THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 12, 1997 TAG: 9701120063
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY PAUL CLANCY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 507 lines
They were lurching toward the rolling sea, but the atmosphere was curiously jovial. The life raft was in the water, their life jackets snugly on. A container ship was standing by. The Coast Guard was on the way.
And suddenly it was chaos.
They were in choking waves, clinging to a bucking life raft, as the ship rolled over and vanished into the deep.
Yale, the captain, was screaming for a knife, knew they had to cut the line to the raft or the ship would pull it under. He remembered the tool on his belt and slashed at the line as it tightened.
Becky was floating away. Paul grabbed her. One of the dogs was trying to swim back to the ship. Keith let go of the safety line and swam to it, but as he reached for the animal, it disappeared. And where was Harold? They couldn't find him. The raft was moving rapidly in the wind and Keith couldn't get back. Now two were missing.
``Keith! Keith! Keith!'' Becky screamed into the howling storm. The others were leaning toward one end of the raft when a new wave flipped them over. Now all the ship's souls were adrift on a raging ocean, in a nightmare that none had dared to imagine.
What was to have been an adventurous cruise to the Bahamas on the Alexandria, a beautiful, historic, three-masted schooner, was now a struggle for survival in a notoriously dangerous part of the Atlantic off Cape Hatteras.
During those frightening minutes and the agonizing hours that followed, many others would be called upon to reach deep for courage, skill and blind luck to save the lives of the crew.
Later, there would be questions.
Why did the proud tall ship, said to be badly in need of repair, put to sea in December?
Why did she leave Norfolk with a barely adequate crew?
Did the captain draw his fellow adventurers into a near-fatal mission without adequate preparation?
Finding the answers means unraveling the skein of events as they occurred and bringing together the lives of the people involved as they intersected at that fateful junction in the Atlantic Ocean.
Yale Iverson, 59, a one-time lawyer from Des Moines, Iowa,craved adventure and gave up his practice to fly airplanes, pilot boats, assemble stained glass and write poetry.
``I do not want to go quietly into the night,'' he said in a recent interview. ``I do not want to sit around on a sofa and watch other people on television having fun.''
The Alexandria was just the ticket. And a bargain: The Alexandria Seaport Foundation had balked at expensive repairs and put it on the market, cheap - $25,000 plus spare parts. No more than $50,000 for a classic.
The foundation warned that the Alexandria was in dreadful condition, that she leaked and ``moved,'' or twisted, in heavy seas, loosening planks.
Alyn Fife, a marine surveyor from Newport News, told the foundation it would take between $300,000 and $400,000 to repair the ship using volunteers. The worst-case estimate was $1.4 million.
`` `You'd be putting good money after bad,' I told them,'' Fife says. `` `It's beyond economical repair.' ''
But Iverson didn't think so. His inspection of the tough old oak planks showed a vessel that was basically sound. Yes, there were some bad timbers, but not as bad as the ``white pants'' sailors and cautious lawyers who ran the foundation warned.
He put a sign down on the Alexandria, Va., waterfront: ``Volunteer Crew Needed for Trip to the Bahamas.'' Although Iverson had much experience with boats, he knew little about sailing. He'd need a few good people along.
Edmund Lowson, a 32-year-old tour director from Berkeley, Calif., was in town visiting his girlfriend in October. After a farewell dinner, they went for a stroll.
They saw the sign and beside it a ship that looked like it had sailed out of a fabled sea adventure. She was 176 tons of wood paneling, polished brass and masts that rose 100 feet from the deck.
``Ah!'' Lowson remembers thinking.
The Alexandria was built in Sweden in 1929 as a cargo ship. In the 1970s, she was converted to a cruise vessel, plying the Caribbean. With more than 7,000 square feet of sail, the vessel had acquitted itself well in tall-ship races and graced the harbors of many cities on ceremonial occasions.
``I'm in a hurry to get to the Bahamas,'' Iverson told Lowson.
Lowson asked whether Iverson thought they'd get along.
``I can get along with the devil for a week if it gets me to the Bahamas,'' Iverson told him.
First they'd take her to Norfolk for some repairs, then head to sea. Lowson figured he couldn't go wrong just going as far as Norfolk, so he signed on.
