Into the Raging Sea. Rachel Slade
conditioning struggled against the day’s stultifying heat, Third Mate Jeremie let loose his frustration with the increasing workload. One of the reefers hadn’t gotten plugged in during loading the night before, he told Jack. Now a whole trailer full of food was spoiled.
A port mate once helped with loading in Jacksonville, he said, but that position hadn’t been filled since early September.
Jeremie was sick of the constant scrambling and lack of support. “You know what’s changed?” he said to Jack. “I could not fucking keep up with the loading. I had a goodie helping me”—a GUDE, general utility, deck, and engine unlicensed seaman trained in all areas of the ship—“He couldn't keep up. I was helping him plug in and I didn’t have time to get all the temps down.”
All the reefers got loaded on just before the ship left the dock, creating a shitstorm of problems. They had to scramble to get everything plugged in and secured to leave on time.
“We used to have a port mate and now we don’t. We had a longshoreman, now we don’t. Then we also lost our electrician. We used to have that system of checks where a guy would come down and make sure that every reefer was good. That doesn’t happen anymore.”
It was true. Lately, positions on the ships and onshore were being cut, and the remaining crew had to pick up the slack. Setting high standards was tough when the cast of characters was constantly changing.
“Your average union electrician wouldn’t even come on a ship like this,” Jack said. “It’s too much work for them. They’re not gonna work their way through jungles of lashing chains and dirt to get to a plug somewhere.”
“It’s insane down there in the holds,” agreed Jeremie. He guessed that the ship was carrying more than three dozen reefers, each one demanding someone’s time and attention during the short docking period between voyages. Second Mate Charlie Baird would lay out all the electrical cords neatly when the empty ship was heading back to Jacksonville, but his relief, Second Mate Danielle, didn’t do that.
“There’s just extension cords everywhere. It’s a mess down there. Everything is falling apart. I’m doing what I’ve always done, but it’s just not enough anymore.”
Jack nodded his head.
“I don’t think I could ever be captain here,” Jeremie said. “I’d lose my shit.”
Actually, Jack said, it’s good to be captain. “The captain and chief mate go down to their rooms and play video games,” he said.
“Right,” Jeremie said. “These guys got it all figured out.”
El Faro was poorly run, they agreed, but the unlicensed crew was okay, Jack said. He would know since he was unlicensed, too.
On the ships, officers and crew rarely talked to each other. The gulf between the two classes of mariners could be as stark as black and white. They had separate unions, separate sleeping quarters, separate mess halls, and separate lives. The officers on El Faro lived in New England or southern Florida. As members of the American Maritime Officers union, they could call their hall to get work instead of showing up in person and they usually signed long-term employment contracts.
The unlicensed crew on El Faro mostly came from tough Jacksonville neighborhoods where a seafaring job could save kids from a life in and out of prison, if they could resist becoming drug mules. Guys like LaShawn Rivera, thirty-two, who was working as a cook in the galley on El Faro on her final voyage.
Shipping had been the young man’s salvation. He’d been raised in Atlanta by his mother and stepfather, Robert Green, a bank manager who later joined the ministry. When Shawn was a teen, the family uprooted to Jacksonville. Away from his cousins and hometown, the boy got teased at school for being different, and he withdrew to the streets. Soon he started dealing drugs and spent time in juvie. Then he had a baby girl.
For a young troubled kid in Jacksonville, few job prospects lay ahead, but he was determined to take care of his child.
One day, an elder of the neighborhood told him about the merchant marine. It sounded like the way out—one of the few good jobs available to folks without a college degree. Shawn drove over to the Seafarers International Union hall and studied the job board. All those ships heading to exotic places around the world called to him. He spent all day every day at the hall until he landed a spot on a ship.
The first time he sailed abroad, he called his stepdad from London. “I’m never coming back,” he told him. Back, Pastor Green says, meant the Jacksonville streets.
In search of a specialty, Shawn took cooking courses through his union and eventually was certified to prepare food for the thirty-three men and women on El Faro, his dreadlocks loosely tied back. Working on the ships gave him a sense of pride and purpose, but it would never make him rich. He had a fiancée and then another little girl to support on his $80,000 a year salary. In his spare time, he consumed popular business and self-help books, trying to find a better way to care for his family. When he shipped out on El Faro in late September, Shawn left behind his older daughter, plus a one-year-old baby girl, his fiancée—pregnant with their second daughter—and a stack of books promising him a better future.
After sailing for forty years, Jack Jackson had met many guys like LaShawn Rivera and plenty of other unlicensed seamen who were much rougher around the edges. Trapped on a ship way out at sea, things could get ugly, sometimes violent, and you couldn’t just call the cops.
“You wouldn’t believe the fucking shit that goes on on these ships, ya know?” he said to Jeremie. “I’ve always had the bad luck of being around these crazy eccentrics. I mean, I’ve been with some real sickos, man. I mean, some real fucked-up people, man.”
Jack’s assessment was that during this tour, at least, they were sailing with some good people.
Jeremie looked out at the sweltering sea. Dazzling sunlight burned up the hazy dawn. He was happy to hear he wasn’t a sicko.
At 9:30 a.m., Davidson walked in. “What’s this silly thing telling us?” he asked, gesturing to the NHC weather alerts coming in through the SAT-C printer.
Jeremie joined him at the machine and studied the new data. “Showing the wind warning and all that stuff. We’re going into it.”
“We’re going into the storm,” Davidson said turning to face down the horizon. “And I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
For Davidson, handling a massive cargo ship was a true test of a man’s mettle. Courage was a job requirement for taking the top post in the American merchant marine. You had to be ready to fight drunken seamen, confront recalcitrant officers, and wrangle more speed out of your chief engineer. And there was always the threat of the sea itself. That said, Davidson hadn’t yet seen much weather on El Faro. Erika was the first real storm he’d been through on that ship. And thanks to Charlie Baird, he hadn’t witnessed how El Faro handled in a full-blown tropical cyclone. Their route during Erika through the Old Bahama Channel took them south of the islands. They had forty-knot winds on their port side but were in the lee so the seas stayed calm enough that the crew had been able to work as they steamed through.
“Ship’s solid,” he told Jeremie authoritatively. “There was no shortage of swell running during that storm.”
“This ship is solid,” Jeremie agreed. “The hull itself is fine. The plant no problem. But it’s just all the associated bits and pieces, all the shit that shakes and breaks loose that’s the problem. And where the water goes,” he added prophetically.
“Just gotta keep the speed up,” said Davidson, perturbed that his third mate didn’t simply agree with him the way a third mate should. “And who knows? Maybe this low will just stall a little bit, just enough for us to duck underneath.”
Throughout the voyage, Davidson never referred to Joaquin as a hurricane. He called it a “low,” or a “storm,” or a “system,” continually downplaying Joaquin’s power, either to reassure himself or to firm his officers’