Robin Walbridge was lost overboard when replica tall ship foundered in hurricane seas, killing another crew member
The US Coast Guard has suspended its search for Robin Walbridge, 63, the missing captain of the replica tall ship HMS Bounty, which sank in heavy seas stirred up by hurricane Sandy.
Fourteen crew members were rescued from life rafts by coast guard helicopters on Monday but Walbridge and another crew member, Claudene Christian, were washed overboard before they could make it to the rafts.
Christian, 42, was pulled from the sea later and flown to hospital, where she was pronounced dead.
"Our thoughts and prayers are with the Walbridge and Christian families," Captain Doug Cameron, chief of incident response for the Coast Guard 5th District, said in a statement. "Suspending a search and rescue case is one of the hardest decisions we have to make."
Crews searched more than 90 hours and covered about 12,000 square nautical miles in the Atlantic Ocean, the coast guard said.
All members of the crew wore buoyant survival suits and water temperatures were about 25C (77F), raising hopes Walbridge might be found.
The three-masted, 55-metre ship built for the 1962 movie Mutiny On The Bounty had been on its way from New London, Connecticut, to its winter berth in St Petersburg, Florida, and was about 160 miles (260km) from the eye of the hurricane when it was overwhelmed by the stormy seas.
The original Bounty, a British transport square rigger, is famed for a mutiny in 1789. Marlon Brando starred as lead mutineer Fletcher Christian in the movie for which the replica was built.
In a short video of Walbridge posted on the Bounty's Facebook page this week, he described being captain of the Bounty as "probably one of the greatest jobs in the world".
Walbridge worked on the Bounty for 17 years, said his wife, Claudia McCann. "That was his passion," she said.