Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018

Copyright © 2018 by Rachel Slade

Cover design by Allison Saltzman

Cover images © Mike Hill/Photographer’s Choice/Getty Images

Rachel Slade asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008302436

Ebook Edition © August 2017 ISBN: 9780008302450

Version: 2018-04-23

Dedication

To the families and friends of those lost on El Faro.

No one should have to endure such sorrow.

Epigraph

There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.

—LORD JIM, JOSEPH CONRAD

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

CAST OF CHARACTERS

CHAIN OF COMMAND ABOARD EL FARO

EL FARO PLANS AND CROSS-SECTION

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

PART I

CHAPTER 1: THE CLOCK IS TICKING

CHAPTER 2: BLOUNT ISLAND

CHAPTER 3: TROPICAL STORM JOAQUIN

CHAPTER 4: THIRD MATE JEREMIE RIEHM

CHAPTER 5: A HURRICANE IS NOT A POINT ON A MAP

CHAPTER 6: SECOND MATE DANIELLE RANDOLPH

CHAPTER 7: COLLISION COURSE

CHAPTER 8: HULL NUMBER 670

CHAPTER 9: AFTERNOON

CHAPTER 10: CAPTAIN MICHAEL DAVIDSON

CHAPTER 11: QUESTION AUTHORITY?

CHAPTER 12: THE JONES ACT

CHAPTER 13: EVENING

CHAPTER 14: NIGHT

CHAPTER 15: NECESITAMOS LA MERCANCÍA

CHAPTER 16: DAWN

CHAPTER 17: THE RAGING SEA

CHAPTER 18: WE’RE GONNA MAKE IT

PART II

CHAPTER 19: WE’VE LOST COMMUNICATION

CHAPTER 20: SEARCH AND RESCUE

CHAPTER 21: FLIGHT TO JACKSONVILLE

CHAPTER 22: SHIPS DON’T JUST DISAPPEAR

CHAPTER 23: PROFIT AND LOSS

CHAPTER 24: THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE

CHAPTER 25: HOW TO SINK A SHIP

CHAPTER 26: ADMIRAL GREENE CLEARS THE AIR

CHAPTER 27: PORTRAIT OF INCOMPETENCE

CHAPTER 28: MISSION NUMBER TWO

CHAPTER 29: THE PROOF IS IN THE PUDDING

CHAPTER 30: VOICES

CHAPTER 31: TWENTY-FOUR MINUTES

CHAPTER 32: SPIRITS

EPILOGUE

CREW LIST

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A NOTE ON SOURCES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

CAST OF CHARACTERS
FEATURED EL FARO OFFICERS AND CREW

DECK DEPARTMENT

Michael Davidson, 53, Master

Steven Shultz, 54, Chief Mate, First Watch

Danielle Randolph, 34, Second Mate, Second Watch

Jeremie Riehm, 46, Third Mate, Third Watch

Frank Hamm, 49, Able Seaman, Helmsman for the First Watch

Jackie Jones, 38, Able Seaman, Helmsman for the Second Watch

Jack Jackson, 60, Able Seaman, Helmsman for the Third Watch

ENGINEERING

Richard Pusatere, 34, Chief Engineer, Dayworker

Michael Holland, 25, Third Assistant Engineer

LaShawn Rivera, 32, Chief Cook

James Porter, 40, Utility Person

Jeff Mathias, 42, off-duty Chief Engineer in charge of Polish workers aboard El Faro

EL FARO FAMILY AND FRIENDS

Laurie Bobillot, mother of Danielle Randolph

Jill Jackson-d’Entremont, sister of Jack Jackson

Robert Green, stepfather of LaShawn Rivera

Rochelle Hamm, wife of Frank Hamm

Glen Jackson, brother of Jack Jackson

Jenn Mathias, wife of Jeff Mathias

Marlena Porter, wife of James Porter

Frank Pusatere, father of Richard Pusatere

Deb Roberts, mother of Michael Holland

Korinn Scattoloni, friend of Danielle Randolph

OFF-DUTY EL FARO OFFICERS

Charlie Baird, off-duty Second Mate

Jim Robinson, off-duty Chief Engineer

OTHER TOTE SHIP’S OFFICERS

Ray Thompson, Isla Bella Master, former Chief Mate of El Faro

Earl Loftfield, El Yunque Master after the loss of El Faro

Kevin Stith, El Yunque Master during accident voyage

JACKSONVILLE PILOT

Eric Bryson, River Pilot with St. Johns Bar Pilot Association

RETIRED MARINERS

Eric Axelsson, retired TOTE Master, Davidson’s relief on El Faro until August 2015

