Out of the serene darkness that enveloped the ship came a deafening bang that stopped the boat. Everyone aboard knew something was seriously wrong.
Alliance had struck a submerged object that ripped a jagged hole in the hull of the boat, and within minutes the crew was wading ankle-deep in frigid water.
The nine aboard immediately enacted their meticulous emergency plan ― one they had practiced routinely and been quizzed on for months but hoped they’d never have to use.
Get the pumps running to buy a few precious extra minutes. Deploy the inflatable life raft. Grab only what’s essential from the cabin below, leaving personal effects behind. Be prepared to say goodbye to the boat, and try not to think too hard about the haunted looks in the eyes of your fellows.
And hope that help would arrive in time.
▪▪▪
Lydia Mullan, 31, of Somerville was at the helm when Alliance began to take on water during the 2024 Newport Bermuda Race.
Two years removed from that harrowing disaster, she and crewmember Sam Webster, 31, of Cambridge, return this week to the biennial race aboard the Archambault 40 RC Banter, one of the boats that responded to the mayday call that saved their lives.
At 636 nautical miles, the Newport Bermuda is one of the longest and most demanding offshore races in North America. The race, which begins Friday off the shore of Fort Adams State Park in Newport, R.I., dates to 1906, making it the oldest regularly scheduled ocean race in the world.
The grueling trek through the Gulf Stream is one of only two regularly scheduled races held almost entirely out of sight of land. For many sailors, winning the coveted silver lighthouse trophy is the pinnacle of ocean racing.
Alliance and Banter have been intertwined for years. Banter owners Matt and Tori Gimple have sailed on Alliance, and they count many of the people who were aboard that day as close friends.
So the decision to bring Mullan and Webster aboard for this year’s race was a natural evolution of their friendship. But there’s another meaning, too.
“For them, I don’t see it so much as redemption,” Matt Gimple said. “I see it as a continuation and a finishing of unfinished business.”
▪▪▪
It was around 2:45 a.m. on June 23, 2024, the third day of the race, and Alliance was 300 miles into its journey and 300 more from the finish line off St. David’s Lighthouse in Bermuda.
Mullan, standing at the helm, diligently scanned the boat and the sea around her. She marveled at the perfection of the scene: waves cresting at 7 to 8 feet, a clear, moon-lit sky.
Then, a bone-rattling noise rang out.
The boat shuddered and stopped. Mullan was flung forward into the wheel. The tension was gone; she knew they had lost steering. The crew below deck smelled burning fiberglass.
“You have this sudden feeling that this is bad,” said Mullan, “that this fragile thing in a hostile environment is suddenly in danger.”
The crew thinks Alliance hit something large and metal, though they’ll never be certain. It ripped through the rudder’s housing.
They realized quickly they were going to lose the boat, and they were too far from shore for the Coast Guard to reach them. They had only their competitors to rely on for help.
Alliance co-owner Mary Martin issued the mayday call. Catastrophic damage. Nine souls aboard.
“You hear it on the radio, you could hear it in the movies or anything like that,” said Tori Gimple, who heard the call aboard Banter. “But when it’s your friends and you know every one of them, and you’re in the middle of the Gulf Stream, and you know the Coast Guard can’t get there … ”
Banter and another vessel, Ceilidh, were within 4 nautical miles. The Alliance crew did not have time to wait for them to arrive.
This may be the moment you expect the crew to panic. But Martin and co-owner Eric Irwin were meticulous in their preparation: The majority of the crew had sailed more than 1,000 hours together, and nearly all had taken Safety at Sea courses, even though race organizers only required 30 percent of the crew to have done so.
So, instead of chaos, it was calm. Their movements were calculated. Every decision was measured.
Alliance had two electric de-watering pumps on board, though the race only required one ― a decision that bought the crew precious minutes as they waited for help. Webster got both firing right away.
“It was a transition of priorities that happened really fast,” Mullan said. “It went from ‘Our priority is to sail the boat’ to ‘Our priority is to keep the boat afloat long enough for help to get to us.’ ”
Fifty-five minutes after impact, the Alliance crew could see Ceilidh’s lights. They began loading into the cramped life raft, each person with just a few essential items in a drybag.
At 3:45 a.m., exactly an hour after the mayday call, Ceilidh was within reach of the life raft as it heaved over the swells.
The 7-foot waves felt infinitely larger than they had just minutes earlier, making the transfer from raft to vessel much harder. With a chasm of churning water between the raft and the stern of Ceilidh where it was tethered, two Ceilidh crew members grabbed each person from Alliance by the wrists hard enough to leave bruises.
By 4:06 a.m., all nine souls had made it aboard Ceilidh, but their next plan fell apart.
The crews intended to put half the Alliance crew back into the life raft and aboard Banter, the second responding boat. But in the process of the rescue, the upper tube of the raft had been punctured. Another transfer would be too dangerous.
