Into the Raging Sea

by Rachel Slade

  Jack wasn’t so sure. “I’ll never have faith in these assholes like I used to,” he said. “One captain sailed us right into a storm. All naive and confident. Oh sure,” he said sarcastically, “they know what they’re doing. As I got thrown to the deck, I could hear the captain screaming. We were going over this big wave. First the ship started pitching and rolling. Then it got worse and worse. Then all of the sudden it was like some kind of wild animal trying to break out—like a bull in a stall. Going wilder and wilder and wilder and pretty soon it was out of control. Then all the cargo broke loose and oh my God.

  “We were rolling, and a wave came in and slammed us. We came to this shuddering stop. I mean, I was sure we were going over. Positive.

  “It was like death, actually. It was like we were fated to die. No one spoke about it for two to three days. People were shell-shocked. Everybody felt death was right on us. It was like this presence. Bring your rosary beads.”

  “Well, you didn’t say anything then, and you’re here to tell the tale,” said Jeremie. “Guess I’m just turning into a Chicken Little, but I have a feeling like something bad is gonna happen.”

  At 11:00 p.m., he ripped the latest NHC forecast off the SAT-C printer and couldn’t keep quiet anymore. The third mate picked up the phone and called Davidson. “Hey, Captain, sorry to wake you. The latest weather just came in and I thought you might want to take a look at it, if you have a chance. Just looking at the forecast and looking at our tracking, which way it’s going, thought you might wanna take a look at it.”

  What do you see? Davidson asked him.

  “Well, it’s the, the, the current forecast has max winds at 100 miles an hour at the storm’s center. And it’s moving at 230 [degrees] at five knots. I assume it’ll stay on that same direction for, say, the next five hours. So it’s advancing toward our bow, and our course puts us real close to it. I could be more specific. I could plot that out. But it’s gonna be real close. We’re looking to meet it at, say, four o’clock in the morning.”

  The captain asked him to draw it on the chart. Jeremie did and six minutes later, called him back: “At four o’clock this morning, we’ll be twenty-two miles from the center of the hurricane with max [sustained winds] 100 [miles per hour], with gusts to 120 miles per hour and strengthening. From what I can see, at 2:00 a.m., we could head south, and that would open up some distance between us and the hurricane.” Then Jeremie caught himself, remembering to defer to his commanding officer. “I mean, of course I’d want you to verify what I’m seeing.”

  He told the captain in no uncertain terms that if they continued on their current course, they would sail right into the most dangerous area of the hurricane—the eyewall, and into the eye. “Just so you know,” he told Davidson. “That’s how close we’ll be.”

  Jeremie listened to Davidson’s response and hung up the phone. He turned slowly back to Jack, shaking his head. “Well, he seems to think that we’ll be south of it by then. So the winds won’t be an issue.”

  “Fuck,” Jack said.

  “Fuck.”

  “We’ll be twenty-two miles from the center.”

  “Fuck.”

  “He’s saying we’ll be in the southwest quadrant of the hurricane, which is the safest place to be if you’re going to get close. Wind will be coming from the north and it’ll push us away, toward Puerto Rico. I trust what he’s saying, it’s just I don’t like being twenty-two miles away from 100-knot winds. This doesn’t even sound right.”

  “No matter which way it’s hittin’ ya, it’s still 100-knot winds,” Jack agreed.

  The captain may have been unhinged for steering them into this storm, but then again, hubris was part of his job. Great captains were made by taking risks and living to boast about them. Shipping history is replete with slightly mad masters aching to test their mettle, pushing their vessels and crew to the brink and coming out heroes. In the modern age, everything always turned out fine. El Faro had been inspected, tested, and secured. And they had a wide range of safety equipment at their disposal.

  After he got off the phone with Jeremie, Davidson did not check the weather forecast. He did not download the latest BVS forecast waiting for him in his inbox. Instead, he went to bed. Records show that Captain Davidson did not download the eleven o’clock BVS forecast until five o’clock the next morning. His third mate had told him the truth. But he didn’t want to hear it.

