Author to speak on ship captain's battle with Hurricane Sandy

When its pumps failed, the 52-year-old ship - originally built for the 1962 Marlon Brando film "Mutiny on the Bounty" - rolled over and sank.

Any other time, such a sea disaster would make national news. But with Sandy wreaking historic devastation on New Jersey and New York, many overlooked the story of the ship's fate.

Campbell, a former reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer [and Soundings] who has written about other sea disasters, is co-author of "Rescue of the Bounty," which chronicles the ship's sinking off the coast of North Carolina and the Coast Guard's efforts to save the 16 crew members aboard her.

Campbell, an avid sailor, got involved in the project when he got a call from co-author Michael J. Touglas asking for help with the book.

"We were aware of each other because he also writes survival at sea stories," Campbell said. "He had a book coming out and he wanted to do this story, but he felt he didn't have enough time to do it himself."

Campbell happily signed on board, thinking it would a good opportunity to satisfy his own curiosity about the disaster.

"When the Bounty went down, I had my questions on it - why would the captain take that boat out on the Atlantic in that storm? I saw it as a great opportunity to find the answers myself," Campbell said.

Campbell needed to research the wreck because the ship's captain, Robin Walbridge, was one of two crewmembers who did not survive the sinking.

"I tried to answer the question, 'Why did he go?' Because he was dead, I couldn't ask him, so that forced me to look into his background," Campbell said. "What I found interviewing people was an individual who was very bright, but also extremely self-directed."

Growing up in landlocked Montpelier, Vt., Walbridge started pursuing his goals at a very early age.

"He had this idea in his head at a very early age that he wanted to be at sea and he used his resources and he worked his way up," the author said.

When he was as young as 5, Walbridge began saving to buy his own big rig truck.

"If someone gave him a quarter, he would say, 'That is for more my truck.' At 5 years old he decided he would he would be a long-haul trucker, and at 21 he paid cash for his first rig."

With that dream achieved, Walbridge remained frugal and invested his money. When he was in his 30s he was able to retire from trucking and pursue his dream of becoming a sailing ship captain.

He became captain of the Bounty in 1995, and a year later the U.S. Navy tapped him to teach sailors what they needed to know to work the sails and rigging of the frigate U.S.S. Constitution. If there were any doubts about just how good a sailor Walbridge was, working with the Constitution, the nation's oldest commissioned ship, gave Walbridge the Navy's seal of approval, Campbell said.

Walbridge also had the loyalty and trust of his crew. While commendable, that was not necessarily a good thing, according to the author.

As Sandy headed toward the East Coast, Walbridge explained his plan to sail out into the Atlantic to his crew and told them that anyone who did not want to make the trip could choose to do so. No one took him up on his offer.

"He was trapped because no one would question him," Campbell said. "Some of the Bounty crew didn't appreciate the risk they were taking because of inexperience, and they abdicated the decision to the captain."

Campbell's experience on sailboats - he's raced his own 32-foot boat to Bermuda - makes him appreciate the risks Walbridge was taking.

"There are several issues that every person who goes out on the ocean in a boat has to deal with.You should never have a schedule - the schedule mentality was part of this Bounty voyage. There are times you just shouldn't go out there."

"My suspicion is that he had made up his mind, he was going to go and he wasn't going to let a hurricane stop him. What he must not have understood was the massive geographic scale of this storm. There was no way to get around it."

Walbridge was eager to get to St. Petersburg, Fla., because an event was planned with children with Downs Syndrome. While the Bounty was owned by a wealthy businessman, money was always a problem and the captain was eager for an event that would bring in visitors, Campbell said.

The 52-year-old ship also was in no shape to be sailing into a hurricane.

"Another issue was maintenance of the vessel. Bounty drives that point home. You need to have pumps that are capable of pumping the water out when it comes in, because the water will come in. You have to have pumps that work. They didn't - and they knew that when they left," the author said.

The pumps were particularly important because the ship's wooden timbers above the waterline had dried out during the summer, causing them to shrink. This caused the Bounty to take on water when things got rough.

While Campbell thinks the ship wasn't prepared for the storm she encountered, he credits Walbridge with assuring that there was an abundance of immersion suits on the ship. Most of the crew survived because of this and because of the bravery of Coast Guard crews, who flew out into the hurricane's fury to rescue the stricken sailors.

And while Campbell's research left him with many opportunities to question Walbridge's judgment, he also came away with a certain amount of respect for the late captain.

"For all the negative things I have say about captain, he seems to have been quite a decent individual," Campbell said. "Listening to (the surviving crew members) all testify they all still seem to revere the captain that had taken them out into harm's way."