Rhode Island ferry Ava Pearl rescued off East Chop

Packer tug Sirius assists Sea Tow rescue boats to haul crippled ferry to Vineyard Haven, with 75 passengers aboard.

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Updated May 31 @ 4 pm

The MV Ava Pearl, a Rhode Island Fast Ferry, lost power off East Chop soon after it departed Oak Bluffs on its 11 am Sunday trip to Quonset, R.I. Approximately 75 people were on board.

“She lost both engines and just stopped, that’s all I know,” Ava Pearl’s captain, Tony Bessinger, told The Times at the scene.

Jeff Sherman, commercial sales manager for MTU, the manufacturer of the engines, told The Times that there was an issue with the ferry’s “stop switch.”

In a statement issued Wednesday afternoon by Rhode Island Fast Ferry president Charles Donadio Jr., the loss of power was blamed on “unsecured gear; a portable heater used as an auxiliary window heater, falling into the vessel’s emergency stop buttons.”

The Sea Tow rescue boat Defender, on patrol out of Falmouth, was first to aid the Ava Pearl, according to Captain Ramsey Chason, owner of Sea Tow.

The ferry was backed up to the beach near East Chop with waves breaking, he said. Donadio estimated waves at 3 to 4 feet based on NOAA buoy data, among other things.

Though the ferry was anchored, the situation was tenuous and “perilous,” Chason said. He described the ferry as “at risk of breaking free, setting them on the beach. We came in the nick of time.”

“They’re lucky their anchor held,” Oak Bluffs harbor supervisor Aaron Wilson said. Wilson said the the wind would have otherwise grounded the ferry.

There were no injuries and the Ava Pearl’s crew was widely heralded for its response throughout the incident.

Chason said his boat was able to pull the ferry away from the shoreline with a tow line.

The Ava Pearl was surrounded by more Sea Tow vessels and a Defender-class patrol boat out of Coast Guard Station Woods Hole a little past noon. At that time the Tisbury Towing and Transportation tug Sirius was underway from Vineyard Haven. Captains Randy Jardin, Paul Bangs, and John Packer arrived on scene at about 12:20, with Bangs at the helm. Through the tinted windows of the ferry, passengers could be seen in lifejackets. The tug subsequently picked the MV Ava Pearl “up on the hip,” nautical parlance for an alongside tow, Bangs said, and trundled to Vineyard Haven, with the Coast Guard boat and Sea Tow boats providing escort.

By 1 pm, the Ava Pearl, still rafted to the tug Sirius, was being nudged into place at Tisbury Wharf in Vineyard Haven by Sea Tow boats. Passengers disembarked to waiting taxis. Ralph Packer and several other members of the Packer family greeted the passengers as they stepped off the gangway. The taxis drove the passengers to the Steamship Authority Vineyard Haven terminal. The passengers then crossed for Woods Hole, where buses waited to transport them to Quonset.

The Ava Pearl was moved from Tisbury Wharf to the R.M. Packer marine terminal later in the afternoon, Captain Bangs told The Times.

The vessel cleared a Coast Guard inspection, and has since returned to service, Donadio said.

 

Waves making waves

Exactly how turbulent the sea was when the Ava Pearl went into distress may depend on the eye of the beholder.

“I want to say maybe four to six [feet]. It was pretty rough that morning,” Wilson said.
“Sunday was a complete train wreck. I didn’t go out on Sunday,” charter captain John Potter said. Potter, who has fished out of Oak Bluffs since 1987, estimated the winds at 20 to 25 knots, and the seas at three to five feet. A “tide against wind” effect was at play Sunday, he said, whereby extra chop is created when winds and tides come at each other from opposing directions.

“We skipped two round-trips,” Island Queen general manager Todd Bidwell said. Bidwell said the foulness of the sea conditions did not reflect what maritime reports indicated they would be. The last departure the Island Queen made before the cancellations began was 11:05. The crossing “was very rough,” he said.

