Thank You HMS Bounty

[Velocir]

With all the furor in the media about the tragedy that is the sinking of the HMS Bounty and the number of outspoken critics, I feel there is a part of the story missing from that discourse. I want the people reading Bounty’s story out there to know what the ship, her Captain, and her crew mean to those of us that knew her best. What they mean to me.

Thank You HMS Bounty - CNN iReport

Please share it with others if you like it.

Fair Winds,
Captain Grant Howerton
www.Velocir.com

[Exile]

[sabray]

Is there merit in the furor? Your experience is all lovely and romantic. It does not address how the boat was maintained and some of the hard conversations. Explicitly the rotting frames. The boat was not licensed for commercial use. The fact that it could not meet a charter standard and leaked buckets is telling if its demise.
Romantic but a young women died. It is good to hear this enchanting side . It can't wash away the facts. It appears now that the command was not aware of the size if the storm they were heading into. Going eastward was not a option. The boat was a leaking sieve with rotten frames.
Perhaps it inspired you. I found it to be a tourist trap with a poorly organized tour.
Later it was the death of one young women who won't experience what you describe with such eloquence.

[Gadagirl]

http://gcaptain.com/illusion-experie...unty-hearings/

This says a lot and is an interesting observation. I've been following the live hearings here

http://www.wavy.com/generic/news/hms-bounty-hearings

And a thread here
http://www.sailnet.com/forums/genera...ouble-162.html

To hear the first hand testimony is heart wrenching and stirs anger. Yes, two have testified that they used DAP to seal the seams of the haul. And there was testimony about other things. Such a preventable and stupid tragedy! There's 3 days left of testimony during this part of the enquiry.

[sabray]

Dap as a seem compound is not unusual. This is not apart of the caulk system in a wooden boat that adds integrity. First we used irons like wide chisel to set caulk usually cotton this is hammered in by a long headed hammer. Takes skill to know how much you pinch into the seem. Dap compound is used by the painters and fills in the part past the caulking and levels the plank seems so it appears fair. Gives a paintable surface. Nothing wrong with using this on top of proper caulking. Apparantely in the day of glass no one seems to know this is common practice. Yikes I'm getting old.

[Gadagirl]

Might be, but testimony of rotten ribs. Standard was running the pumps in even mild seas. Her seams were constantly leaking. Makes no sense to me that she'd be safer at sea.

[sabray]

Rotten frames. Yes we caulked many boats and dap was standard on the dressing end. Us that did this have scars on the back side of our thumbs that only caulkers have. Put many miles of caulk into the seems if wooden boats so I'm pretty confident talking about this I can feel the repeated beating my upper thumb took.
Heading into that storm was dumb. They could have gotten north otherside of the canal and been fine in Plymouth or such. Money and time ruled the day. Dreams and romance ruled the moment while sense sat on its ass in denial.

[captain58sailin]

It is a very nice romantic story.

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by Gadagirl

Might be, but testimony of rotten ribs. Standard was running the pumps in even mild seas. Her seams were constantly leaking. Makes no sense to me that she'd be safer at sea.

All wooden vessels are rotten, to some degree or another, and all of them leak. Nature of the beast. Bounty would have been less rotten and would have leaked less had more hundreds of thousands of dollars been poured into her. It's easy to for us to say from our armchairs how "preventable and stupid" the tragedy was -- sure, just get out the checkbook, no problem. But the reality of managing a vessel like that is a bit more complicated. There are many, many testimonies to the skill and dedication of the captain, despite a very stupid sounding interview he gave once about "chasing hurricanes", which can be found on Youtube. Sounds horribly stupid now, but at the time it was probably marketing-oriented bravado. By all accounts he was a careful and skillful sailor.

Should Bounty have stayed in port? Seems pretty clear, with hindsight, that she should have. The Captain made a mistake and someone died. But he paid for this mistake with his own life. Seems to me it might be about time to let them rest in peace, instead of rehashing and rehashing and over-armchairing the events.

[Richard_W]

All I can say is this ...

I am sorry that this beautiful sail ship is gone. There is fewer and fewer of them.

I am sorry that two people lost their life. It did not have to happen but it did, and nothing will change it.

[MarkJ]

I am not sorry this pile of junk is gone. Its lucky that only 2 people were killed, in other circumstances the whole lot may have been killed.

The reports from the hearing are startling, even eclipsing some of the worse case senarios on internet forums.

The Coast Guard is as much to blame for allowing rotted piles of junk to take passengers as crew; their 12 passenger rules without seaworthiness certification or independent survey; the 'dockside attraction' rules allowing the ship to then travel unrestricted in the ocean with crew.
The Bounty owners who have declined to answer questions (5th amendment?)themselves for allowing architect and the surveyor to be one and the same person, as well as other conflicts of interest; The changing of displacement to slip into different rule categories therfore avoiding some USCG inspections and restrictions. The lack of proper training to the new and slightly older bosuns.

The allegation of heading into the hurricane as their was the chance of someone buying the boat on Nov 9th cant be explored by the hearing as the owners wont answer questions.

This hearing is showing a litany of what could be found as criminal negligence that has caused death, injury, hardship... and terror to 18 crew, family and friends.

To laud the wonderfulness of this ship and company whilst this hearing is going on is spiking the evidence with rum. And lots of it!

Mark

[DeepFrz]

There was some interesting testimony today reported on gCaptain about never using or testing the hydraulic pumps or the backup generator. The new maintenance chief could find no maintenance records for the engines or generators and no one had ever run the hydraulic pumps. The gasoline trash pump had been run once and put back in its case filled with gasoline and left for about 18 months. It didn't run well at all when they tried to use it.

This kind of goes against the kind of Preventative Maintenance I was taught to do and practiced for most of my life. Also the fact that new crew members were not trained and were not encouraged (actually told to not touch) to do regular maintenance on the equipment.

Nice guy the Captain may have been but he had certainly allowed his ship to decay. He had been warned to pick his weather wisely or repair the rot and he heeded neither of those warnings.

[sailorboy1]

I have had the feeling from the beginning that in the end we would discover that the storm didn't really sink the boat, the boat's condition did and the storm just hurried it along at a bad time.

[David M]

I'm just glad this floating cluster-f and the irresponsible people in charge did not take more lives.

[DeborahLee]

For those interested check this blog. Doug Campbell is a writer and is working on a book abot the Bounty sinking. His blog talks about the Coast Guard inquiry that he has been covering. douglas a. Campbell's books