Quote from the Day 6 report: "According to Svendsen’s testimony on day one of the hearings, Walbridge told him that he planned to wait until the water reached the vessel’s tween deck to abandon the boat. Perhaps he had that ridiculous old sailor’s maxim stuck in his head, “You never step off until you have to step up.” It’s terrible advice and almost never true.

In the early morning on Sunday the 28th, the third mate reported to his captain that they were “not keeping up with the water.” That’s called progressive flooding, otherwise known as sinking. Notifying the Coast Guard then would have given the crew what they didn’t have by the time Bounty was half full of water and unstable: options. It would have given them time for an orderly abandon ship, one done on purpose – during daylight hours – and not at the mercy of ten miles of flailing line and tons of mast and debris.

The last to testify yesterday (and break my heart) was twenty-five-year-old Jessica Hewitt. Talking through tears she told the panel about her ordeal with the rigging and about the slamming rig dragging her underwater, then about the miraculous escape from the rig and swimming with her friends away from the hulking wreck. She almost drowned, too. They all had the same story: they all came so close to dying, so much closer than they really needed to.

Invariably, what had to be the two hardest questions from the panel came near the end: “When was the last time you saw Robin Walbridge?” and, “When was the last time you saw Claudene Christian?” So far, no one remembers seeing either of them in the water; the cost of waiting, I guess. They all left the boat in such chaos, thrown from her decks as she suddenly rolled to starboard. Listening to Hewitt cry as she relived the ordeal, all I could think was that they all should have been long gone by then."

Fascinating reading.