Also on the crew was Harold Phinney, 62, a highly experienced deep-water sailor from Alexandria, who had piloted the tall ship many times. He was stout and suffered from asthma, but at sea, he said, his breathing always cleared up.
Things didn't start well. With foundation sailors at the helm, the Alexandria ran aground three times coming down the Potomac River. Stuck in the mud. They were freed by a tow boat, but in the process broke a mast fitting.
If they had been patient enough to wait for the next tide, the ship might have floated free.
``Yale was incredibly energetic about getting to the Bahamas, but when it came to paying attention to details, he was a little bit dreamy,'' Lowson recalls.
They stopped overnight at Davis Boatyard in Newport News to pick up a port anchor and chain, put in briefly at a private pier next to the Norfolk Naval Base, and intended to shove off the next morning.
Phinney was upset. They couldn't go with just three people, he told Iverson. Besides, the wind was foul and the sea was foul. They'd get beaten up before they even got out to sea, he said.
But the captain was in his ``got-to-go mood,'' Phinney says, and there was no way of talking him out of it.
So several weeks before her last voyage, the Alexandria sailed out of the Elizabeth River and into choppy Hampton Roads.
``By the time we got to buoy one,'' Phinney says, ``Yale had already lost his cookies over the side. Edmund, too. Yale gave a circle-the-wagons sign, and we turned back to Norfolk.''
On Nov. 11, the Alexandria tied up to the Otter Berth at Waterside Marina and put out another sign advertising for crew.
Keith Boyer, 25, of Virginia Beach and Rebecca and Chris Grandi, 23 and 20, of Norfolk had barely sailed on boats before, no less tall ships, but they couldn't resist. Besides, Iverson told them he liked them, and that's what mattered.
``Ofttimes people with the most credentials are the ones with the least value - when it comes to ships, anyway,'' Iverson says.
Meanwhile, Edmund Lowson called his friend Paul Weinstein in San Francisco.
``Do you want to sail to the Bahamas in a tall ship?'' he asked. The 30-year-old management consultant dropped everything and flew to Norfolk.
Iverson took a few days off and flew to Nassau. When he returned, there was no longer any urgency about leaving. They stayed a week at Waterside, then motored down to Lyon Shipyard near the Campostella Bridge.
The shipyard hauled the vessel out, washed and painted its wooden hull, installed a generator and bilge pump and made several other repairs. They also provided Iverson and his crew with a man-lift, a sort of traveling scaffold that enabled them to work on the hull.
David Gunter, the shipyard's vice president, says he found the Alexandria ``in very poor condition'' but said Iverson ``was really excited about his boat. He told me he had gotten a steal and that it was in much better condition than the Seaport Foundation thought it was.''
Says Iverson: ``It was really stout built. It didn't go down because of rotted framing.''
He and the crew shot caulking into each seam that appeared to need it, mostly above the waterline where the planks were dry and hadn't swollen tightly together. They all felt the boat was in good shape. Both Lowson and Phinney felt Iverson took plenty of precautions.
Enough, Iverson said finally. It was time to go.
They tried to get under way Monday, Dec. 2, but the weather forecast was no good. They needed a 48-hour window to get to Beaufort, N.C., their first planned stop. They couldn't take the Alexandria ``inside'' on the Intracoastal Waterway because of her tall masts. So the weather would have to be perfect.
It wasn't until Thursday that they got the green light.
In the pre-dawn darkness of Friday, Dec. 6, they cast off from Waterside.
The sun rose on a beautiful day as the Alexandria motored past the gray hulls at the naval base and swung to the east. It was a bit choppy, and some of the crew were already feeling a bit green.
As soon as they reached the ocean, Becky and Chris Grandi threw up.
The two, sister and brother, went below and rarely emerged for the rest of the trip.
``It's the sickest I've ever been,'' says Chris. ``I thought I could get by. I've been through Marine boot camp and got my butt kicked, but this was beyond the pale.''
By the time the storms began to rage, ``I figured I was dead, and I just wanted to go quick.''
Becky Grandi, a recent history grad from Indiana's Taylor University, says she never wanted to go but was talked into it. Iverson said she'd make a great cook, but she hardly ever got up from her bunk to make a meal.