Paul Haley, retired TOTE Chief Mate

Jack Hearn, retired TOTE Master

John Loftus, retired Horizon Shipping Master

Pete Villacampa, retired TOTE Master

Bill Weisenborn, retired TOTE Port Captain

SUN SHIPBUILDING AND DRY DOCK

John Glanfield, retired Shipbuilder

Eugene Schorsch, retired Naval Architect

NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE

James Franklin, Director of the National Hurricane Center, Miami

US COAST GUARD DC HEADQUARTERS

Rear Admiral Paul Thomas, Assistant Commandant for Prevention Policy

Captain Jason Neubauer, Head of USCG El Faro investigation

Commander Michael Odom, USCG Traveling Ship Inspector, former Rescue Swimmer

Commander Charlotte Pittman, Deputy Chief, USCG Office of Public Affairs, former helicopter pilot

Keith Fawcett, Marine Board Investigator

US COAST GUARD SEARCH AND RESCUE

Captain Rich Lorenzen, Commanding Officer, Air Station Clearwater

Commander Scott Phy, Operations Officer, Air Station Clearwater

Lieutenant Dave McCarthy, MH-60T Pilot, Aircraft Commander for Minouche rescue

Aviation Survival Technician 1st Class Ben Cournia, Rescue Swimmer during Minouche rescue

Lieutenant John “Rick” Post, MH-60T Pilot, Co-Pilot for Minouche rescue

Aviation Maintenance Technician 2nd Class Joshua Andrews, Flight Mechanic during Minouche rescue

Lieutenant Commander Jeff Hustace, HC-130 pilot, Aircraft commander for El Faro search

Captain Todd Coggeshall, Chief of Incident Management, 7th Coast Guard District, Miami

Operations Specialist 2nd Class Matthew Chancery, Search and Rescue Mission Coordinator, 7th Coast Guard District Command Center, Miami

NATIONAL TRANSPORTATION SAFETY BOARD

Tom Roth-Roffy, NTSB Chief Investigator

Eric Stolzenberg, NTSB Nautical Architecture Group

Doug Mansell, NTSB Technology Specialist

Mike Kucharski, NTSB Investigator

TOTE EXECUTIVES

Peter Keller, EVP, TOTE

Phil Greene, President, TOTE Services

Phil Morrell, VP Marine Operations, TOTE Maritime

Tim Nolan, President, TOTE Maritime Puerto Rico

John Lawrence, Designated Person Ashore and Manager of Safety and Operations

Jim Fisker-Andersen, Port Engineer

CHAIN OF COMMAND ABOARD EL FARO

EL FARO PLANS AND SECTION

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

Six microphones installed in the ceiling of El Faro’s navigation bridge recorded twenty-six hours of conversation leading up to the sinking. This audio was captured on a microchip by an onboard Voyage Data Recorder—the ship’s black box. All the dialogue in this book aboard El Faro during her final voyage was taken from a transcription of this audio.

CHAPTER 1
THE CLOCK IS TICKING

The satellite call came into the emergency center at 7:08 on the morning of October 1, 2015.

OPERATOR: Okay, sir.

CALLER: Are you connecting me through to a QI [Qualified Individual]?

OPERATOR: That’s what I’m getting ready now. We’re seeing who is on call and I’m going to get you right to them. Give me one second, sir. I’m going to put you on a quick hold. So one moment, please. Okay, sir. I just need your name please.

CALLER: Yes, ma’am. My name is Michael Davidson. Michael C. Davidson.

OPERATOR: Your rank?

CALLER: Ship’s master.

OPERATOR: Okay. Thank you. Ship’s name?

CALLER: El Faro.

