Into the Raging Sea: Thirty-three mariners, one megastorm and the sinking of El Faro

Davidson, a man she never liked, came onto her. He caught up with her when she was alone, cornered her, and said, Will you be my special friend?

Many guys had hit on her during her career. She was a tough girl, her friends say. She could handle it. But when the ship’s captain wants sleep with you, how do you deal with it? How do you delicately push him away without damaging his ego? How do you escape his advances trapped on a ship at sea? What if you pissed him off so much that he got you fired and ruined your professional reputation? It could happen.

She knew exactly how things played out when a woman reported sexual harassment on a ship. Yeah, she could handle it. But behind her back, the guys would wonder what she’d done to lead on the captain. In cases like these, the woman never escapes unscathed.

CHAPTER 7 (#ulink_8fcfa9f5-2682-58d2-b9c8-16ada85e7dc4)

COLLISION COURSE (#ulink_8fcfa9f5-2682-58d2-b9c8-16ada85e7dc4)

27.29°N -77.36°W

At noon, Danielle and helmsman Jackie Jones watched the sky turn a blinding blue. It was a tease. The hot Caribbean waters simmered in the sunlight but beyond, a storm was lingering, festering as Davidson had put it, intensifying off their port bow. It was out there.

The NHC weather report came in around 12:30, sending the printer on the bridge into a temporary frenzy. No change. Joaquin was still lumbering south-southwest, gaining force, with maximum sustained winds now predicted to reach 80 knots by midnight. The storm would be worse than originally thought.

Engineer Jeff Mathias came up to the bridge to check in. He’d been working all morning with the five Polish contractors hired to get the ship ready for the cold Alaskan waters.

Jeff had served as a chief engineer on other ships for several years after graduating from Massachusetts Maritime Academy, but with three young kids at home, he preferred to work on land. In lieu of that, this short, temporary, and lucrative job managing the Polish riding gang on El Faro fit the bill.

“Look at you,” Jeff said to Danielle, gently teasing his fellow New Englander. “All freshened up, huh?”

She laughed and offered him coffee.

For Jeff Mathias, there was nothing like being at sea and the good income that came with it. But since the birth of his first born, he struggled to balance his passion for shipping with his home life. Overseeing the Polish workers was a good compromise because Jeff could do short stints at sea. He’d worked out his shipping schedule earlier that month so that he could be home for his daughter’s first day of school and was scheduled to fly home from San Juan that weekend.

Jeff’s ultimate goal was to turn his family’s struggling cranberry farm into a destination. In the fall during harvest time, elementary school groups visited, usually guided by Jeff’s mom, to learn more about the ancient craft of growing the fruit, first introduced to Massachusetts’s English settlers in the 1600s by the Algonquins. Loaded with vitamin C, cranberries played a critical role in early colonial shipping, consumed by New England’s whalers and sailors to stave off scurvy during long voyages.

Jeff had spent much of his shore time building an elaborate play castle and maze to attract more visitors to the farm’s cranberry bogs. He hoped this would generate additional income to help fight off encroaching real estate development. Just beyond the playhouse and maze, behind a copse of pines, a cul-de-sac of new homes had sprung seemingly overnight. The houses were nearly done but the dirt between the Mathiases’ land and the development was still stripped and raw.

Danielle respected Jeff and his opinions and was relieved to have someone knowledgeable aboard who wasn’t part of the official El Faro command chain. He could speak more freely and could either reassure her that they would be okay or maybe confront the captain if he thought they were in trouble.

In her usual light and girlish tone, she gestured to the BVS graphic: “Do you wanna see the pretty pictures with the pretty-pretty colors?”

When he saw the deep scarlets, intense blues, and bright saffrons on a normally pastel-hued map, Jeff swallowed hard. “Wow, look at that.”

“That’s us,” she said, pointing to their current location. “And that’s the storm,” she said. “This is tomorrow.” She clicked forward in time. The ship and the hurricane were destined to collide.

“Where are we right now?” Jeff asked.

She pointed to a spot forty miles northeast of Grand Bahama island.

“Really?” Jeff said, incredulous that they were heading straight for a storm system.

“Tentative,” she said. “We are taking a track line a little bit further south, down here, so this is where we’re gonna be in the morning,” she said, confirming the direct hit.

Jeff spent some time studying the chart for possible escape routes. He saw a few deepwater channels that would get them out of the way. “Can you duck down between the islands here?”

Danielle knew Davidson. He didn’t have any interest in changing the plan and she told Jeff as much, silently gauging his reaction. Full steam ahead to San Juan.

“Is the captain gonna grab Old Bahama Channel back?” Jeff asked, thinking about how much ocean Joaquin would churn up by Friday night.

“Yeah,” Danielle said. Joaquin was forecast to intensify in a few days, so Davidson wanted to play it safe and sail on the lee of the islands, then skirt the Florida coast all the way back up to Jacksonville. “I think the El Yunque will be taking that route coming back up, too,” she said.