``I just kind of felt my purpose on the boat was nonexistent.'' She slept and prayed most of the time.
And when the first storm hit, she was terrified.
``Oh, my God, how did I get myself in this situation?'' she recalls thinking. ``How did I get out here?''
Boyer, of Virginia Beach, was a high school and college swimmer and has the big-shouldered look of an athlete. He spent his summer repairing swimming pool pumps and the critical job of bilge pump maestro fell to him. He was sick, too, but shrugged it off.
He and Becky had dated for a while, but their relationship had changed to close friendship. He, Becky and Chris hung around together.
Just after the Alexandria turned south in the Atlantic, within sight of the Virginia Beach resort hotels, her new Volvo Penta engine sputtered and died.
Iverson went below to work on it, declining Phinney's help.
``You're not up on this engine,'' Phinney says Iverson told him. ``This engine is very special. There are tolerances you would screw up if you worked on it.''
Phinney has a theory about what went wrong. He says he warned the captain before they left that the fuel should be pumped out and filtered. But Iverson balked at the cost: $1.30 per gallon, $1,300 total. That, Phinney says, caused the filters to clog and, when they were changed, resulted in an air lock in the engine.
Iverson went on that assumption and spent the better part of the next 48 hours trying to bleed trapped air out of the engine's cylinders.
But that wasn't the problem, they would find out much later.
The crew scrambled for the sails, raising three gaff-rigged mains and three jibs. With most of her old red canvas flying, the Alexandria must have been a sight that evening as the sun went down. She was doing what she was meant for, riding on brisk western winds.
``It was fantastic,'' Weinstein says. ``I just remember thinking, `This is what I came out here for, to be behind the wheel and to feel the boat pulling out of the water.' ''
Weinstein and Lowson took the midnight-to-4 a.m. watch, then handed over the helm to Phinney and Boyer.
Every two hours, the one on watch who was not at the helm would run the bilge pump. It was a heavy-duty, 3-inch affair that would drain the lower part of the ship's hull that routinely - especially with wooden boats - takes on water. It would clear the bilge in minutes.
It's not clear why, but when Iverson woke up Saturday the Alexandria was north of her position the night before. There were sharp words, but no one thought there was any real trouble.
There was still enough of a window to make it to Beaufort, they thought.
But Saturday night was to be a rude awakening.
At 10 p.m. Dec. 7, the wind at Diamond Shoals Light, 30 miles northeast of Cape Hatteras, blew out of the south at 50 mph - a punishing gale - and wave heights were about 35 feet, according to records at the National Buoy Data Center, the government's ocean-monitoring branch.
The Alexandria was well northeast of that spot when the wind began rising. The crew dropped some of the sails. With just the forward main and the inner of the three jibs up, the old ship surfed the waves at 9 knots. For most sailing ships, that's flying.
Lowson and Weinstein were excited. The wind, at that time howling out of the north, was at their backs. It was a struggle to hold course, demanding three full turns of the wheel for every correction to port or starboard. But adrenalin was flowing, and there was never a question they could handle it.
The light on the compass was out, so one of them held a flashlight and screamed out course information.
One of them started singing at the top of his lungs and the other joined in:
I've been working on the railroad . . .
They sang Beatles' songs, Christmas carols - every song they could think of.
Row, row, row your boat . . .
Below, crew members lay in their bunks and listened to the groaning of the wood as it worked back and forth. Chris Grandi wanted to die. ``OK, God, I see your omnipotent power,'' he remembers thinking. ``Go ahead, make an example of me.''
Becky Grandi was in the head, sick again, when she noticed water splashing in near the toilet. She asked if anything was wrong, and one of the crew said it was OK - to go back to sleep.
``If I just lie here and close my eyes, maybe the next thing I know we'll be in port,'' she thought. And that would be the end of the trip for her. She'd take a taxi back from Beaufort and go back to life on solid ground.
The storm abated somewhat as the next watch came on, but there was a problem: One of the sails, the jib, had started to rip. Then the main began to tear - and both sails were in tatters.
They turned into the wind, put up a different set of sails and continued to race on.