OPERATOR: Spell that E-L …

CALLER: Oh man, the clock is ticking. Can I please speak to a QI? El Faro: Echo, Lima, Space, Foxtrot, Alpha, Romeo, Oscar. El Faro.

OPERATOR: Okay, and in case I lose you, what is your phone number please?

CALLER: Phone number 870-773-206528.

OPERATOR: Got it. Again, I’m going to get you reached right now. One moment please.

CALLER: [Aside.] And Mate, what else to do you see down there? What else do you see?

OPERATOR: I’m going to connect you now okay.

OPERATOR 2: Hi, good morning. My name is Sherida. Just give me one moment. I’m going to try to connect you now. Okay, Mr. Davidson?

CALLER: Okay.

OPERATOR 2: Okay, one moment please. Thank you for waiting.

CALLER: Oh God.

OPERATOR 2: Just briefly what is your problem you’re having?

CALLER: I have a marine emergency and I would like to speak to a QI. We had a hull breach, a scuttle blew open during a storm. We have water down in three-hold with a heavy list. We’ve lost the main propulsion unit, the engineers cannot get it going. Can I speak to a QI please?

OPERATOR 2: Yes, thank you so much, one moment.

Thirty-three minutes later, the American government’s network of hydrophones in the Atlantic Ocean picked up an enormous thud just beyond Crooked Island in the Bahamas. It was a sound rarely heard out there in the deepest part of the sea where, for decades, the government had been recording an endless underwater symphony. Three miles down, they listened to the lonely cries of humpback whales, the eerie hum of earthquakes, and the whirr of submarine propellers. Just white noise, really. But that morning, something huge and audible hit the ocean floor with terrific force.

Based on the positions of the hydrophones, the people listening knew approximately where the object landed. They also knew the precise moment that it hit. But what was it?

That the Americans had been listening in on the ocean since the 1960s was no secret, at least not to mariners. Some older guys remembered laying down the cable decades ago to feed this equipment, which served as the country’s first line of defense against submarine invasion or other nefarious activity on the high seas.

The precise locations within this network were considered classified, but one monitoring station, known as the Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center (AUTEC), occupies a piece of Andros Island in the Bahamas, just west of Nassau. The thud was notable enough that there was talk among a few members of the armed forces stationed there. That intel simmered among a handful of officers assigned to monitor maritime activity in the Caribbean.

When word got out that a large American container ship had vanished in Hurricane Joaquin somewhere east of the Bahamas, those stationed on Andros Island knew exactly what they’d heard. It was the sound of El Faro colliding with the ocean floor.

CHAPTER 2
BLOUNT ISLAND
JACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA, 30.39°N -81.54°W

From above, Jacksonville looks like a battleground between land and water where water is winning. Rivers, streams, and inlets branch like veins folding in on themselves, following their own secret logic; roads curve here and there, searching for a path from one scrap of land to the next. A series of bridges stitches northern Florida’s tenuous coast together.

It was late in the afternoon on September 29, 2015, and Jacksonville’s wide open-for-business highways were choked with commuter traffic baking in the heat of another late September day. Down at the sprawling marine terminal on Blount Island, stevedores loaded El Faro, a 790-foot-long ship, with 25 million pounds of cargo: 391 containers, 238 refrigerated containers, 118 trailers, 149 cars, and enough fructose syrup to make more than one million two-liter bottles of soda.

In his comfortable home at Atlantic Beach, Eric Bryson waited for a call from his dispatcher. Eric was a river pilot with the St. Johns Bar Pilot Association. He made his living divining the secrets of Jacksonville’s waterways to safely deliver tankers, cargo ships, and car carriers up the St. Johns River to the Port of Jacksonville or back out to sea. Federal maritime law requires that every deep-draft vessel hire a local guide like Eric to navigate ships through these waterways so that they don’t collide with each other or the struts of bridges, or take one of the many tight turns too wide and ground on the shallow banks.

To earn his piloting job, Eric had to memorize the twists, hazards, and depths of the St. Johns River in exquisite detail—enough that he could draw a navigable map of it from memory. Though the pilot’s test was only open to seasoned ship captains like him, just the top scorer was considered for the position. When he took the exam in 1991, Eric blew away the other twenty-six applicants.