  Chapter 14

  Night

  24.53°N -77.59°W

  El Faro was small and alone in a vast, black emptiness, shrouded by Joaquin’s miles-thick clouds. The few lights on the ship’s console were like cold, distant stars; a laptop-size radar screen regularly burst into silent fireworks representing the agitated surface of the sea. Another screen tracked the ship’s position, their intended course shown as a simple straight line. The instruments would reveal other vessels in the area, too, if there were any.

  “We don’t have any options here,” said Jeremie said to Jack. “We got nowhere to go.”

  “Jesus, man. Don’t tell me anymore. I don’t even wanna hear it,” Jack told him.

  The two men stood behind the console squinting into the abyss. Invisible waves pounding the vessel’s port side bullied her into a long, slow, rhythmic side to side roll, not enough to make them sick, but enough that as they walked around the bridge, they ran their fingertips lightly along the grab bars to stay upright. Small things began to shake loose and slide across desktops onto the floor. Anyone below who was awake flicked on cabin lights and stowed away pens, coffee cups, and eyeglasses in drawers and cabinets.

  The distant hum of the engine far below was the only source of comfort, like a heartbeat.

  Just before midnight, Danielle entered the bridge in a flood of light.

  “Good morning, Danielle,” Jeremie said.

  “Good morning,” she said, closing the bridge door softly behind her, sealing the room once again in the heavy gloom. She approached the console. Jeremie winced in the darkness. He wasn’t sure he wanted to leave the helm to his fellow officer; so many things could go wrong. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to stay, either. After experiencing hours of anxiety, he was mentally exhausted.

  “I’ll show you what’s going on back here in the chart room,” he said, pushing aside the blackout curtains that protected their night vision. He slipped into the warm glow of the dim chart room light. They stood together, hunched over the table, the large map of the area laid out in front of them.

  Jeremie picked up the wax pencil resting on the Plexiglass protecting the paper chart and used it as a pointer as he spoke. “This is our latest course,” he told Danielle.

  They would travel thirty-two miles to the next waypoint—a predetermined coordinate that marked their course—which put them right on track to meet the storm, if the NHC’s forecast was correct. “The NHC weather report that came in at 2300 was different from BVS,” Jeremie noted. “I told that to the captain, but this is the course he wants.”

  “This is totally crazy,” Danielle said, once more breaking into excited, uncontrollable laughter. Her one consolation was that in her lifetime, no American container ship had gone down. Ships sometimes got caught in vicious storms, but they always made it out. They’d be okay. Still, this was scary.

  “If the forecast holds,” Jeremie continued, “at four o’clock in the morning, you’ll be twenty-five miles from the center and still going toward it.” Twenty-five miles from the hurricane’s eye positioned them square in the eye wall, the deadliest part, where the powerful forces driving the system are most concentrated. If he knew that, he didn’t say it. Neither did Danielle.

  Just then, AB Jackie Jones came up to the bridge to take over Jack Jackson’s watch. “Hey, where’s the party at?”

  “It’s gonna be a party in a few hours,” Jack said lugubriously.

  “I know,” Jackie said. “I just seen a little TV, and then the TV went out. We fixin’ to be right in the middle of the storm.”


  Jack suggested that his fellow AB check his survival gear.

  “Do you know where your EPIRB is?” he asked Jackie, referring to the emergency beacon that all seamen were supposed to have on them so that they could be easily located by rescue crew.

  “I ain’t got no EPIRB,” Jackie answered. “Uh-oh. This is a bad deal.”

  “When I get to my cabin, I’m getting out my flashlight, life saver, and Gumby suit,” Jack said, using the slang term for an immersion suit—a thick neoprene unibody outfit required for every mariner aboard a merchant ship sailing in winter in the North Atlantic. The suit comes with built-in booties, mittens, and a hood designed to stave off hypothermia in cold water. When you’re zipped up and Velcroed inside, you look like a red version of its 1950s cartoon namesake, minus the Play-Doh eyes.