Sunday began as a beautiful day, and most of the crew, even the sick ones, came up on deck. With all the vomiting, it was pretty bad below.
``We popped the hatch to get some of the stink out and tossed a couple of buckets of water down there to clean up some of the slippery spots,'' Phinney remembers.
The running joke was, ``Are we in Beaufort yet?''
They weren't, not by a long shot. And they were increasingly frustrated by their inability to make much progress.
Iverson continued to work on the engine as the day wore on, but it refused to come to life.
At 3:30 p.m. the Cape Hatteras Coast Guard station received a call. Iverson's voice sounds weary on the recording:
``I need some information concerning a Volvo Penta engine. Six cylinders, 250 horsepower. I'm unable to restart it after changing the fuel filter. I believe it's an air lock.'' He asked if someone could advise him on what to do.
The Coast Guard replied that it didn't have such expertise but would put out a marine assistance request asking whether someone else did.
The Warner, a large Army tugboat from the 73rd Transport Company at Fort Eustis, happened to be making its way home from Charleston, S.C., and its skipper agreed to come to the Alexandria's aid. They received the call at 4:20 p.m. and chugged into view three hours later.
The 128-foot, 5,100 hp tug was an impressive sight as it pulled within a few feet of the Alexandria and cut its engines.
With hardly any hesitation, Army engineers Scott Aimi and Terry Gaskins, timing a rising wave as it lifted the Alexandria, leaped several feet across and down to her deck.
``We traced out the fuel line and found the engine was not receiving any fuel,'' Aimi says. It wasn't air lock after all, but a clogged fuel line.
``Why didn't I think that one through?'' Iverson would wonder later.
The engineers installed an auxiliary line, and a cheer went up from the crew as the engine coughedand fired. They had power and sails, and they were halfway to Beaufort. They declined a tow to Norfolk.
The Alexandria resumed its voyage about 11:20 p.m. The sea was rough and the wind was rising, but so were the crew's spirits.
For a while.
At 1:30 a.m., with Lowson at the helm, Weinstein went below to start the main pump. There was a foot, maybe two, of water in the bilge. ``I flipped on the switch and nothing happened. Absolutely nothing.''
Weinstein pounded on Iverson's door, and the crew roused the pump expert, Boyer, who was in a dead sleep after little rest the past two nights.
He staggered into the engine room, and he and Iverson tried to restart the pump.
Someone must have left it in the ``on'' position, Boyer yelled. It was hot. The order went up to steer the boat so as to minimize rolling, and the rest of the crew frantically strove to employ several of the auxiliary gas pumps on deck.
The problem was that the topside pumps had to be primed, a delicate operation. And just as they'd get one working, the boat would roll and the pump would quit. Repeating the effort exhausted the crew.
Boyer said he had to sleep, so Iverson continued to work on the main pump. Finally, he found the problem: A small, plastic wire nut, the kind used to join electrical wire ends, had been sucked into the intake.
At 4 a.m. the pump was restarted. But by this time water was pouring in through seams where the caulking had worked loose.
Boyer woke with a start as a wave washed over the deck and water poured down onto him.
He went to Becky who had abandoned her soaking bunk and sought sleep on top of sails piled on the floor. He lay beside her and held her hand as she sobbed.
``Please, let us make it until daylight,'' she prayed as she looked up at the sky through the hatch.
At 6:32 a.m., as dawn was breaking, Coast Guard Petty Officer Chris Huber received a distress call from the Alexandria.
``We're taking on water in heavy seas, and we can't keep up with the flooding,'' Iverson said. ``We request assistance.''
Huber asked how much water was accumulating. Boyer ran below. Almost three feet, he shouted - almost to the dip stick on the engine.
Put on your life jackets, Huber told them.
Keith brought the news to Becky.
``Go in your cabin and get your wallet and anything else you need. Put on your life vest and go up top.''
``Are we sinking?'' she asked.
``Yeah, we are.''
``Oh, my God!'' she blurted out.
``Don't worry,'' Keith told her. ``We've called the Coast Guard. We're going to be all right.''
About 6:40 a.m., Petty Officer Douglas Hanley, a rescue swimmer, was awakened by an alarm sounding at the Coast Guard Rescue Station in Elizabeth City, N.C. At 7:05 he and his crew were airborne in a helicopter and headed toward the Atlantic.