Since it requires such highly specialized knowledge, piloting is one of the most stable positions in the maritime industry. Getting the St. Johns job meant that Eric could give up the seaman’s life and settle down for the long haul with his wife, Mary. They could work together raising their two kids in the warmth of the Florida sun, and he’d never be more than seven miles out to sea. It was a radically different life from the typical mariner who spends at least ten weeks straight on a ship, often out of communication, far from home.

Eric thinks of his job as a craft. “Any idiot can color inside the lines,” he says of finessing a ship safely in and out of port. “The art of it is coloring outside the lines safely.” Sturdily built, just shy of six feet, bald and bearded, with a face like a benevolent bulldog, Eric is the embodiment of male competence. Ponderous by nature, he does not take anything lightly. Some mariners who’ve worked with him call Eric “the Priest.” All this, combined with his detached Yankee demeanor, puts ship captains at ease when Eric assumes command of their vessel.

The pilot dispatcher’s call for SS El Faro came at six o’clock. The container ship was just about ready to leave port, but she was running an hour late. She’d been delayed because she’d been incorrectly loaded—someone had accidentally transposed a few numbers in the ship’s loading software, causing the weight of the cargo to be unevenly distributed, which resulted in a noticeable list. The stevedores had had to scramble to shift cargo around to get her upright once again.

Eric knew El Faro and her two sister ships well—they’d been running twice weekly from Jacksonville to San Juan for nearly two decades, and he’d piloted them up and down St. Johns River dozens of times over the years. He knew many of the deck crew and officers, too, if not by name, at least by face. They were nearly all Americans. These days, that was notable. Most of the ships coming in and out of Jacksonville were registered in foreign countries and crewed by a mix of international laborers—predominantly Philippine.

By the time Eric got the call that hot Wednesday evening, his small travel bag was packed. He’d been following El Faro’s loading progress all day. He grabbed his navy-and-yellow pilot’s jacket and walked through the kitchen door to one of his company’s white Subarus, perpetually parked in the driveway.

As he drove to the terminal, a concrete expanse about the size of Central Park surrounded by a high chain-link fence, Eric cleared his head of the little things that might distract him. He needed intense focus to do his job right. Eric was acutely aware that in the world of big ships, complacency meant death. Now nearing sixty years old, he wanted to get out before his job killed him. Which it nearly did, twice.

To bring ships into Jacksonville, Eric had to board them at sea. He rode in his pilot boat seven miles out to the vessel, at first invisible on the horizon, just a blip on the radar, then looming large as he and his driver pull alongside. Riding up next to the massive, impermeable steel hulls never ceased to give Eric a thrill. If the winds and seas were high, the ship could trace out a big, lazy circle in the water to create a temporary lee for the small pilot boat.

Big ships rarely stop or drop anchor for pilots—they have so much momentum that they’d take miles to come to a halt, and even then, they’d drift with the winds and currents; instead, the pilot boat nestles up alongside like a pilot fish clinging to a whale shark, then tries to keep up with the ship, about 11 miles per hour. The two vessels aren’t ever tethered together.

The small boat is outfitted with an external set of stairs leading to a platform, like a kitchen ladder that someone screwed onto its deck. Moored at the pilot association’s office, the stepladder steps off into the void. But alongside a thousand-foot-long ship, it’s the only way a pilot has any chance of climbing aboard.

Once the boat is riding alongside the ship, a small door in the enormous hull opens, a friendly face pops out from the steel wall, and a hand drops down a rope ladder as the pilot boat’s driver tries to maintain the same speed and course as the ship. The pilot climbs his stepladder and then pauses, clinging to his platform, gauging the situation. The bottom rung of the huge ship’s rope ladder dangles a few feet away from the pilot’s shoes, but the two vessels are bobbing up and down at different rates. The pilot times his leap as the ship and pilot boat perform their version of synchronized swimming. He grabs hold of the rope ladder and scrambles up.