  “I put all the Cokes and water bottles in the cabinet too,” he told Jackie. “Probably gonna start throwin’ shit around here. We’re gonna drink the water if they aren’t careful. We’re gonna get sucked into it.”

  “We’re the only idiots out here,” Jack remarked before heading down to his cabin.

  Meanwhile, at the chart table, Danielle and Jeremie tried to reconcile Davidson’s orders with the latest NHC forecast. “This is the second time we changed our route and the storm just keeps coming for us,” Jeremie said. “But the ship’s solid.”

  “Yeah,” Danielle said. “I trust her.”

  The two pored over their charts, searching for a way out of the hurricane’s path if it didn’t turn stop coming for them. One option was to continue south toward Crooked Island Passage. It was a straight shot, once they got past San Salvador, via the West Channel to the Old Bahama Channel—nice, wide, and deep. At that point, they could keep running west, away from the storm, or hook around Cuba and head west or south. Two small reefs stood in the middle of Crooked Island Passage, so whoever was at the helm then would have to maneuver carefully around hazards, steaming in high seas through unknown waters in the dark, relying heavily on their paper charts and depth finders. If they had electronic charts, it would have been easier to visualize their path as they worked their way through.

  Danielle knew Davidson. He wouldn’t readily embrace a plan that risked grounding them on shallow shoals.

  “What’s concerning me is that the information we’re getting from other sources is so much different from BVS,” Jeremie said again. “According to everyone else, Joaquin wants to intensify and keep going southwest.”

  “Blowin’ now like hell,” Jackie called out from the helm. “It’s just sittin’ out here suckin’ up the heat outta these waters.”

  As an officer, Danielle had to stand by her captain’s decisions when talking to her AB. She certainly didn’t want to cause widespread panic. Turning away from Jeremie, she reassured Jackie that they’d be fine: “We would’ve been within twenty-five miles of it, now we’re just gonna dodge down to port, just southwest of the center.” In her heart, she must have known this wasn’t likely.

  “Why don’t we slow down? This game is stupid,” Jackie told the night.

  Jeremie headed down to his room to get some rest, leaving Jackie and Danielle alone on the bridge. The second mate may have felt some relief that Davidson wasn’t up there yet. She privately dreaded that midnight watch, and not just because they’d be wrestling with Joaquin. She didn’t want to be alone with the captain on the bridge. She’d told her friends that she loathed him; her hatred must have intensified now that he was putting them in danger. She suspected he was kind of guy who, when rejected, swung from hurt to fury in a heartbeat.

  Danielle returned to the chart room to painstakingly plot an alternate course based on her discussion with Jeremie. She was riveted to her work, spending more than half an hour with her pencil and clear plastic triangle working out waypoints to avoid the reefs along their way, to get them safely down to the Old Bahama Channel.

  At 12:41, she told Jackie, “I may have a solution. At two o’clock we’ll be in a good spot to alter course south to 186 degrees. That course line, if we stay on it, keeps us five miles away from any kind of shallow area. Not a lot of wiggle room, but right now where we’re going, we don’t have much wiggle room.”

  “Then we’d have the wind about dead on our ass,” Jackie said. A push in the right direction sure would be nice but running with the waves requires excellent steerage and speed control. They’d need to hang behind the crest to avoid getting swamped as the wave breaks, a nearly impossible maneuver if they couldn’t see the ocean.

  “This course could get us away from Joaquin,” said Danielle. “Go south, get away from it, and connect with the Old Bahama Channel, right into San Juan. Unless this damn storm goes further south. It keeps trying to follow us.”

  “It ain’t gonna do nothing but sit down here growing, getting stronger and strong,” Jackie said. He liked her plan.

  Outside, the sea growled in warning. Joaquin was ahead of them, bearing down on them, churning up the ocean and leaving behind a frothy wake. Yet its slow westward momentum had compressed its forward edge, meaning they wouldn’t feel the full brunt of the system until they were much closer to its eye.

  “It doesn’t really feel like we’re getting near a hurricane,” Danielle said.

  Still, they were approaching a monster, and the calm was disquieting. “It’s an eerie feeling, I’ll tell you,” said Jackie, going over to study the latest forecast emerging from the NAVTEX printer. “They say this storm could grow to a Category 4.”

