‘We’d yell, “Jump!” ’
High-seas drama as crew rescued from crippled tall ship
About four hours into the rescue of his disabled replica pirate ship off the coast of Gloucester, Mass., on Monday, Ryan Tilley, the 24-year-old captain, radioed some bleak news to the U.S. Coast Guard crew towing the battered schooner back to shore.
The masts, whose sails had become an entangled mess in cutting winds and gnarly waves, could snap at any time and hurtle down onto the deck, potentially sinking the 26-metre vessel.
They agreed to cut the towline — and abandon ship.
“He was actually very calm for the situation that was going on,” Petty Officer First Class John Borzilleri, who was steering the rescue boat, recalled on Tuesday. “I expected more panic.”
For the Tilley family of Halifax, N.S., this wasn’t their first adventure — or misadventure — on the high seas.
“My mom would always say, ‘the sea is in our bones,’ ” Nora Tilley, Ryan’s relieved grandmother, said Tuesday.
Her son, Joseph Tilley, Ryan’s father, is a navy veteran. It was always his dream to own a tall ship after retirement. So when he saw a hull languishing in a Texas shipyard in 2005, he snatched it up and transformed it into a vessel straight out of the 1700s, the era of Black-Beard, Captain Kidd and other notorious pirates.
The family named the schooner Liana’s Ransom after the beloved dog, Ransom, that Joseph’s wife, Liana, had taken in years ago.
To finance the ship, the Tilleys began offering guests day trips and weekly charters to the Caribbean. Their website promises a “swashbuckling” good time, including the ability to “fire the cannons, swing from the yardarm, hoist the sails, or walk the plank.”
But on more than one occasion, the family’s fantastical voyages have run into real-life drama.
Last December, the Caribbean-bound family escaped injury when the ship’s main mast crashed down in the middle of the night in bad weather. The Canadian Coast Guard towed the battered vessel back to port.
The roles had been reversed earlier that summer. The family — dressed in full pirate regalia — came to the rescue of a young couple who became stranded while swimming in the frigid waters of Georgian Bay in Ontario.
But this week, it was Liana’s Ransom and its crew that needed to be rescued again.
Not long after the ship departed Nova Scotia Friday evening, bound again for the Caribbean, three of the nine crew members became overwhelmed with seasickness, Ryan Tilley said.
Things worsened when the port engine stalled and the starboard engine wasn’t giving much thrust, slowing the ship to a crawl. Then the oil pressure dropped.
The crew tried to hoist the sails but ended up ripping the foresail and the headsail. And a horizontal boom holding up the mainsail went vertical, causing the sail to
Taking people off a boat that’s rolling like that [has risk of serious injury]
get entangled in the rigging and lines.
“We were completely without propulsion at that point,” Mr. Tilley said.
Just after midnight on Monday, the U.S. Coast Guard’s command centre in Boston received a distress call from the ship, which was drifting about 90 kilometres off the coast.
About 3:45 a.m., a rescue team from the Gloucester station was sent to help. At times, the waves swelled to three metres and winds clocked in at 55 kilometres an hour, Petty Officer Borzilleri said.
The stranded vessel was “rocking and rolling, bobbing like a cork.”
The rescue crew attached a 122-metre towline and began the slow trek back to shore. But four hours in, Mr. Tilley radioed the rescue boat to report that two bobstays — the ropes that provide a source of tension to keep sails up — had ripped. And the bowsprit, which is linked to the ship’s cable system, had begun to break apart.
The masts were rocking back and forth and the integrity of the whole ship was now in jeopardy.
The rescue boat circled back. It didn’t take long for all parties to agree that Liana’s Ransom’s crew should abandon ship. All crew members put on full-body immersion suits.
By this time, another Coast Guard rescue boat, piloted by Petty Officer First Class Rick Bowen, arrived on scene. They took turns steering their rescue boats up to the side of the vessel and taking one passenger each time. Timing was critical. “It was pretty tricky,” Petty Officer Bowen recalled. “We had to wait for a window or lull in the seas and then move in there.
“We’d yell, ‘ Jump!’ and they’d jump onto the boat.”
It was a challenging rescue, agreed Petty Officer Borzilleri. “Taking people off a boat that’s rolling like that, there’s a chance they could get caught between the two boats and they could get seriously injured.”
One of the crew members appeared to hesitate and landed in the water, resulting in a head injury. He was airlifted to hospital as a precaution.
After an hour and a half, everyone was safely off the vessel. It took another two hours to get back to shore.
“They were smiling, happy to be on land,” Petty Officer Bowen said.
A locator beacon was left on Liana’s Ransom so crews could return to tow it back.
In a Facebook post, Joseph Tilley thanked the U.S. Coast Guard for its prompt response and praised his son. “Captain Ryan Tilley made the right call in the best interests of his crew, and as a father I am very proud of the way he and his crew handled the situation,” he wrote.
“As befits a captain, he was the last crew to depart the vessel, ensuring all watertight doors and hatches were closed before he disembarked.”
Resting in a hotel, Ryan Tilley said there never was a point when he panicked. “The worst thing you can do is lose your cool,” he said.
The ship’s last two mishaps, he stressed, are “unrepresentative” of its history.
“It is very seaworthy.”