by Rachel Slade
Ben was one of the few people in his class to get certified as an elite coast guard rescue swimmer. The punishing Rescue Swimmer Training Program is notorious for its higher than 50 percent attrition rate. Along with intense physical training, the program demands superhuman ability to overcome mental and physical limitations. At one point, swimmers are pushed to extreme physical limits and nearly drown.
But all that training couldn’t prepare Ben for the conditions in which he found himself that night, in the darkness with hurricane-force winds and huge seas. He plunged down into the warm, frothy waters, which felt womblike in the darkness and silence of the deep. As soon as he resurfaced, though, chaos reigned supreme. The Jayhawk’s spinning blades above caused a powerful downdraft that competed with crosswinds and torrential rains to push him back under. The sound of the waves was deafening. He repressurized his face mask, and then braced himself for the next wave, which he knew was there but couldn’t see in spite of the spotlights. The air was half sea spray, making it nearly impossible for him to clear his snorkel, and the ocean’s churn knocked him around like a gang of thugs, trying to confuse and drown him. It was enough to make him wonder why he’d signed up for this. He used all his strength to keep his head above water but the intense rising and falling of the swells made his stomach churn.
“I was telling myself this was for real this time—twelve lives were on the line,” he said. “All our training came down to that moment.”
Ben rode up the mountainous crest of a wave, set his sights on the raft, and began a strong, rapid crawl down into a valley, up again, occasionally glimpsing the weak lights coming from the life vessel, gasping for breath in the soul-sucking wind. His body was pounded by ferocious waves, but he refused to give in.
A few minutes later, he drew close to the raft and grabbed a tight hold to a line. He shoved his head inside and saw twelve petrified men looking back at him. The crew was mostly Haitian and didn’t speak English—eyes wide, dark black faces. But they understood the universal language of a rescue. The Minouche went down so fast that her crew didn’t even know she’d sunk.
In the roar of the sea, Ben could yell but he wouldn’t be heard. Instead, he pointed to one panicked seaman in the raft and signaled for him to climb into the rescue cage dangling above them. The mariner didn’t want to leave the safety of the raft. Ben had to physically draw out the frightened crewman, wrestle him into the basket, then use hand signals to Josh to start hoisting. When the basket got to the helicopter’s open door, the seaman inside clung to it like a crab in a trap, forcing Josh to shake him loose. The man hit the helicopter’s deck facedown, and lay there, spread-eagle, frozen in shock.
Ben watched as the helicopter swallowed the basket, then he turned to hoist the next guy. But the raft was gone. In the short time it took him to load the first man into the basket, the raft had drifted a few hundred yards away. He fought his way through the waves to the raft. If he had to swim that far every time, he’d exhaust himself after a few hoists. Instead, he helped seven more guys up to the hovering Jayhawk, riding the helicopter’s cable back to the raft between each hoist.
Dave had been keeping an eye on fuel, and now it was getting low. “We can’t keep going,” he told his crew. “We’ve got to go back to base to refuel.” Ben stayed with the raft and watched the chopper disappear into the night. Though the water was warm, the wave action was sickening. He and the four remaining men, eyes wide as saucers, waited to the sound of the deafening storm, trying not to puke.
As they were pulling into Inagua with their rescues, Dave and Rick saw a lone bird standing on the tarmac, disoriented by the storm. “Aw, no, no, no!” Rick said, anticipating what would happen next. Like a rocket, the bird took flight and was instantly consumed by the helicopter’s fifty-foot blades. Bird strike.
While the Minouche’s crew recovered in the hangar, the coast guard mechanics had to inspect the chopper to make sure the bird hadn’t been ingested into the engine or otherwise damaged the aircraft.
With their rescue swimmer and four guys in a life raft battling high seas in the darkness, Rick and Dave didn’t have the luxury of time. Josh and the line crew used a flashlight in the driving rain to pick bird parts out of the rotor and try to assess whether the Jayhawk was safe to fly. He did his best to clear it and ran his assessment by the captain in Clearwater. He got the go-ahead, and the aircrew took off, back into the night.
