by Rachel Slade
There was a time when Korinn herself had answered the call of the sea. She was a successful dancer in New York City when, one day, she went down to see the tall ships at South Street Seaport. As soon as she saw the elegant historic sailing vessels moored to the dock, she knew that was where she was meant to be. Korinn quit her job and signed up to work on the HMS Rose, a replica of a twenty-gun Royal Navy ship built in 1757. As a hired hand aboard the three-masted frigate, she was expected to haul and furl the sails, keep the decks and sails clean and mended, and help in the galley.
Late one afternoon, she and another member of the crew were ordered to climb seventy feet up the mast to furl a sail. They’d been working all day and were exhausted, but as the only woman aboard, she wouldn’t complain. At the time, they didn’t tie-in, trying to be as authentic as possible. Leaning over the yardarm, Korinn began pulling up the yards of canvas, her feet supported only by a slack horizontal rope. When her partner accidentally kicked the rope out from under her, she fell. She would have died if it hadn’t been for the chief mate, Robin Walbridge, who violently shoved her into the water right before she hit the deck. She made out with a few cracked ribs and a broken wrist.
Robin later became known as the captain who took the replica of the HMS Bounty out to sea during Hurricane Sandy and died with the ship when she was swamped by the storm.
Shipping out all the time made it difficult for Danielle to keep up relationships, which she valued more than anything. She was gone half the year and began to realize how much she was missing. “She was at a point in her life where she was ready to move on,” her friend says. Danielle wanted to come ashore for good; the ten-week rotation was dragging her down.
“Yeah, she was missing things,” her friend says. “She wanted to be home. She struggled with scheduling, you know? We’d get the calendar out and say, What Christmas are you gonna be here? What Easter are you gonna be here? What summer are you gonna be here? That sort of thing, I think that part was tiring.”
Danielle was home throughout the summer of 2015. She threw parties at night, built bonfires and make s’mores with giant marshmallows. She lazed about in hammocks with her friends and used an app to look at the stars, picking out constellations. Danielle had spent her entire life laughing off things that bothered her. That summer, she laughed a lot.
Still, the specter of another voyage loomed. She refused to talk about life on the ship, but occasionally let her closest friends know how frustrated she was with how much El Faro was being neglected. The four men who’d been fired a few years ago, officers who’d trained and supported Danielle, had taken great pride in keeping the old vessel looking her best. Now no one seemed to care.
But like many mariners, Danielle had developed an addiction to shipping. You’re addicted to the sea, or you’re addicted to the money, or you’re addicted to both. You leave your family for months to drive the huge ships on the open ocean. It’s intense work and the money’s good. You can’t find that kind of rush in an office cubicle. You tell them onshore, I’m quitting in a year. I’m quitting in five years. I’ll find a job on land. But you get into a rhythm, the rhythm of the sea, and you keep going.
Danielle dreamed of coming home for good but starting a new career would cost a lot of money that she didn’t have. Everything she wanted to try required more schooling, which she couldn’t afford. The pay aboard the ships was too good to walk away from; she wasn’t in a position to start from scratch. She had to keep shipping.
Adding to her frustration that summer was the fact that she was about to lose her home. For years, she’d been living with her two cats in her mother’s Rockland house. But now her mother, who’d moved to Wisconsin with her boyfriend, told Danielle that she was selling it. The whole situation upset Danielle. Her grandmother and great-aunt had passed away; her mother was halfway across the country pursuing a new life. Her home, her only anchor, was slipping away.
Late in the summer, Danielle learned that she hadn’t been assigned to the new LNG ships. Instead, she was slated to ship out to Alaska with the decrepit El Faro. And Captain Davidson.
There was something else bothering her that summer. During her previous tour of duty, in the spring of 2015, it happened again.
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
Collision Course
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 pict
ures 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.”
This exchange is one of the most contentious pieces of El Faro saga. Much time has been spent parsing Davidson’s apparent request to take the Old Bahama Channel home, which he did via email earlier that morning to multiple managers at TOTE’s Jacksonville office. Did he actually need the company’s permission to reroute? His request was carefully worded and thoughtful:
“I would like to transit the old Bahama Channel on our return North bound leg to Jacksonville? This route adds approximately 160 nautical miles to the route for a total of 1,261 nautical miles. We need to make around 21 knots for the sch
eduled 10:05, 10:45 arrival time at Jacksonville pilot station.
I have monitored Hurricane Joaquin tracking erratically for the better part of a week. Sometime after 9/30 0200 she began a southwesterly track early this morning. Adjusted our direct normal route in a more southeasterly direction towards San Juan, Puerto Rico, which will put us 65 plus/minus nautical miles south of the eye. Joaquin appears to be tracking now as forecasted and I anticipate us being on the backside of her by 10/01 0800.
Presently, conditions are favorable and we’re making good speed. All departments have been duly notified as before. I have indicated a later than normal arrival time in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Anticipating some loss in speed throughout the night. I will update the ETA tomorrow morning during our regular pre-arrival report to San Juan Port, etc.”
Was Davidson planning to plow through in spite of the looming hurricane because he felt pressure to get to Puerto Rico on time? Had TOTE chastised him for playing it safe and going through the Old Bahama Channel in August during Tropical Storm Erika?
TOTE maintains that scheduling was never an issue. The captain is in complete command of the ship and its route. TOTE says that in all instances, safety comes first. The company claims that this email exchange was simply a formality—regardless of how one might read it, Davidson had full command of his vessel and his course. He did not need permission to take a different route.
That may be true at TOTE, but most ship’s masters I interviewed tell a different story. Although a few can’t believe that a company would pressure anyone to go into a storm, most captains (both foreign and domestic) say that fending off schedulers and managers is simply part of the job. The office worries about customers and profits; captains worry about everything else. Sometimes their interests diverge.
A captain’s best attitude, my sources say, is the one that keeps crew and cargo safe. With pride, they’ve told their schedulers: You can find another captain or fire me, but I’m not putting this ship or cargo in danger. I can always find another job. They say that it’s absurd to take orders from a person sitting behind a desk. He or she can’t see what’s going on at sea, usually lacks nautical experience, and can’t imagine the conditions the crew is dealing with. Sure, the ship might be able to pull through a weather system, but if a new car breaks loose and smashes up fifty others, would it really matter that they arrived on time?