 +0000

“Leaving port could have been an excellent decision”
Yeah, if the damn boat is worth more than a life, let alone a crew!!!
The mind boggling part is obvious.

By: trackofalljades

trackofalljades — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 03:49:00 +0000

There’s no reason not to be out to sea when a hurricane might be ripping your port up, the confusing thing is why they weren’t very far out to sea at all, but rather in the storm’s path. They had plenty of fair warning and time to put out further to the east where they could have been fine. The power failure was tragic, but it seems like they were in a pretty ridiculous situation well before their power failed anyway. I suppose in the coming days more details will be made public.

By: Alfred Baber

Alfred Baber — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 03:48:00 +0000

That’s why I ended up here instead at the news sites regurgitating this stuff. I’m WTFing it, too.

By: trackofalljades

trackofalljades — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 03:46:00 +0000

This is exactly the point I was trying to make, perhaps I should have said “south” to Florida instead of “down” to Florida, but yeah…basically they didn’t turn east until the last minute and that’s the part that has everyone going WTF.

By: Alfred Baber

Alfred Baber — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 03:44:00 +0000

You make a good point, but this ship tracker site that I forgot about had the Bounty heading south over the last ten days. Someone failed there. Looking at those speed figures, I’m just thinking that fighting swells out of the east to head east wasn’t going to get anywhere.

http://www.sailwx.info/shiptrack/shipposition.phtml?call=WDD9114

That said, I would have taken my chances tying up to another boat in a slip.

By: Jeff Heinzelman

Jeff Heinzelman — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 03:37:00 +0000

Why was it out to sea at all? Wasn’t there an obvious hurricane threat? And no, I’m not being callous, just trying to figure out why they would take such a risk…