Hurricane Sandy sank the HMS Bounty last month, killing the wooden ship's captain and a crew member and ripping out part of Kenn Anderson's heart.
Long ago, when all he was looking for was just a little adventure, Mr. Anderson threw his body and soul into rebuilding the replica ship constructed for the Hollywood movie starring Marlon Brando.
A Navy veteran from North Scranton who survived a shipwreck himself once, Mr. Anderson's voice quivers when he thinks of the tall ship submerged at sea perhaps 90 miles or more southeast of Cape Hatteras, N.C. He aches for close friends, Bounty Capt. Robin Walbridge, 63, missing and presumed dead, and fellow ship enthusiast Claudene Christian, 42, found unconscious and pronounced dead.
"It's just a giant hole in my life," Mr. Anderson said.
Fourteen other crew members survived. They probably hold many of the answers to exactly what happened. The Coast Guard will host a formal inquiry. A surviving crew member told the Nelson County (Va.) Times the ship was taking on more water than normal and had lost power to an engine and water pumps.
Mr. Anderson saw the remaining crew members at a memorial service in Florida, but they did not speak of what happened.
"I've run through worse storms with Robin on that ship - 2010, going from Maine to Puerto Rico; higher winds, taller seas," Mr. Anderson said. "Nothing really surprises me about what can happen at sea, but something other than the storm happened. I don't know what. I don't want to speculate what that was that caused the ship to sink. But the storm alone didn't cause the ship to sink. Something else failed."
His home is loaded with Bounty memorabilia - books, a copy of its schematics, pieces of the ship itself, a miniature, gold-plated model and thousands of pictures, including him hale and hardy on the deck with the kind of bushy beard so familiar on sailors from days gone by.
As a memorial to Bounty, a lot of his memorabilia will be on display Friday at 6 p.m. at Care Net of Scranton, 310 Adams Ave., its contribution to the monthly First Friday celebration.
Mr. Anderson's connection to Bounty is improbable.
He grew up in Haddon Heights, N.J., and joined the Navy. A radio man on the U.S.S. Rich, he was ready to recommit for another tour when the Rich met near disaster. On July 12, 1977, on its way to the Caribbean, a rudder problem spun her into a collision with the oiler Caloosahatchee, according to a Navy history website. The damage was all above the waterline and the Rich limped back to port, but after the accident Mr. Anderson told the captain he decided against re-enlisting.
"I told him, 'You know what? I think I'd rather have a plane ticket,'" he said. "He said, 'You know what? I agree with you on that.'"
That was supposed to be that. Mr. Anderson started civilian life, and arrived here to study at Baptist Bible College. Raising a family interrupted college so he held odd jobs until he taught himself architectural and mechanical design and landed a job at Acker Drill. He learned automated computer-assisted design and eventually started his own company teaching AutoCAD to others.
That's about where his life was in June 1998, when he read a short story about a replica tall ship, the H.M. Bark Endeavour, in The (Scranton) Sunday Times.
The original ship, captained by James Cook, sailed the world more than two centuries earlier. Australians rebuilt it and decided to do it again and Mr. Anderson thought it "would be really cool" to join them.
"My wife said, 'Once in a lifetime opportunity, you know, you'll never have a chance to do this again.'" Mr. Anderson said.
He met the Endeavour in New Bedford, Mass., and sailed to Portsmouth, N.H., with its operators letting the tourists steer the ship and inspect its innards.
"The wind will shift and all hands will be called to climb the mast and it just happens over and over again. You're doing regular maintenance; you're sanding, painting, you're swabbing the deck," he said. "Came home from that fully pumped about tall ship sailing and everything that I had learned."
All winter long, he regaled his wife, Ruth, and daughters, Rebecca, Rachel and Debbie with tales of his experience. He showed them how to tie the kind of knots needed on a large ship, the kind that must be so precise that someone else can untie them just by feeling them in the darkness of an ocean voyage.
By the end of the winter, Rebecca and Rachel were tying the knots and wishing they could travel on Endeavour. The next summer, they all joined Endeavour on the west coast.
Then, the trip was over and Endeavour was gone, but Mr. Anderson couldn't give it up. He longed for another ship.
He found the Bounty.
The original Bounty, built in 1784, became infamous when its captain, Lt. William Bligh, was the victim of a mutiny by its acting sailing master Fletcher Christian. Two centuries later, Hollywood filmed movies about the story.
In 1962, a remake, "Mutiny On The Bounty," starred Mr. Brando and the new HMS Bounty, a replica built for the movie - 180 feet long, 28 feet wide and 115 feet tall from waterline to mast top, a third larger than original.
The original plot called for the replica's burning, but Mr. Brando objected.
"Marlon Brando said, 'If you burn this beautiful ship, I will not finish the movie,'" he said.
Bounty survived, turned into a tourist attraction, served as the ship in the 1989 remake of "Treasure Island" and eventually landed in the hand of a foundation, which is where Bob Hansen found it.
In February 2001, Mr. Hansen, a Long Island, N.Y,, air conditioning manufacturing company owner, bought the wreck of a replica for $300,000. He was looking to restore it.
Mr. Anderson had his next commission.
"She was worm-eaten, she was leaking like a sieve, needed a total engine upgrade, tanks upgraded, everything needed to be changed out," Mr. Anderson said.
Over the next 17 months, at Boothbay Harbor, Maine, Mr. Anderson and others restored the ship. At one point, Mr. Anderson spent two entire months on the ship, including on 9/11.
At home, he carved its four cannon carriages out of a felled oak tree he bought.
By late summer 2002, the Bounty was back in the water. After that, Mr. Anderson returned regularly as a crew member. Daughters, Rebecca and Rachel, often joined him and eventually met their husbands on the ship. Rachel earned a captain's license.
The ship resumed its movie career, doubling as the Edinburgh Trader, the ship on which the beautiful Elizabeth Swan stowed away in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," the second in the series of popular films starring Johnny Depp.
The movies are fanciful escapes from reality.
For Mr. Anderson, that's sort of what the Bounty was. On the Bounty, unlike in his business, others told him what to do. He could relax. Often, he pictured himself in the 1700s and wondered what it was like, most vividly during a staged cannon fight on Lake Erie in 2004 with the Niagara, the reconstructed flagship of Pennsylvania. The original Niagara won the Battle of Lake Erie in the War of 1812.
In the basement workshop where he fashioned the cannon carriages, Mr. Anderson holds out a foot-long section of the original railing of the reconstructed Bounty. He picks up a broken carriage wheel. Each carriage had four wheels, all showing their age.
"Some of them were cracked and seeing a lot of wear, so I was going to build another 16 wheels this winter. And," he said, pausing, "Now I won't."
Contact the writer: bkrawczeniuk@timesshamrock.com