by Rachel Slade
“Kiss those containers good-bye.”
Chapter 10
Captain Michael Davidson
Michael Davidson grew up on the coast of Maine where sea captains once ruled both land and sea. Their stately homes—built on majestic sites overlooking the water—still stand as reminders of a glorious shipping past. Driving up Route 1, you can’t help noticing their prominent manses, many of which have been converted to inns named for the captains who built them: the Captain Swift Inn in Camden; Searsport’s Captain A.V. Nickels Inn; and Kennebunkport’s Captain Jefferds Inn. All summer long, No Vacancy signs hang from sturdy wood posts.
In 1829, eleven-year-old John P. Nichols, for one, left his Maine home for a life at sea. When he retired as a captain thirty-six year later, he built a 10,000 square-foot twelve-bedroom Italianate home with multiple fireplaces, servants’ quarters, and gilded accents, all topped with an airy cupola in Searsport overlooking Penobscot Bay. Nichols’s house is now an inn, listed for sale in 2017 for $829,000, triple the price of most area homes.
Searsport was a natural place for the nineteenth century captain to settle down. During Nichols’s lifetime, the town was renowned for producing intrepid ship’s officers and swift, multi-masted schooners. Now it’s a few sharp bends in the road. You can pick up a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee at the big gas station on the hill or buy some scratch tickets at Tozier’s Family Market, which looks like it hasn’t been touched since the Johnson administration. A modest maritime museum, closed in winter, hints at the town’s illustrious past.
Arguably, the days of the respected ship captain ended with the age of sail. Now, mariners tell me, people on land consider them “ocean truckers”—working-class people earning police officer’s wages, who move cheap underwear from China to your local Walmart. The mystique of life at sea has vanished.
On ships, however, the captain is still called “master.”
As a boy, Davidson loved being on the water. He was a strong swimmer—a daredevil who impressed his friends by diving into the foam churned up by propellers of departing boats. His father, Sam Davidson, was the go-to accountant for Portland’s fishermen, and a founding board member of the city’s fish exchange. He was the proverbial big fish in Portland’s small pond, which gave his son a sense of entitlement at an early age.
Mike earned his degree from Maine Maritime Academy in 1988, then took a job as a deckhand on the Casco Bay Lines ferries that shuttled people and cars around the small islands along the Maine coast. The ferries docked in South Portland within earshot of Mike’s father’s office. Eventually, Mike served as a deck officer aboard ConocoPhillips tankers in the Pacific Northwest. That job was his life, but he lost it over a dispute with a fellow officer. He then sailed with TOTE in 2005 for five years, took an interim job, then rejoined TOTE in 2013 as a third mate. When TOTE fired Captain Hearn as captain of El Morro, Davidson assumed his role. When that ship was scrapped in May 2014, Davidson became master of El Faro. By September 2015, due to the ten-week on/ten-week off schedule, he’d sailed on that particular vessel for less than one year.
Davidson made a good living, enough to maintain a forty-one-hundred-square-foot home on a cul-de-sac in a quiet Portland suburb for his wife, Theresa, and their two athletic daughters. But now that the girls were in college, expenses were high. He had two BMWs in the driveway, tuition bills, taxes. Mastering container ships paid up to $150,000, if you could get the work. Mariners who knew Davidson told me that he often complained that the money never went far enough. Like many middle-class Americans, Mike couldn’t quite get his head above water.
Some people are born lucky, some not. Mike Davidson’s mistakes had a bad habit of catching up with him. In his twenties, he got a string of speeding tickets. And one time, he grounded a Casco Bay’s ferry on a shallow shoal. He had to ask a local fisherman where he was. If you knew the area, a Portland-based sailor told me, you’d never wander in there.
As a captain, Mike rubbed some of his colleagues the wrong way. He liked to have control over his ship and ran it according to his own highly regimented schedule. Davidson was a stickler for rules and safety protocols, but his meticulous nature, and need for control, could be misinterpreted as arrogance. One mariner told me, “I had friends who sailed with him. Things didn’t always go so well. He had to move on. Bravado. That’s all I can think of. You gotta check that at the gate when you join the ship. Do it at home. You can’t do it on the ship. I’m the captain. Yeah, everybody knows you are.”
