Crippled by the brutal wind and waves of Hurricane Sandy, the HMS Bounty was sinking.

Capt. Robin Walbridge had ordered his crew of 15 to abandon ship in the early morning of October 29, 90 miles off North Carolina.

Searching the ship a final time before escaping to a waiting lifeboat, a crew member peered through the captain's rarely opened door. There she noticed that Walbridge's treasured framed photograph of his wife, Claudia McCann, was missing from its place on his desk.

During the escape from the 50-year-old wooden ship, the captain clearly had taken his prized picture with him.

Now, four months later, that story about her husband's final moments still touches McCann. "Of all the things he could have grabbed, I guess a picture wasn't going to weigh him down," she said last week from her 1930s historic home in St. Petersburg. "But it was going to be with him."

Wearing a medallion carved with the image of the Bounty, McCann, who never took her husband's name, shared stories she's been hearing from survivors of the shipwreck.

As the U.S. Coast Guard begins hearings Tuesday in Portsmouth, Virginia, to determine if negligence was involved, McCann is defending Walbridge against criticism that his decisions somehow put the ship at risk.

On October 29, the three-masted replica of an 18th-century ship -- which starred in classic movies such as Marlon Brando's "Mutiny on the Bounty" and Johnny Depp's "Pirates of the Carribean" -- was threatened by a real-life drama as it took on water and lost power.

At one point when Walbridge was below deck, enormous waves tossed the vessel, slamming the captain into a table, said McCann. Walbridge, 63, was so seriously injured that he needed help putting on his rescue suit and life jacket as he prepared to abandon ship.

McCann said crew members' accounts conflict about whether or not the captain ever was able to escape the Bounty before it went down.