Ben was able to get the ninth guy into the basket when the flight mechanic noticed that the hoisting cable had frayed. They couldn’t risk breaking the line, so once again, the Jayhawk was forced to head back to base. When they got there, due to a power failure, the hangar’s sixty-thousand-pound doors were stuck closed. The mechanics, in desperation, pried open the hangar’s doors with two small tractors called “mules,” and towed out the second chopper.
But who would crew it? Piloting and hoisting require split-second decision-making based on a string of mental checks. Sleep deprivation degrades motor and processing skills. If they’re really tired, pilots can forget things on their checklist and skip a critical step. Flying four or five hours on night-vision goggles only adds to their fatigue.
Josh, Rick, and Dave huddled around the phone and talked it out with their commanding officer in Clearwater. They knew they were tired—they’d backed one another up, tried to catch each other’s mistakes as a team, tried to avoid micro-sleeps. Their adrenaline had spiked several times—when they first went out, when they were hoisting, when they hit the bird. But exhaustion could easily overcome any one of them, putting the mission at risk.
All that made it tougher to judge whether Phy should let the other crew take over.
Still, there were a few good reasons not to switch teams: Dave, Rick, Josh, and Ben had perfected their hoisting and communications system and were working well together. The guys in the raft knew the drill. And if the new crew went out, the twenty-four-hour on-duty clock would start ticking for that team, limiting Inagua’s ability to deal with anything else that came up during Joaquin, like a possible search and rescue for El Faro. Dave and his team wanted to finish the mission. They could do it.
They swapped helicopters, went back for the remaining three Minouche seamen, and returned to base at dawn on Friday morning. They’d been up for twenty-four hours.
And in that entire time, there had been only silence from the American container ship caught out there, somewhere in the storm.
Chapter 21
Flight to Jacksonville
At 3:20 Thursday afternoon, October 1, Deb Roberts’s cell phone rang. She almost didn’t answer it. Deb was a school administrator in the tiny rural town of Jay, Maine, halfway between here and nowhere, hunting country supported by a big paper mill. She’d lived there all her life, raised her kids there. And usually when someone called from a number she didn’t know, it was a sales call. Which is why she surprised herself when she answered it.
“Are you Mike Holland’s mom?” the woman on the line asked. Oh yeah, it was a sales call. Deb’s son Michael was a young mariner, just three years out of Maine Maritime Academy, and because he was away at sea so much, she took care of his finances. Her number was listed on his credit cards. “Yes,” she answered warily.
“I’m calling from TOTE Services,” the woman said. Deb’s son was kind of a wild one. She wondered what kind of trouble he had gotten himself into now.
The woman identified herself as the crewing manager for TOTE. And then she said the one thing every mariner’s mother never wants to hear: they’d lost communication with Mike’s ship. It was in a hurricane.
Deb didn’t know anyone at TOTE or on El Faro. She hadn’t even known the name of the ship Mike was on until she got the phone call from the crewing manager.
Mike rarely talked about his life at sea, not because he didn’t enjoy it. Just because when he was home, he was home. The sweltering engine rooms were a thousand miles away. Mike hunted for deer and rabbit, and he fished. He went to sea to make money that he could spend on his
life back home.
When he was in high school, Mike wanted to join the marines. That scared Deb—the US was in the middle of a couple of wars, and she didn’t want her oldest son walking into that if she could help it. So she convinced him to consider Maine Maritime. One of seven maritime academies in the US, Maine Maritime offered an engineering curriculum that you could use at sea or landside, running power plants. Mike’s football coach at Jay High School had gone there; now he worked at the local paper mill. Deb thought it was a good compromise—Mike would have the structure he craved and a lucrative, vocational career—but ultimately, he had to decide for himself.
During the fall of Mike’s senior year, Deb drove him 111 miles west to the school’s campus on Maine’s rocky coast. She hoped it would sell itself and convince Mike to give up his military dreams. It was the best she could do to keep her son safe in a dangerous world.