In fact, Davidson had exchanged emails with the captain of El Yunque earlier that day and learned that his ship was sprinting back to Florida along their usual route. As they passed Joaquin, the captain informed him, they experienced gusts in excess of 100 knots. That on-site observation wasn’t consistent with the NHC reports. Computer models and satellite imaging were already failing to accurately capture the rapidly intensifying storm.

What El Faro’s officers needed was a working anemometer, but the one onboard hadn’t worked for some months. Several people had mentioned the problem to TOTE, but a repair or replacement was slow in coming. The ship’s anemometer was so dodgy that Danielle joked to Jeff, “We’ll just stick Jackie Jones out there. We’ll use the Jackie Gauge. If he gets blown off the bridge, we’ll say, Oh, it was about 190 miles per hour.”

Understanding true windspeed and direction can be difficult when you’re moving because you’re creating your own wind. (Think of riding a bicycle on a calm day. Go fast and you’ll feel a breeze. It’s not the wind; it’s you.) An anemometer uses vectors to make the calculation, taking into account the ship’s heading and speed. For example, if an 18-knot wind is at your back and you’re traveling at 18 knots, the apparent wind—the wind you perceive—would be zero, because you’re both moving at the same rate in the same heading. Your vectors cancel each other out.

The anemometer is a critical piece of equipment because true wind direction can tell an experienced mariner where he or she is relative to a major weather system. A quick way to do this can be found in Nathaniel Bowditch’s The American Practical Navigator—a thick navy blue book found aboard nearly every floating vessel. Continuously published since 1802, it’s considered the mariner’s bible. Bowditch describes Buys Ballot’s law, a handy rule of thumb invented by a Dutch meteorologist in 1857 that’s based on the unassailable fact that in the Northern Hemisphere, hurricane winds blow in a counterclockwise direction. The rule says this: When your back is to the wind, stick out your arms, making a T. Your left hand will point to the low, your right to the high. The low, of course, is the hurricane’s center. According to that rule, as long as winds were slamming El Faro’s port side, the crew could safely assume that the hurricane was dead ahead.

In the dark in a hurricane, however, it’s all but impossible to determine true wind direction without an anemometer because the frenzied waves and winds create a chaotic condition, like being inside a Dyson vacuum. From the outside, the larger system makes sense. But when you’re in the middle of it, it’s impossible to organize the powerful forces into a clear, coherent picture.

Jeff considered their situation, but as an extra hand aboard the ship, he couldn’t do much about it. Instead, he worried about how the weather would affect his weekend plans. He was rushing to finish his maze in time for the Halloween rush, and Joaquin could put a kink in his progress.

“The hurricane is going to shoot north after this?” Jeff asked.

“They’re predicting that it will hit New York this Saturday,” Danielle answered. That meant it would probably begin dumping rain on coastal Massachusetts by Saturday night. Jeff might get in a day of work.

Jackie Jones brought their attention back to the ship. He reminded Jeff that the Polish contractors needed to tie up their equipment.

“Absolutely,” Jeff said. “The bottles are secured, pipes are all lashed down. So yeah, that should be all right.”

“Lash down your workers?” Danielle joked.

“They’re all excited,” he answered.

“I don’t think they realize what they’re getting into,” she said with a nervous giggle.

“See what color their heads are tomorrow,” Jackie cracked, and the three had a good laugh. They knew they’d all be green tomorrow, too, if the weather turned as foul as expected.

At 2:30, Davidson came up to the bridge to remind Danielle that he was thinking about taking the Old Bahama Channel on the northbound run back to Jacksonville. Joaquin was forecasted to intensify in a few days, so Davidson wanted to play it safe and sail in the lee of the islands, then hug the Florida coast all the way back up to Jacksonville. He was obsessing about this proposed route change and was anxious to get TOTE’s response to his request. Maybe he thought they’d thank him for being so proactive and conscientious. He was working hard to please the shoreside folks.

“I have to wait for confirmation from the office, but I put it out there,” he said about the rerouting. “And I’ll let you know.”

“Does the company want to give permission now?” Danielle asked, half surprised, half exasperated. “Because it used to be just, We’re doing it. You people are sitting in your office behind a desk and we’re out here. We’re doing it. Hell yeah.”

“Well, I’m extending that professional courtesy because it does add 160 nautical miles to the distance,” said Davidson defensively.

“Yeah, but rerouting also saves stress on the ship,” she said.

Why was she giving him a hard time? “That’s why I just said, ‘Hey, I would like to take this going northbound. I’ll wait for your reply.’ I don’t think they’ll say no. I gave them a good reason why, because if you follow this hurricane track down, then look what it does on October third, fourth, and fifth. And that’s right where we’re going.”

“Yeah, and lightly loaded, it gets even worse,” said Danielle. After unloading in San Juan, El Faro took on mostly empty containers. Without cargo weight, she sat higher in the water and would bounce around in the wind and waves.

“So I just put it out there and we’ll see what happens.”

Davidson didn’t like his second mate’s nervous energy. It rubbed him the wrong way. He had to put this whole thing to rest. “We’re gonna be far enough south that we’re not gonna hit the damn thing,” he declared. “Watch. Gonna get a little rougher, but these ships can take it.”