Into the Raging Sea: Thirty-three mariners, one megastorm and the sinking of El Faro. Rachel Slade
Charlie was.
He couldn’t take it anymore. At 6:31 p.m., he texted Davidson again: “Whats your plan?”
“we’ll steam our normal direct route to SJP,” Davidson texted back a few minutes before 7:00. “no real weather to speak of until the evening of the 30th. all forecasted information indicates Joaquin will remain north of us and by the morning of the 01st we will be on the backside of her. we schedule to depart the dock at 20:00 tonight so everything is shaping up in our favor.”
“Cool if u have to we have routes thru mauagiez crooked isle or ne prov chnl,” Charlie reminded him. This was shorthand for the channels between the islands along the way deep enough that El Faro could use them as escape routes to the lee side if anything should brew up out there.
“Watchin sox presently up 1-0 over ny,” he wrote.
“2-0 sox,” Charlie added a few minutes later.
“go sox …” Davidson replied.
27.37°N -77.43°W
Just before noon, Second Mate Danielle took over Jeremie’s watch on the bridge. She’d worked from midnight to four o’clock a.m., gone to bed, showered, eaten, and was back up reporting for duty. Jeremie walked her through the new course Davidson had plotted. He showed her the hurricane’s position on the chart and warned her that it was moving southwest at a very lazy, very unusual five knots.
Danielle knew that getting close to any storm was plain stupid. Up on the bridge rolling in high seas, you were bound to get seasick sooner or later, regardless of how experienced a mariner you were. Danielle didn’t like her captain’s glibness, either, considering the seriousness of their situation. “He’s telling everybody down there, Oh, it’s not a bad storm. It’s not so bad. It’s not even that windy out. I’ve seen worse,” she told Jeremie.
He rolled his eyes and kept quiet. What else could he do? He was only third mate. He walked out to get lunch and unwind before his evening shift.
Danielle turned to her helmsman, Jackie Jones, a Jacksonville man in his late thirties with five children below age twenty, and continued her rant: “He’s saying, It’s nothing. It’s nothing! And here we are going way off course. If it’s nothing, then why the hell are we going on a different track line? I think he’s just trying to play it down because he realizes we shouldn’t have come this way. He’s saving face.”
Davidson showed up a few minutes later, disappointed that they weren’t moving as fast as he’d hoped. They were steaming at a healthy 18.9 knots. “Damn, we’re getting killed with this speed,” he said inexplicably.
“I think now it’s not a matter of speed,” Danielle warned him. “When we get there, we get there, as long as we arrive in one piece,” she added.
The prospect of sailing into a hurricane filled her with dread, which she tried her best to laugh off once she and Jackie were alone. Humor was Danielle’s way of dealing with things beyond her control. She turned on Sirius XM radio and sang along to contemporary hits, then switched over to Dr. Laura on Fox News.
“Two of the Polish guys were standing there when he said that,” she told Jackie, referring to the five extra hands hired to install heating coils on El Faro’s ramps and decks so that trailers wouldn’t slip and slide on the ice when the vessel returned to the Pacific Northwest. It wasn’t unusual to have extra workers fixing things while El Faro was at sea. A ship in port is a ship losing money. “I wanted to make sure they knew the word hurricane. One of them smiled and said, Hurricane! Yes!”
Danielle laughed. “They’re all excited about it. Ah, if they only knew. I remember going through a couple of storms on the El Morro. Shit was flying everywhere.”
At 12:24, Danielle saw a thick black line on the horizon—the bar of the storm. “There’s our weather,” she said ominously. “The storm gets really big on the third or the fifth of October,” she added, studying the forecast. “Warning in red for this weekend for rain—severe flooding and rain. They never mentioned Maine, though. They didn’t say, Two more days and then it’ll cover the entire state of Maine. Yeah, you know, some people live up there.”
Like Davidson, Danielle had grown up on the coast of Maine. Her parents were retired navy; her mother worked as a hairdresser, her dad as a handyman. Danielle’s grandmother and great-aunt had emigrated from France after World War II. The older women used to converse rapidly and loudly in French. Danielle understood what they were saying, but she never got the hang of speaking the language.
Danielle spent her childhood in Rockland, a small town on Penobscot Bay, but life wasn’t easy for her as a girl. She wanted to belong, wanted to feel a part of something, but her world felt fragmented. Her family’s foreignness added to Danielle’s feelings of isolation. Danielle lived in a tiny second-floor apartment with her grandmother, separated from the rest of her family—mom, dad, and brother—who lived in an apartment below. Danielle’s best friend says it was strange, this little girl and older woman sharing a closet-size room, just big enough for a bed and a radio.
During summer breaks, Danielle worked on the docks of Port Clyde, and at the O’Hara Corporation—a fishing consortium and marina in Rockland. That’s where she discovered her love of boats and the ocean. She’d jump in a skiff and paddle around while her great-aunt watched from the shore.
Danielle was drawn to the sea at a very early age and in high school, informed her mom that she planned to go to Maine Maritime Academy (MMA), one of five American maritime academies established by the federal government to train ship’s officers and engineers for the merchant marine. Getting into Maine Maritime focused Danielle, gave her purpose.
Maine Maritime was based in the tiny town of Castine, twenty miles northeast of Rockland as the crow flies. If it weren’t for the islands in Penobscot Bay, Danielle would be able to see straight across to the school from her house.
Castine once held a strategic spot at the mouth of the Penobscot River—the main thoroughfare for the fur and timber trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The town was first settled by the French in 1613 as a trading post. In less than a year, the British seized it, then the Dutch came in, then the British reclaimed it, and finally, the Americans incorporated the town in 1796, though it was contested ground again during the War of 1812.
Now the only people fighting over it are real estate agents. Come summer, wealthy folks “from away” arrive to air out their cottages and put their sailboats in the water. The two kinds of people—full-time Mainers and those “from away”—rub shoulders at T & C Grocery, Dennett’s Wharf Restaurant, and Eaton’s Boatyard. Mainers keep to themselves. Summer people pay taxes on their pricey properties. It’s a practical arrangement that works all the way up the coast.
In winter, when frigid winds whip across Penobscot Bay up the steep streets of the tiny town, Castine’s white clapboard houses huddle together against the cold; along the waterfront, small nineteenth-century brick warehouses hint at the town’s historic commercial past. This was the only place Danielle wanted to be. Students at MMA could study deck operations and serve on a ship’s bridge, or study engineering and serve in the engine room. Danielle wanted to join the ranks of the former. She applied to MMA as a senior in high school and refused to consider any backup schools. For Danielle, it was Maine Maritime or bust.
Danielle’s first year at academy was stressful; her hair fell out in clumps. Laurie Bobillot, her mother, remembers seeing bald patches in her daughter’s wavy locks. Still, five-foot-nothing Danielle wouldn’t quit.
Being a small woman in a man’s field had inherent dangers, but her mostly male academy