In many ways, rural Maine and coastal Maine are worlds apart. In and around Jay, things feel like they’re coming to an end. Owners of the paper mill have been threatening to shut it down for years as demand for their product shrinks. In town and along the roads, there’s not much to buy—used cars, guns and ammo, fishing gear.
When Mike found out that he could keep his shotgun at the school and check it out when he had time off, or drop a line in the water and fish whenever he had a break, he knew he’d found his place. It helped that he loved engineering. Plus, Maine Maritime’s football coach was showing interest in the five-foot, seven-inch linebacker who played like a three-hundred-pound bone cruncher.
That was seven years ago. Mike had been around the world on ships—in Thailand, through the Panama Canal, everywhere. He hated being away from his friends and family but loved traveling. That’s why he was getting tired of his job at TOTE going back and forth between Jacksonville and Puerto Rico. He wanted some new scenery. The only reason he didn’t look for another job was because he enjoyed his mates aboard the ship. They were like family to him.
Deb immediately thought the worst. She couldn’t listen to the woman on the phone anymore. She called out for her coworker to bring a chair and braced herself as the woman continued.
There were lots of details that Deb didn’t hear. But she did pick up something about a website that TOTE would be setting up to give hourly updates to families. “And then I hung up the phone and just lost it,” she told me a few months later as we sat at her dining room table.
Deb’s coworker offered to drive her home, but the only thing Deb wanted to do was talk to her husband, Robin. He was levelheaded. He would chase away her panic. These things happen, especially in storms, he told her. Everything will be okay. It’s a big-ass ship.
“And so I drove home and paced,” Deb says. “And paced and paced. Went out and weeded the flower beds because it was early October. Raked leaves. I just had to keep busy because I just couldn’t stand it. And I waited and waited. And it took a few hours for the website to come up, and then I checked it every hour. I checked it every hour all night long. I didn’t sleep. Forever. And then it was Friday.”
Deb didn’t tell anyone about Mike, his ship, or the hurricane. She assumed the whole thing would blow over and she’d be able to go on with her life. No one questioned why she was out of the office that day. Weeks ago, she’d planned to celebrate the beginning of Maine’s hunting season by trekking with her husband to their hunting camp for the weekend. Since Mike was away so much, she’d always borrowed his shotgun and send him pictures of the birds she got with it. This time, she’d use her own, a Christmas gift from Mike. That’s what she and Mike texted about on Monday night, the twenty-eighth, before he left Jacksonville. “You’ll finally get to use that new gun I got you,” Mike had written. “Yes,” Deb texted back. “I’ll try to get a bird for you. I hope your mom makes you proud.”
She wasn’t surprised that Mike didn’t reply. Communication was never easy when he was shipping. He probably went to bed or got pulled into other things. She’d hear from him when he got to Puerto Rico on Friday.
But now Deb was sitting by the phone. Waiting. Checking TOTE’s website. Refresh. Refresh. She found she could track ships over the web, too. She’d never tried before, but she located El Faro. “I could see the last time that there was a beacon, which made sense because they said they had lost communication with them. They couldn’t track them anymore. So I was watching and I just kept checking and checking and checking and it was always the same last known location. Last known location.”
In the morning, TOTE posted a new message on the website: the company was holding a phone conference for El Faro families in the afternoon.
Everyone desperately needed clarity. Some like Jenn Mathias in her house on the southern coast of Massachusetts tried not to think about the ship that carried her husband, Jeff, into the storm in the Bahamas. He’d been in bad weather before. There was one time when Jeff found himself in a North Atlantic storm near the place where the Andrea Gail of the Perfect Storm had gone down. The seas knocked around his vessel so hard that a forklift chained to the deck shook loose and crashed through the hull. Jenn showed me photos of the aftermath—it created a huge hole in the two-inch steel.
When Jeff first went to sea in 1998, he didn’t have email, and cell service in those days was prohibitively expensive. He’d call to say literally hello and good-bye. Even so, his phone bill sometimes hit a thousand dollars a month. The couple could go that long without connecting. To be closer to her fiancé, Jenn occasionally traveled with him while he was working; she boarded the Alaska in San Francisco bound for Hawaii and spent the first few days on the ship sleeping, lulled by the gentle rocking.
