Into the Raging Sea. Rachel Slade
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 classmates were supportive. As a cadet, however, Danielle had to confront the reality of shipping out with men. During one of her first tours on one of TOTE’s vessels, the chief mate called her into his stateroom. He said that he wanted to show her something. She knocked on his door; he opened it and dropped his towel. She fled, told her friends, and word got up to the captain. The chief mate was unpopular with the other officers and was quickly fired for sexual harassment. When the second and third mates moved up to take his place, Danielle was given the third mate position aboard that vessel.
After that, she was branded as the girl who got her job because she claimed some chief mate harassed her. Which wasn’t quite fair. At the time, she was very young and very green. She did what she was told. She didn’t ask for this, she didn’t want it. She’d worked hard to be a deck officer in the merchant marine. She wanted to be taken seriously.
Academically, things didn’t always come easily to Danielle. She sometimes transposed numbers and dreaded taking azimuths at sea. At two o’clock on Wednesday afternoon as they headed to Puerto Rico during the final voyage, she sent a weather report to the National Weather Service—a voluntary spot-report requested of all commercial vessels at sea—and ended up sending erroneous coordinates that positioned El Faro squarely atop mainland Cuba. Because of that mistake, her data was chucked.
One former ship’s officer told me that he’d tell her to do something and then she’d walk away and forget it entirely. “Write stuff down,” he admonished her. He liked her a lot, everyone liked her, but she was often distracted. It took her a few times to pass her second mate’s exam.
Danielle loved life, though, and onshore, she was a regular Martha Stewart—cooking, decorating, planning parties. She had a passion for the past, especially vintage clothes. She would order ’50s dresses off the web whenever the ship had internet service and came bouncing down the gangway to dozens of boxes of things she’d bought for herself and friends; it was like Christmas every seventy days.
She adored holidays and planning parties, too. One fall, she decorated a backyard path that led out to a table under a tree with homemade lanterns—mason jar lanterns with votive candles, which she also hung from the tree’s branches—and she decked out each setting with decorative cloth placemats and a carved pumpkin with a candle in it. She went all out.
When she was ashore, Danielle was tireless. “She exhausted me,” her friend says with a smile. “She had lots of energy, so by the time the ten weeks were over on this end, we needed a break. She would run us ragged because she’d have so much that she wanted to squeeze in.”
Danielle’s brutal work schedule on the ship, along with a steady diet of cafeteria food and lack of sleep, was beginning to show. She worried a lot about her weight; it didn’t help that the other officers sometimes teased her for putting on the pounds. During shore leave, she became a workout fanatic, and built a strong friendship with her fitness instructor, Korinn Scattoloni. Danielle was memorable because she pushed herself hard, enough that Korinn sometimes worried about her. “I watched that red face to make sure it didn’t turn purple,” she says. At first, Korinn didn’t understand why the high-energy woman in the back of the class with the hot pink workout clothes would vanish for months at a time. Eventually, Danielle told her instructor that she was in the merchant marine, a career path Korinn understood well.
There was a time when Korinn herself had answered the call of the sea. She was a successful dancer in New York City when, one day, she went down to see the tall ships at South Street Seaport. As soon as she saw the elegant historic sailing vessels moored to the dock, she knew that was where she was meant to be. Korinn quit her job and signed up to work on the HMS Rose, a replica of a twenty-gun Royal Navy ship built in 1757. As a hired hand aboard the three-masted frigate, she was expected to haul and furl the sails, keep the decks and sails clean and mended, and help in the galley.
Late one afternoon, she and another member of the crew were ordered to climb seventy feet up the mast to furl a sail. They’d been working all day and were exhausted, but as the only woman aboard, she wouldn’t complain. At the time, they didn’t tie-in, trying to be as authentic as possible. Leaning over the yardarm, Korinn began pulling up the yards of canvas, her feet supported only by a slack horizontal rope. When her partner accidentally kicked the rope out from under her, she fell. She would have died if it hadn’t been for the chief mate, Robin Walbridge, who violently shoved her into the water right before she hit the deck. She made out with a few cracked ribs and a broken wrist.
Robin later became known as the captain who took the replica of the HMS Bounty out to sea during Hurricane Sandy and died with the ship when she was swamped by the storm.
Shipping out all the time made it difficult for Danielle to keep up relationships, which she valued more than anything. She was gone half the year and began to realize how much she was missing. “She was at a point in her life where she was ready to move on,” her friend says. Danielle wanted to come ashore for good; the ten-week rotation was dragging her down.
“Yeah, she was missing things,” her friend says. “She wanted to be home. She struggled with scheduling, you know? We’d get the calendar out and say, What Christmas are you gonna be here? What Easter are you gonna be here? What summer are you gonna be here? That sort of thing, I think that part was tiring.”
Danielle was home throughout the summer of 2015. She threw parties at night, built bonfires and make s’mores with giant marshmallows. She lazed about in hammocks with her friends and used an app to look at the stars, picking out constellations. Danielle had spent her entire life laughing off things that bothered her. That summer, she laughed a lot.
Still, the specter of another voyage loomed. She refused to talk about life on the ship, but occasionally let her closest friends know how frustrated she was with how much El Faro was being neglected. The four men who’d been fired a few years ago, officers who’d trained and supported Danielle, had taken great pride in keeping the old vessel looking her best. Now no one seemed