I once took a piloting trip with Eric. I thought I was mentally prepared for that moment when you had to take that leap of faith. But when confronted with all this—the flimsy rope ladder, the wall of black steel, the deep water rushing below with nothing to catch me if I missed—I panicked. Freud says that those who are afraid of heights don’t trust their bodies not to jump. If my hands decided to let go, I would plummet between the two vessels and drown.

“Grab on! Climb up,” Eric commanded. I reached out and gripped that rope ladder like my life depended on it, which it did. And then I scurried ten feet up the hull, ten steps straight up, holding my breath until I was safe on the deck, looking back down at Eric’s head as he followed me scaling the side of the ship.

Pilots have missed that ladder. They’ve slipped and fallen into the sea where they were crushed between their boat and the ship. In October 2016, a pilot with more than a decade’s worth of experience died this way on the river Thames.

Eric was once reaching for the ladder when his driver pulled away too soon, leaving him straddled between the two vessels. Eric was forced to make a split-second decision: jump for the ladder and risk missing it, or fall back into the pilot boat. He hurled himself toward the deck of his boat and saved his life but shattered his heel. He was out of work for months, and in immeasurable pain, but hated being on meds. His second accident was caused by his bag—caught on the pilot boat platform, it yanked him back, and when he fell onto the deck, he broke his back. He’s never fully recovered from that. But he’s alive.

Pilots board a berthed container ship like anyone else—up the gangway or loading ramp.

That’s how Eric got onto El Faro on the evening of September 29.

He parked his car at Blount Island Marine Terminal at 7:30 and walked across the expanse of tarmac by the fading light to the ramp. As he approached El Faro, Eric regarded her dark blue steel hull. Like all massive ships, El Faro was a paean to modern engineering—a floating island capable of moving the weight of the Eiffel Tower through the ocean at 25 miles per hour. She was as long as the Golden Gate Bridge is high; it would take more than four minutes for a person to walk from bow to stern. Designed in the late 1960s, she was built for speed at a time when fuel was cheap and fast shipping fetched premium pricing. To reduce drag, she had a narrow beam that tapered steeply and evenly to her sharp keel.

These days, the profit is in cargo. The more you take, the more money you make. So modern ships are bulkier and slower; megaships, like the 1,305-foot-long Benjamin Franklin, are fat all the way to their little nub of a keel and can carry up to eighteen thousand containers. (If you lined them up, they’d reach from Manhattan to Trenton, New Jersey.) These ships made El Faro look like a toy.

Just about loaded up, El Faro sat low in the water, but Eric could still see her load line marks etched into her hull indicating she was safe to sail. Thick lines kept her tied to the dock as trucks and cars sped up her wide loading ramp, located at midships, in a fog of gas and diesel exhaust.

Twelve stories above Eric, a crane operator labored in a glass-bottomed cab hanging from a track, hauling the final containers onto El Faro’s main deck.

A working crane is like a massive version of the classic claw game, and watching it load ships is mesmerizing. On the dock below the crane, a longshoreman steers a flatbed truck into position next to the ship, then releases the clamps holding the container to the truck’s chassis. A typical container is forty feet long and can be as heavy as thirteen cars. The crane operator uses cables and winches to lower the “spreader” over the steel box—a steel frame that aligns with the container’s top four corners—and locks it in place like a tight-fitting lid. The spreader grips the container as the operator artfully swings it above El Faro’s deck, accommodating for the box’s languid movement, and just as momentum begins to pull it backward, he lowers it into its designated spot, using gravity’s pull to level it into place. Stevedores lash each box to the ship’s deck with steel fittings, tightened with turnbuckles. Stacks of containers are locked to one another like Legos.

The frenzied choreography works most of the time but occasionally things happen—a container slips from the spreader’s grip and crashes back on the flatbed, or it lands misaligned and crushes a longshoreman’s hand as he’s leveling it into place, or a stevedore gets hit by one of the huge trailers being driven off the ship in a great rush.

The huge loading cranes themselves also pose danger. They glide on two tracks that run parallel to the dock along its entire length, allowing the cranes to move from bow to stern and from ship to ship, stacking boxes. In 2008, a squall sent one 950-ton Jacksonville crane careening down the length of two football fields into the next, causing the steel constructs to twist and crumple into a heap of junk. It looked like spaghetti. It’s a rare event—the cranes come equipped with multiple brakes—but shows the kind of power packed in gale-force winds.