When Banter received word over the radio that all nine people were aboard Ceilidh, the crews agreed to stay close in case anything else went wrong.
Matt Gimple turned to his Banter crew and gave them 10 minutes to collect themselves. There was still a race to finish.
“And then we look over, and there’s Ceilidh, and they’re putting their sails up,” Tori Gimple said. “ ‘We’re going to resume racing’ comes on the radio.”
“And I go, ‘You’ve got five minutes,’ ” Matt said.
▪▪▪
The first brush of daylight had just broken over a blue horizon. A satellite phone was passed around. Family members of the Alliance had been notified when the mayday came in, but this was the crew’s first chance to make contact.
For the next 52 hours, there were 16 people on a boat meant to be crewed by seven. The adrenaline that kept the Alliance crew running through the past three-plus hours began to wear off, and the gravity of it all began to set in.
“We suddenly didn’t have control over the situation ― not that you really have control over a boat that’s sinking underneath you, but we knew our boat really well,” Mullan said. “And then once we were on that other boat, and suddenly everything’s out of your control and unfamiliar, is when you start to feel really anxious.”
The crew of Ceilidh wanted to finish the race. And regardless, going back across the Gulf Stream to the United States would have been near impossible. But they worried the race committee would disqualify the boat if the Alliance sailors helped with the actual racing, so while the Ceilidh crew navigated toward Bermuda, the Alliance crew tried to stay out of the way.
“As any sailor knows, you don’t start counting your cards until you’re back at the dock,” said RJ Graef, one of the crew of Ceilidh. “Just because they were on our boat didn’t mean it was over for them. They were still in it, whether they liked it or not.”
The inside of the cabin felt like a sauna. The conditions were rough, and everyone was soaked. Spare clothes would’ve taken up too much space on the life raft.
The sailors battled through the heat and close quarters below deck for a few precious moments of sleep when they could. The Alliance crew packed in like sardines on the floor, and Graef and his brother Austin slept in a cockpit storage locker.
When Ceilidh crossed the finish line, the crew received an ovation from the throngs of people on the docks. They strung up Ceilidh’s flag with an Alliance flag below it and celebrated that night as if it were a normal party after a normal race.
“We had made it to Bermuda, and they could start to digest what they went through,” Austin Graef said. “It hit a lot of the people on Alliance once we stepped onto the dock.”
At one point, the noise became overwhelming for Mullan, so she broke from the celebration and walked alone onto the docks. At the sight of Ceilidh, she was overtaken by a sob and vomited into the black water. For the rest of her time in Bermuda, she threw up every day.
“Five days of hell in paradise,” she said.
▪▪▪
It’s a serene early-June morning at Stonington Harbor Yacht Club in Connecticut, and the docks are abuzz with movement. A light breeze drifts through as boats sway in their slips to a soundtrack of seagull calls and the periodic clink of metal hardware against carbon fiber masts.
A half-dozen crews shuffle up and down the docks, carrying overloaded drybags and totes full of supplies to their vessels in preparation for the weekend of racing ahead.
The Banter crew is itching to get on the water. They’re using this race, a quick (by offshore standards) jaunt to Block Island, as a warm-up for the Newport Bermuda and one last chance to make sure everyone is working in lock step.
In the slip farthest from shore the crew gathers, Mullan and Webster among them, wearing royal blue tech shirts with the name of the boat on their chests and an illustration of it on the back.
Mullan and Webster had been back on the water two weeks after they returned to Boston from the doomed race. Bill Kneller, who had been on watch with Mullan when they hit the object in the Gulf Stream, invited them on his boat.
Saying no wasn’t even a consideration.
“If we didn’t jump back on the horse, we were going to lose this thing that we really love in our lives, and it was going to become a source of even more trauma,” Mullan said.
Webster knew pretty much immediately after 2024 that he wanted to do Newport Bermuda again this year, and signed on quickly.
But the trauma of the sinking and the 52 hours that followed continued to haunt Mullan.
For months, she would log out of work at 5 p.m., and three hours would pass where she felt as if she had lost consciousness. It would be 8 p.m. and she’d still be sitting at her desk, not knowing where the time had gone. She felt detached from herself, as she was watching her life in third-person perspective. Her sister, a neurologist, said she was showing signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Mullan never sought a diagnosis, but she worked out ways to manage the symptoms. She found a therapist in the fall of that year, and talking through it helped.
But what she really needed was to get back on the water as much as possible, she said, to “rewrite” the experience. So she’s taking on the 636 miles again.
“We’re really grateful to be doing it with Banter,” she said. “We’re really excited to spend some time with them and close the loop and actually get to Bermuda this time. There are a lot of feelings associated with it, of course, but I don’t think there was a question in our minds of whether we were going to do it again.”
There’s nothing to do but press on and keep racing.
Put the sails up. You’ve got five minutes.
Emma Healy can be reached at emma.healy@globe.com or on X @ByEmmaHealy.