The initial request was to drop new pumps to the Alexandria, but Hanley had a feeling he'd be going into the water that morning.
On the Alexandria, the crew assembled near the stern as the sinking ship tossed and rolled. Each time the bow dived beneath the waves, it took longer to come up.
Iverson went below to get his dogs, white German shepherds he'd named John and David. They were frightened and balked at being strapped into life preservers.
Then everyone heard the engine sputter and die.
``You knew, then, that was it,'' Weinstein said.
One heartening sight was the appearance of the container ship Arktis Crystal. The huge ship had been shadowing the Alexandria through her ordeal and helped relay messages to the Coast Guard.
The Alexandria rolled again in 25-foot waves. Her starboard side went under and did not recover.
Iverson ordered the life raft into the water, and three of the crew heaved the 400-pound capsule containing the oversize craft overboard. The CO2 containers hissed instantly, and the bright-red raft inflated.
They stood hesitantly, kicking off their shoes, getting ready. Chris Grandi was the first to leap and landed in the raft. The others sort of fell into the water as the Alexandria continued to roll.
Becky Grandi felt a heavy weight on top of her - Iverson, who had gone in behind her and landed on her. She rose to the surface and regretted she hadn't taken off her boots. They were pulling her down. Lowson and Weinstein pulled her to the raft.
Phinney was standing at the stern as the Alexandria went over, and as he fell, the transom came down on top of him. He swam down and away from it only to surface and have the small dinghy attached to the stern push him under again.
The great ship fell over like a lead weight, its wooden masts thundering as they hit the water near the raft.
Boyer pointed to John, one of the dogs, splashing frantically in the waves. ``I'm going to get him,'' he said.
``I saw Keith go over the top of a wave, and when it came back down, he was gone,'' Becky said.
Just as Iverson sliced through the line from the raft to the sinking boat, the Alexandria went straight for the bottom.
``If I were a ship, that's the way I'd like to go,'' Iverson would say later.
The five survivors clambered aboard the life raft, but when they crowded to one side to search for Harold and Keith, they tipped its balance. The wind and a wave flipped them over.
Lowson and the other dog, David, were in the upside-down domed raft. He had the dog by the leash, but when the raft flipped again, the shepherd was gone.
Outside now, Lowson clung to the raft as it sailed in the wind. His foul-weather pants were filling up, acting like a sea anchor, and he ripped them off. Off came his his sweat pants and long johns, too, leaving him naked from the waist down.
The Coast Guard helicopter arrived just in time, with four survivors in the rolling waves and one clinging to the errant raft.
Swimmer Hanley went down to the water on a winch-lowered cable and swam to Becky.
``She had that look in her eyes,'' he said, ``a stunned look.''
A toboggan-like basket splashed down near them, and she was the first to climb in. Then, like a spacecraft returning to its mother ship, the basket rose from the roiling blue ocean - and Becky was safe.
One after another, the four other survivors were lifted to the rescue helicopter. Someone reported seeing one of the dogs, but it might have been a whitecap. The churning sea caused images to flicker and die like candles in the wind.
``It looks like a tornado there in front of us,'' one of the crew reported. In fact, it was a white squall, the Coast Guard said later, a funnel of water rising off the sea.
The search continued for the other two, but there were now two worries: The survivors were shivering and risked going into hypothermia, and fuel was limited. Still, they searched for what seemed a very long time.
``Find them, find them, find them!'' Iverson kept saying to himself. ``Please, find them soon.''
In the roiling water, Phinney and Boyer could see the chopper as it appeared to hover over bits of refuse from the sunken boat. A life jacket. A gas can.
``I watched the whole rescue take place,'' Boyer says. Once, the helicopter flew directly over him as he shouted and waved furiously.
At least, he thought, he wasn't very cold. They were in the Gulf Stream, the water a mild 68 degrees. Not far away, at Diamond Shoals, it was less than 50.
Phinney was probably no more than 200 yards away, but they couldn't see each other across the towering waves.
And the rescue team in the helicopter couldn't see them either.