Steamship Authority general manager Robert Davis confirmed several ferries were diverted from Oak Bluffs to Vineyard Haven because of the weather.

“They were a little rough, but they went OK,” Hy-Line vice president Murray Scudder said of his company’s Sunday crossings. Scudder said Hy-Line canceled one boat run, on the MV Vineyard Lady out of Oak Bluffs, because of the weather. This was because it wasn’t fitted with the “ride control” other Hy-Line ferries have, which makes tossing seas “less rough on the passengers.”

At 11:49 am, the Coast Guard pegged the seas off Oak Bluffs at four feet with a steady seven-knot wind, gusting to nine knots, according to Ensign Nathan Mendes. The temperature was 59°, he said.

In an email to The Times, Donadio provided a NOAA buoy chart indicating the closest Nantucket Sound data buoy to the vicinity of the Ava Pearl incident registered wave heights at 4.3 feet.

“Our crew handled this situation perfectly,” Donadio said. “They did everything right. It was a freak thing that happened.”

Bangs agreed with Donadio’s assessment of the Ava Pearl crew.

“They all did exactly what they should have done,” he said, and included the work of Sea Tow in his appraisal.

Bangs estimated the seas at “four to five feet — every now and then maybe something bigger.” He emphasized that estimate was what he encountered when he arrived with the Sirius to assist the Sea Tow rescue. He did not witness conditions “around the corner” near the East Chop Beach Club, where the Ava Pearl was towed after cutting anchor.

“I’m sure it was a lot worse than what we were dealing with,” he said. Closer to the beach, the waves could have been larger, he said: “You’re on a lee shore with a lot of windage.”

Harbormaster Todd Alexander said he did not think the waves were close to eight to 10 feet. But he did say it was windy — “20 to 30 knots, east, northeast, which is sort of the low side of a nor’easter.”

Alexander said he was on the phone with Donadio during the incident. “Something with his [engine] kill switch, for whatever reason, killed his engines,” he said.

“There was definitely a problem with the stop switch,” Sherman told The Times.

The stop button itself is protected by a covering, and is located on the bridge, from which it is wired to the engines.

MTU troubleshot the problem remotely by consulting with Rhode Island Fast Ferry personnel over the phone, Sherman said. “There were no mechanical problems with the engine whatsoever,” he said.

Peter Duclos, co-owner of Gladding-Hearn Shipbuilding, the Somerset company that built the Ava Pearl, was stunned by the improbable nature of the double button hit (one for each engine).

“I’ve never in my 30-plus year career heard of such a thing,” he said.

Duclos said buttons were a few inches apart from each other, and a “very common” commercial and marine detail.

Alexander said the Ava Pearl’s crew did its job. “It could have been worse — certainly not on par with the ferry that ran up on the jetty last year.”

According to the company’s website, Rhode Island Fast Ferry high-speed service to the Vineyard began in 2003. A family-owned business, it also operates sightseeing cruises in Narragansett Bay, and includes a charter services division, with a vessel currently in Bermuda. The site says it will soon offer high-speed ferry service to Block Island, as well as operating crew transfer vessels supporting offshore wind farms off the East Coast.

Donadio said his company currently has a vessel of the same class as the 108.6-foot Ava Pearl under construction at Gladding-Hearn. He expects it to be completed next spring. Assets from Station Menemsha and Air Station Cape Cod, as well as the 87-foot cutter Hammerhead from Station Woods Hole, readied to deploy to the Ava Pearl scene, Petty Officer Nicole Groll said, but “got stood down” as the emergency decreased.

A professional diver inspected the underside of the ferry Sunday afternoon, and found no apparent damage, Ralph Packer said.

Bangs said the port side bow rail took significant damage when the Ava Pearl anchor was tossed overboard urgently, and that was completely understandable.

Chason summed up the incident as a close call for the passengers, the vessel, and the fuel aboard.

“That was a huge bullet dodged,” he said.

This story has been updated taking out a quote on the size of the waves that could not be corroborated. It was also updated to include the may day call. – Ed.