Into the Raging Sea. Rachel Slade
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.
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 pictures 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.”