  By one o’clock in the morning, Davidson still hadn’t come up to the bridge, nor had he called to check in with his second mate like he’d promised. Maybe he thought they were clear of any danger. “I don’t know if he can sleep knowing all of this,” Danielle said. Still, she waited.

  The radar told them they were passing Cat Island on their right, and San Salvador was coming up on their left. Danielle had worked out a route that would save them. But she still hesitated to disturb the captain.

  Instead, she turned on the satellite radio and heard a brief report from the Weather Channel: “Hurricane Joaquin’s been upgraded to a Category 3 storm. It’s expected to pass near the Bahamas before heading toward the East Coast of the United States. The powerful storm may bring ten inches of rain to some areas.”

  “Oh my God,” she said. “Now it’s a Category 3.” A huge wave slapped El Faro’s port side.

  “Whoa,” said Jackie. “Biggest one since I’ve been up here. You can’t pound your way through them waves. It’ll break the ship in half.”

  At 1:20 a.m., Danielle finally picked up the ship’s phone and dialed Davidson. It took him a few rings to answer. “I just wanted to tell you that I’ve charted another course that runs south of the island chain into the Old Bahama Channel,” she told him. “Otherwise, we’ll be meeting the storm. Fox News just said it’s up to a Category 3. It isn’t looking good right now. My track line: at two o’clock, alter course straight south and then we’ll go through all these shallow areas, and the next course change will be through the Bahamas and then just turn to San Juan.”

  There was a pause. They were in fourteen-foot seas by then, with 55-knot winds.

  “Okay,” she answered softly. “I’ll adjust course to 1-1-6. Okay, thank you.”

  Davidson didn’t just reject Danielle’s plan, he ordered that she alter the ship’s heading to 116 degrees, pointing El Faro even more easterly, a direct route to the eye. El Faro would soon find herself rammed broadside by forty-foot-high waves as 100-mile-per-hour sustained winds shoved the ship over to starboard. It was the worst possible decision.

  “He said to run it.”

  In less than an hour, they began feeling the fury of Joaquin. Seas rose up around them as torrents of rain pummeled the windows like God’s own pressure washer. Through the deluge, they saw flashes—either lightning off the bow or the reefers on deck shorting out. They could hear clanking but didn’t know where it was coming from. As they rolled in the growing swells, their propeller cont
inually spun out, causing their speed to drop down to 16 knots. Small things began flying free below them, as huge waves crashed over the decks.

  The whipping winds made a deafening roar on the bridge, and Danielle had to raise her voice to be heard over the din.

  Then cargo started breaking loose. They couldn’t see it, but they could hear thumps in the dark. Danielle and Jackie had to lean to stand upright as the floor rhythmically pitched left, then right beneath them.

  Danielle wanted to believe that Davidson was correct, that they would pass below Joaquin any minute. She was waiting for the winds to shift to their starboard side as they got south of the hurricane. When the screeching gusts continued pounding El Faro from the northeast, she fought back waves of fear.

  Both weather reports—NHC and BVS—were wrong. NHC showed Joaquin’s eye too far north by a few dozen miles, and BVS by double that. Davidson had taken BVS’s forecast as gospel and sealed their fate. They’d cleaved so close to the hurricane that they’d left no margin for error. They were firmly in Joaquin’s grip.

  “I figured the captain would be up here,” Jackie finally said at 2:47.

  “I thought so too,” Danielle said, struggling to hide her terror. “I’m surprised—he said he was gonna come up.”

  “He’ll play hero tomorrow.”

  Chapter 15

  Necesitamos La Mercancía

  Shipping is the engine that drives the modern world. It’s our T-shirts, diapers, beer, and crisp new sheets. It’s everything we wear, everything we touch, the parts inside our cars, our laptops, and our dinner. More than 90 percent of the things people need come by ship.

  Cheap transport has shaped the needs of every man, woman, and child on Earth.

  It binds us together.

  Its collapse could rip us apart.