Out of the din, Eric saw Jack Jackson coming down the ramp to greet him. Jack was the helmsman on the 8:00 to midnight watch that night; he’d stand at the ship’s wheel on the navigation bridge and take steering commands from Eric. When they reached the sea buoy, Eric would disembark, leaving the captain in charge.

Sixty years old, sun-bleached yellow hair fading to white, ruddy face with a devilish grin, Jack had a wry sense of humor that could catch you off guard. He was the middle brother in a family of self-ascribed air force brats, mostly raised in New Orleans. Dad would show the kids pamphlets of the places they were moving next. Delaware! Beaches! Jack’s older sister, Jill, moved frequently; she was a restless soul. Younger brother, Glen, with his ginger hair and blue eyes, could’ve been Jack’s twin, but he was more a traveler of the mind.

When Jack and Glen were boys in New Orleans in the 1960s, there were four major shipping companies keeping the port busy. They used to ride out to the big bend in the river to watch the ships. Two sunburned boys dreaming on the banks of the Mississippi. The boats were always going somewhere, just like their family, always moving. That’s where the fascination began, Glen says.

Jack signed up with the merchant marine during the 1970s to explore the world, make some money, live free. He enjoyed the easy sea life delivering grain to Africa or going back and forth to Europe. In those days, ships would spend days or weeks in a port loading and unloading so he could get off and poke around. Just one big adventure.

Jack had a magical aura about him; people were drawn to him. He once owned a motorcycle—a Norton. One day when Jack was stopped at a red light, a girl jumped on. She said she liked Nortons. They lived together for a year. That’s how life was back then.

Jack was easygoing. He never pursued an officer’s license or tried to hustle up the ranks; he preferred to avoid the messy politics aboard. He saw how cutthroat officers were; getting ahead wasn’t worth the increase in pay and the hassle. Guys with higher ranks would sit in union halls for days waiting for work but as a general able-bodied seaman, called an AB, Jack could always get work whenever the spirit moved him. Sailing, living free.

Decades later, Jack was still shipping out, and in a way, so was Eric. But Jack had fully embraced the seaman’s life; he lived alone in Jacksonville and had never married. During shore leave, he carved sculpture out of wood and painted dreamy Edward Hopper–like scenes. He once told Eric that when he retired, he planned on throwing an oar over his shoulder and walking west until someone asked him what it was.

Eric was pleased to see his fellow traveler on duty that night. Guys like Jack made the heavy workload on these short, busy runs down to San Juan go a little smoother.

Working ships are an obstacle course of cargo, safety equipment, and machinery and as Jack led Eric from the ramp to the ship’s house, he casually pointed out anything—raised thresholds, low headers—that Eric might trip over or bang his head on.

Though El Faro had an elevator, the captain on duty didn’t want the crew using it. Someone could get stuck in there. The machinery was old and cranky, and he worried that it might stop working entirely because the shipping company had stopped paying to have it inspected. If it did quit with someone inside, the ship’s engineers would have to spend their time fixing the lift instead of tending to the ship’s ancient steam plant.

So Jack and Eric climbed seven flights of industrial stairs bathed in fluorescent light to get to the navigation bridge. Each floor in the ship’s house served a function. Ascending, they passed the galley, the crews’ quarters, engineers’ quarters, deck officers’ quarters—each door clearly labeled—to the final set of stairs, through the door to the bridge where the captain and the third mate were waiting for them.

Nearly ten stories above the waterline, the navigation bridge was a single room atop the house with seven windows framing the evening sky as the sun set over Jacksonville. It smelled like old solder and aging wiring, an olfactory blast from the 1970s, a reminder that the ship was forty years old—built before the internet, laptops, and cellphones—and nearly double the age of the average ship docked in America’s ports.

Against the windows sat a file-cabinet-gray metal console as wide as the bridge, strewn with instruments. In the middle of the console, waist-high, was a small black steering wheel, like something you’d find on a Honda Civic. It was hard to believe that such an inconsequential thing controlled the massive rudder below. A couple of solid wood grab bars were attached to the console; even on this giant vessel, things could get rough. Tucked in the corner was the chartroom; a blackout curtain took the place of a door.