Although he demanded respect from his officers, he had a reputation for spending most of his time in his stateroom; it was rumored that he constantly played video games. The best captains spent their time working closely with their officers and crew, running drills, and training those below them. Davidson’s lack of engagement communicated apathy which, in turn, undermined his authority.
Managing a commercial ship requires serious skills—you’re working with people with a broad range of education levels and economic backgrounds. Your officers may be distinguished maritime academy grads with families; some of your crew might be rough loners with high school degrees who only ship out to dry out. A major rift can develop between the engineers toiling below and the deck officers working above, as each views the other with suspicion and contempt. An even greater split can fall along racial lines. The demanding 24/7 work schedule, especially on a short liner run like the Jacksonville to Puerto Rico route, can exhaust the crew.
A weak leader can provoke defiance or complacency.
Davidson was exquisitely sensitive about how others saw him and just as defensive. In May 2015, two young coast guard officers took a few rides on El Faro and made observations about the crew as part of their training. One, Kimberly Beisner, testified that during one of those rides, she’d written in her workbook under “morale” that the crew seemed to simply do their jobs and return to their rooms. Davidson bristled at what he thought she was implying about his leadership skills. He told her that her presence made the crew uncomfortable. He said that usually they played cards and watched TV together, but since Kimberly came aboard, they were acting differently.
When his comments to Kimberly got around to the crew, many of them went out of their way to privately contradict the captain and reassure the young officer that no, she didn’t make them uncomfortable; Davidson did. He was a hothead, got angry on a dime. If anyone was making the crew uncomfortable, it was the captain.
Life seemed to continually deal Davidson bad hands. He thought people were out to get him. He wasn’t always wrong about that.
Shipping is brutal, especially at the top of the food chain. Officers get paid according to rank, not experience. Since the bottom fell out of the oil industry a few years ago, lucrative tanker jobs like Davidson’s ConocoPhillips gig dried up. Pipelines are taking away more of those choice shipping routes.
When you reach the top of the heap—captain of a container ship—you can’t relax. You watch your back because that chief mate standing next to you may be waiting for a chance to knock you off your block. A lot of mariners are forced to sail below their license—captains work as second mates, chief mates sail third—because they need the work, need the money, or can’t stand the sound of guys sharpening their knives.
Throughout his career, Davidson was convinced people were trying to edge him out of promotions or undermine his authority. When he thought another officer at Conoco was pushing him out of his captain’s job, Davidson left a message on the guy’s voice mail threatening to kill him, which the mate simply played back to the company’s human resources department. Davidson lost his job.
His worst fears came true again in 2015.
That spring, he had interviewed with TOTE for the position of captain aboard one of their two brand-new ships, and he considered himself a strong contender. The ships were a new class of vessels called Marlins, built in San Diego, designed to burn liquid natural gas (LNG) and diesel. They were commissioned by TOTE in 2012 to replace the heavy-oil-chuggin
g El Faro in the Puerto Rico trade. They were just about ready for their sea trials, and TOTE hoped to get the first one fully operational by the end of the year.
TOTE’s older steamships, like most of the world’s deep-draft vessels, burned bunker fuel, the dregs of the petroleum industry. Similar to asphalt, bunker is nearly solid at room temperature and needs to be preheated to flow into a vessel’s fuel lines. It has been targeted by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) as a significant source of greenhouse gases and harmful particulates. The IMO, the United Nations’ maritime regulatory organization, is the most influential body over this global industry, and the majority of countries adopt its laws and standards, with the notable exception of the United States, which cherry picks recommendations. The group focuses its efforts on problems that plague the wild world of shipping: safety and environmental impact.