On board the chopper, it was becoming increasingly clear they had to get back to Elizabeth City or they'd run out of fuel. They radioed for a second helicopter with ``max fuel'' and a C-130 search plane - and headed home.
Becky was shivering and weeping. Reaching over to touch her ankle, Weinstein said as confidently as he could: ``They'll find them.''
Bobbing in his life jacket, Boyer watched the chopper leave. He was getting waterlogged by waves that kept smacking him in the face. But he tried to make the best of it, singing Hank Williams Jr. lyrics about tears in his beer.
But minutes turned to hours. He was getting hungry and terribly thirsty from the constant intake of salt water. And the life jacket had begun to chafe.
He thought about how people would remember him. How would his brother and sister explain what kind of person he was? And would they get it right?
He worried about his two nephews and his niece, his god-child. And he worried whether his grandfather, who was seriously ill, would be able to make it to his funeral.
Geez, he was thirsty. He began to cramp and reached under the water to grab his feet to stop the pain.
His normally upbeat attitude was turning to despair. At one point he reached to touch the air plug on his life vest. If he pulled it, he thought, it would all be over in a few minutes.
At 10:30 a.m., Shane Walker, a Coast Guard rescue swimmer, took off from Elizabeth City in the third helicopter dispatched that morning.
In several attempts at rescuing people at sea, he had never found anyone alive. He prayed for his safety, for his crew and for the men in the water.
Lord, if I were in that water, I'd want someone to find me, he thought. But he knew that in rough seas, it was like finding a penny in a field of tall grass. His eyes almost burned as he scanned the choppy sea, knowing that if he blinked, he could miss what might be only a momentary flash of color.
Nearly seven hours had gone by when Boyer, who isn't very religious, decided there was nothing else he could do but pray. He hunkered down in the waves and asked God for help.
He couldn't hear anything for the howling sea, but something told him to turn around and look up.
And there was the chopper.
The pilot had been the first to see it: a flash of color from an arm or elbow in the water. And just as he spotted it, Walker's heart thumped in his chest.
``Hey, I've got a man at 9 o'clock,'' he sang out.
As the basket splashed into the water, Boyer swam for it and climbed in. As he swung up into the chopper, there was a big smile on his swollen face.
``I love you guys,'' he shouted, then lay back.
The sleep that had escaped him for days came down like a curtain.
A few hundred yards away, Phinney was making deals with his maker. He'd double his tithe to the church. He'd straighten up in lots of ways, be more forthright with people. Whatever might help get him out of that ocean.
Then he saw the chopper, too.
Walker dropped down to him and had to wrestle the big man into the basket. When they got him up to the helicopter, they could see he was having difficulty breathing, so they gave him oxygen.
At the hospital in Elizabeth City, Becky was worried sick and couldn't eat. She thought of having to tell Keith's family, of going to his funeral. It didn't help much that a counselor came to see her and talk about the guilt she might feel as a survivor.
The others had gone to eat, and she was by herself when she saw Laurie, one of the nurses, pick up a phone.
``They did?'' Laurie yelped.
When the nurse turned to her with a radiant smile, Becky knew the answer.
All seven were safe, but not the Alexandria. She had found her rest in the sea. ILLUSTRATION: Drawing
JOHN EARLE/The Virginian-Pilot
Color photos
The Alexandria
U.S. COAST GUARD
BETH BERGMAN/The Virginian-Pilot
Yale Iverson, above, owner of the Alexandria, thought he had found a
bargain in the historic ship. Siblings Chris and Rebecca Grandi, at
left, and Keith Boyer, between them, joined the crew in Norfolk.
Drawing
JOHN EARLE/The Virginian-Pilot
Map
VP
Photos
U.S. COAST GUARD
Keith Boyer, 25, watched most of the rescue take place, but the
searchers couldn't see him over the roiling waves. Hours later, the
Coast Guard rescue basket splashed into the water. He swam for it
and climbed in. ``I love you guys,'' he shouted. The sleep he'd
craved for days came down like a curtain.
Harold Phinney, 62, was one of two crew members who spent hours in
the water before being rescued. By the time rescuers pulled him into
the helicopter, he was having difficulty breathing.
KEYWORDS: ACCIDENT BOAT INJURIES