Captain Michael Davidson greeted Eric. Davidson was a Yankee like the pilot. He had signed on with the shipping company—TOTE—two years ago, and the pair had met here on the bridge a few times. Davidson stood a few inches shorter than Eric and wore his white-and-gray hair close cropped, military style. He had an athletic build, sharp nose, and Scottish eyes that sloped down in a friendly, generous way when he smiled, complementing his cleft chin. A slightly imperious manner betrayed his station as master of the ship. He shook Eric’s hand firmly, calling him “Mr. Pilot.”

“Hello, Cap’n,” Eric said.

Eric opened the door to the bridge wing and stepped into the warm evening air, high above the river. Below him, a pair of pelicans flew over the stacks of containers. Eric had a portable GPS system that came with an antenna that worked best out here; he positioned it carefully on the small deck, sheltered from the wind. The antenna sent his precise location back inside to his iPad, which was loaded with a detailed chart of the St. Johns River, its depths, and live traffic information. The keel of El Faro cut a wake three stories below the waterline, a comfortable depth for the river’s forty-foot dredged channel, but at various locations, tolerances were tight.

Eric’s handheld software was more sophisticated than El Faro’s onboard technology. El Faro didn’t have an electronic chart system, soon to be required of all international deep-draft vessels. Instead, her officers relied on their paper nautical charts published by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), and a crude alphanumerical GPS interface.

Eric always steered ships with his eyes first, technology second. He knew the river like he knew the streets of his own neighborhood, but he regularly referred to his iPad to check his work.

Jack Jackson handed the pilot a cup of coffee and took the wheel at eight o’clock as two tugs below slowly spun El Faro 180 degrees to point her bow toward the Atlantic Ocean, 10.6 miles down the winding river. When she was in position, the tugs pulled their lines and El Faro glided silently forward under her own power. They were underway.

Eric stood in the dusk at the windows of El Faro’s bridge sipping his brew, watching the waterway bend before him. Lights from the houses along the shore revealed the river’s edge, but Eric closely monitored his iPad tracking the ship’s speed and position and the river’s depth. Stretched out before him was a field of red and blue cargo containers, loaded with every necessity for life in Puerto Rico, graying to black in the fading light.

At this time of night, there wasn’t much traffic on the river. The navigation bridge was quiet, illuminated only by the glow of the ship’s instruments as Jack stood at the steering wheel, watching for shrimp boats, pleasure boats, anything the huge ship could crush as it slowly made its way downriver.

In his resonant baritone, perfect for late-night jazz radio, Eric would occasionally call out a command, anticipating current changes ahead to keep the vessel on course. “Left 10.”

“Left 10,” Jack Jackson repeated from behind the wheel and turned accordingly, causing the ship’s massive rudder far below to swing ten degrees to port. The heavily loaded El Faro heeled over slightly with each turn. She was tender, sensitive, slow to right herself, but not unpleasant. That’s how this class of ship moved.

As usual, there was very little chatter among the people on the bridge, just another trip on a calm autumn evening down the coast of Florida. Mariners are comfortable standing in silence for hours at a time, staring out at the sea. It’s part of the job. Jack and Davidson talked a little about the weather with Eric. Something was brewing out there, but El Faro was a fast ship. Davidson said that the storm would cut north and they would shoot down under it.

Eric could hear Second Mate Danielle Randolph on the two-way radio overseeing the men securing the deck and organizing lines at the stern of the ship. She’d spent the whole afternoon directing stevedores and checking cargo. Soon she’d head back to her room to catch a few more hours of sleep before coming up on the bridge for her midnight watch.

“Dead slow ahead,” Eric said as they approached land’s end. When they reached St. Johns Point, just past Mayport Naval base, the coastline peeled back as El Faro moved into open waters. So far above it all, Eric could feel the thrum of the twenty-five-foot propeller turned by the ship’s steam turbine whenever they put on the rudder. By the time the ship reached the mouth of the river, stars were out. The vessel and her cargo were a black silhouette against the dusky sea and sky.