The maritime industry produces 2.2 percent of the anthropogenic carbon dioxide building up in our atmosphere, the gas that causes global warming. Sulfur dioxide, another oil by-product, has been linked to asthma and various lung issues. The IMO set a sulfur cap on commercial shipping vessels for 2020, essentially outlawing the use of bunker fuel, and the US adopted even stricter environmental sulfur emissions standards.
In short, El Faro and her sister ships wouldn’t meet these new requirements unless they were converted to diesel or LNG. The fate of El Faro was sealed. She would go into dry dock in the Bahamas in November 2015 for regular servicing and then sail to Alaska to temporarily relieve one of TOTE’s more modern ships there. No doubt she’d get scrapped after that.
Clearly, being consigned to follow El Faro to Alaska was a career dead end.
Throughout the summer, Davidson waited and wondered whether he would master one of the Marlins. Other officers around him were getting plucked for training for the LNG fleet but no one knew who was next; staffing shifts seemed to come frequently, and at random. The chosen ones signed nondisclosure agreements with TOTE, promising to keep their promotions quiet, which only fueled suspicion and distrust aboard the working ships.
Meanwhile, Davidson’s chief mate Ray Thompson wined and dined the crewing manager. She had joined TOTE ten years ago as a secretary for the company when it was based in New Jersey and stuck around long enough to be promoted into a position for which she may not have been properly trained.
When TOTE slashed upper management in the name of efficiency, the crewing manager stepped into a power vacuum created by corporate restructuring and was basking in the attention. Overzealous downsizing had created a critical managerial gap at TOTE: no one was officially in charge of evaluating the ships’ officers. The port captain once did that work, but TOTE had eliminated the position years ago. TOTE’s two port engineers were expected to issue regular assessments of officers, but due to general management confusion, they stopped doing it around 2013.
As a result, captains and mates were getting precious little feedback from the company on their performance. They didn’t know where they stood.
That lack of assurance created unbearable tension on El Faro when TOTE began plucking officers for positions on its new ships.
The crewing manager took it upon herself to influence officer selection. She got her intel from the unlicensed crewmen who she regularly hired from the union hall. She’d already established a strong rapport: the Jacksonville-based unlicensed seamen adored her and so did their families. She was a white woman working alongside TOTE’s powerful white male executives and her heart was with the black seamen. She looked out for them and socialized with them. Although she employed whomever the union hall sent for each shift, it was okay with her if they thought she had hiring power.
Word got around that she was a key decision maker, or at least had the ear of upper management, and would use any available information to advise her superiors on which captains and mates to promote. Once the unlicensed crew got wind of this, they had power over their commanding officers.
Damning information became currency aboard TOTE’s ships. On El Faro, rumors up and down the command chain began churning. One AB caught an officer sleeping on watch. Instead of going through official channels to address the problem, he photographed his superior and spread the photo around. The situation was toxic. The quasi-military order necessary to the merchant marine had been breached.
The crewing manager seemed to have had a grudge against TOTE’s ship officers. She was responsible for booking their flights down to Jacksonville and had a reputation for sending them on tortuous routes at odd hours with multiple connections. It was hard enough for mariners to leave family for months at a time. The crewing manager’s apparently unsympathetic attitude to the officers’ plight added insult to injury. When officers paid out of pocket for required training during their shore leave, they’d have to beg, sometimes for months, for the manager to reimburse them for their time. The officers’ wives generally disliked her; the perception among them was that she was rude on the phone at best, vindictive at worst.
During the spring and summer of 2015, Florida-based chief mate Ray Thompson frequently visited the crewing manager during the day and took her out to lunch. He had the time to spare and was willing to do the legwork to get what he wanted. He had a family to support too.
While Davidson was under consideration for the new ships, cutting information about him began trickling out. In an email in May to TOTE’s executives, the crewing manager reported that she had “dwindling confidence in his abilities as a leader overall.” On July 8, TOTE’s port engineer Jim Fisker-Andersen sent an email to TOTE’s vice president of shipping operations Phil Morrell that said, “[Davidson’s] a stateroom captain, I’m not sure he knows what a deck looks like, period. Least engaged of all four captains in the deck operation. He’s great at sucking up to office staff.”