When Jenn was pregnant with their first child, Hayden, Jeff knew he had to go for a chief engineer position to make enough money to support his family. He finally landed a job on SS Great Land, one of El Faro’s sister ships, built in 1975. He sailed as chief engineer on her until she was scrapped in 2011.
“He was so devastated because he loved the Great Land,” Jenn told me as we sat in her kitchen, her two younger children, ages five and seven, occasionally joining us to look at photos of their dad.
Jeff’s passion was steam. When he was at home, he’d spend hours on eBay hunting for vintage steam manuals, tools, and photos. He had amassed a huge collection of engineering manuals and textbooks from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
After losing the Great Land job, Jeff filled in as a chief engineer aboard TOTE steamships whenever someone needed to take a leave of absence. He was waiting for a permanent position to open up. When it finally did, Jeff was torn. Timing was bad—at that point, the kids were ages five, three, and eighteen months, and he didn’t want to leave his wife alone with them for ten weeks at a time. So he passed on the opportunity and worked the cranberry bogs and pumpkin patches while inspecting ships locally and occasionally going to sea for shorter tours.
Jeff began overseeing the conversion of El Faro for the Alaska trade in February 2015. He continued on and off throughout the spring and summer. The pay was good, and the stints were short. He made sure he was home for his kids’ first day of school, then went back to Jacksonville in late September.
Jenn remembers their final conversation. Jeff called on Tuesday night, September 28, before El Faro left Jacksonville. He wanted to Skype with the kids, but Jenn said no. “I told him, ‘I’ve got them all bathed, all ready for bed. They’re wound down. I don’t want to get them all hyped up.’”
She sent Jeff an email on Thursday morning, October 1, to let him know that she and his mother had started hosting schoolchildren at the cranberry bog field trips, as they did every fall.
Jenn thought it was strange that she didn’t hear back from her husband. Then the email bounced back—undeliverable—and kept bouncing back.
That afternoon, she got the call from the crewing manager at TOTE.
“The first thing that went through my mind was that Jeff had done something silly that got him in trouble,” Jenn says.
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The woman told Jenn that TOTE had lost communication with the ship. She assured Jenn that everybody was fine. Everything was fine. Jenn immediately called Jeff’s best friend, Sean, who was also a chief engineer. Sean didn’t answer. Then she went over to Jeff’s parents’ house, just a few hundred yards away from her home. The kids were watching TV. Barry, Jeff’s father, didn’t know what “lost communication” meant. But Jeff’s brother did. “When I told him, his eyes bulged out of his head. Meanwhile, I’m thinking, everything is fine.”
Sean called back later and assured Jenn that ships lose communication all the time. Maybe the storm had knocked out the satellite antennas.
In Jacksonville, thirty-year-old Marlena Porter had been tracking Joaquin for days. She couldn’t help herself. She’d never felt completely comfortable when her husband, James, went to sea. He was in the family business—he’d been in the merchant marine for two decades, along with his father, mother, aunt, sister, and nephew. Regardless, the whole thing made Marlena nervous.
One time when James shipped to Africa, Marlena had a vision. She was with her mother in Miami overlooking Biscayne Bay and hadn’t heard from her husband in a month. It hit her all at once. She looked at the water and had a vision of a ship sinking. The vision was so real that tears went running down her face.
What’s wrong with you? her mother had asked.
She had said, Nothing, nothing. It’s just my allergies. Marlena tried to pull herself together. But she looked again and saw the prow of a ship in the water. That’s when her phone rang, a strange number. It was James. A month without hearing from him, a vision, and suddenly he calls. Was it a sign? I am so scared for you to be out there, Marlena told him.
I know, but I’m good, he had assured her. Every seasoned mariner could relate to her fear. But he was fine. I don’t want you to be worried, he’d said. Just make sure the boys are taken care of and stop worrying about me out here on this ship. And then he reminded her, I’m doing this to make sure we’re good. Eventually I’ll give it up. Eventually, because I do miss being home with y’all.