Davidson may have hired a lawyer to pressure TOTE to give him a second look, and in August, the executives decided to promote Davidson. Just as they were preparing to give him the good news, another email suddenly appeared from the crewing manager describing an incident aboard El Faro that had occurred a month prior. It went something like this: While the ship was docked in Puerto Rico, one of the unlicensed crewmen showed up for work after partying in San Juan, clearly intoxicated. When he was confronted on the gangway, he went nuts, possibly wielding some kind of weapon. That’s the kind of thing that happens in shipping—mariners can be a rough lot. Some have criminal records. Others have substance abuse problems. They get drug-tested, but that’s not going to catch your garden variety alcoholic.
Davidson asked his chief mate, Ray Thompson, to check it out, so Thompson went down to the dock. Words were exchanged, no one got hurt, but the crewman was forbidden to board the ship in his condition. El Faro departed for Jacksonville without him. For some reason, Davidson didn’t officially write up the incident, maybe because he wanted the whole thing to go away. The seaman needed to dry out. Maybe Davidson decided to cut him a break. Maybe he didn’t want more trouble from the other crewmen. Maybe he didn’t know company protocol for dealing with incidents like this.
It’s possible that the disgruntled crewman himself complained to the crewing manager about his treatment by Davidson, changing the story to paint himself as a hapless victim. Regardless, this was exactly what the crewing manager needed to further undermine Davidson’s candidacy. She leaked the story to Morrell in August, just as Davidson’s promotion was going through.
A couple of weeks later, Davidson wrote a carefully worded email to TOTE’s management requesting an explanation for why he’d been passed over and how he could improve his performance to optimize his chances for such a position in the future. No reply was documented.
Later, under oath, Morrell made a convoluted reference to the affair as a way of explaining why the captain suddenly lost favor with TOTE: “In my judgement going back to [TOTE CEO] Phil Greene, [the incident] wasn’t executed correctly, and [Davidson] really never spoke to [the crewman], and I recommended to Phil Greene that we—
that there were just some administrative issues there. That I think we needed to stick with the course that was originally determined in which we work with some outside candidates for continuous improvement.”
In early August, Davidson’s relief, Captain Eric Axelsson, suddenly quit El Faro. TOTE had told the middle-aged shipmaster that the company was “going in a different direction” and didn’t plan to hire him for the new ships. Axelsson may have also left because he was fed up with TOTE’s lax attitude toward operations. He’d worked for years as a captain for Maersk and was accustomed to the Danish shipping company’s precise, by-the-book management style. In contrast, TOTE’s apparent indifference to its employees and operations standards annoyed the seasoned mariner. He walked off the ship and went home.
With Axelsson gone, TOTE asked Davidson to cut short his off-duty time and return to master El Faro. Clueless as to why he hadn’t been promoted, Davidson seethed with anger, but took the job. Throughout August and September, however, he regularly pulled aside other officers and crew to complain about TOTE’s decision not to promote him. Up to the end, Davidson was tormented by his fate.
Meanwhile, his own chief mate on El Faro, Ray Thompson, was promoted out from under him to master one of the new LNG ships. Davidson’s worst fears had come true.
Chapter 11
Question Authority?
26.07°N -76.16°W
Davidson was in a fragile state of mind, broken. He was disgusted that at age fifty-three, another job was slipping away.
Chief Mate Steve Shultz was worried about his future too, but at the moment felt compelled to focus on the fact that they were playing chicken with a major storm. The NHC reports had become unequivocal—Joaquin and El Faro were on a collision course. He had to say something.
In industries in which human error can lead to devastating consequences, it’s important to foster good communication that respects the hierarchy while allowing room for debate. In the emergency room, nurses and doctors are trained to work together to make critical decisions about patient care. The commercial airline industry has developed standardized training procedures designed to encourage pilots and copilots to collaborate while in the cockpit. All military branches have checklists and protocols to help people work together to determine risk and check each other’s work. No one makes decisions in a vacuum.