About seven miles out, just before ten o’clock, Eric retrieved his GPS antenna from the bridge wing, packed his bag, and shook the captain’s hand. Chief Mate Steve Shultz walked him down to the main deck. Eric looked over the side and saw his pilot boat pulling up alongside. He gingerly climbed down the rope ladder, made it safely to his ride, gripped the handrail of his boat and looked up. From the top of the ladder, Shultz smiled and waved. The pilot boat pulled away from El Faro and headed back toward the lights of Jacksonville.

CHAPTER 3
TROPICAL STORM JOAQUIN
29.07°N -79.16°W

El Faro steamed south throughout the night hugging Florida’s Atlantic coast.

Two hours before dawn on September 30, Captain Davidson and Chief Mate Shultz met on the ship’s bridge. Since leaving Jacksonville the night before they’d traveled 147 nautical miles, putting them eighty miles east of Daytona Beach. Now they needed to make a decision: continue on their direct route to Puerto Rico or take a southerly detour along the west side of the Bahamas.

Above them, the night sky was clear. A handful of Tropical Cyclone Advisories had come in from the National Hurricane Center (NHC) overnight. Each time they did, a dot-matrix printer above the satellite-fed computer would automatically type out the message. The latest was advisory number 10:

TROPICAL STORM JOAQUIN FORECAST/ADVISORY NUMBER 10: 0900 UTC [5:00 a.m.] WED SEP 30 2015: TROPICAL STORM CENTER LOCATED NEAR 25.4N 72.5W AT 30/0900Z. PRESENT MOVEMENT TOWARD THE WEST-SOUTHWEST AT 5 KT. MAX SUSTAINED WINDS 60 KT WITH GUSTS TO 75 KT.

In the silence, darkness, and coolness of the final hour before dawn, Davidson used his chief mate as a sounding board as he tried to determine whether Joaquin posed a threat.

Shultz was taller and softer than Davidson, and a year older. His thin brown mustache and sparse goatee obscured a smattering of acne scars. As chief mate, he was responsible for the loading and securing of cargo and overseeing the unlicensed crew. Although weather routing was the second mate’s job, Shultz was flattered that Davidson had opted to consult with him that morning.

“This NHC report puts the storm further south than last night,” Shultz observed, studying the newest message out of Miami.

Davidson didn’t like Tropical Storm Joaquin’s slow, lumbering movements. It was traveling at about four knots. And the newest NHC assessment of the storm—that it was heading southwest—contradicted the ship’s forecasting software, which had the storm turning north. “Look, remember how we saw this storm out here the other day? It’s just festering,” he said to Shultz. “I’m anxious to see the newest BVS report.”

El Faro was equipped with a third-party weather forecasting software package called Bon Voyage System (BVS). Its interface is lush, much more visually inviting than the all-caps text advisories coming from NOAA, which need to be plotted out by hand on the ship’s paper charts.

On BVS, weather comes preplotted on a pastel-hued digital map. The tiny islands of the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos appear as beige strands in a light blue sea. Mariners can plug in their ship’s course and fast-forward through time to watch how weather systems are predicted to behave as they sail to their destination. Click and it’s tomorrow. Here’s your ship (based on your projected speed and course) and here’s the weather. Click again and it’s two days from now. You’ve moved, the weather moved. Click, click, click. It’s five days in the future, and there you are, safely in port. It all looks so clear, so real. Solid and dependable.

Nearly all people glean more information faster from data visualizations rather than alphanumeric code. That’s just how our brains work. Davidson, whose elegant handwriting reveals a man with a strong aesthetic sense, preferred to get his weather from the highly graphic BVS software. It put all the information—ship and storm location, plus their projected courses over time—on a single chart. On the bridge, this information was recorded on separate paper maps, one for the ship’s course, one for the storm, requiring a mental workout for an officer to precisely understand their relative positions. “I’m connecting now,” Davidson told Shultz and retreated downstairs to his stateroom to download the 5:00 a.m. BVS update via satellite.

It took a minute for his desktop to get the information and process it, but once it did, a small red circle with two helical wings represented Joaquin. It hovered far west of the Bahamas. Around the storm was a series of wavy concentric circles—bands of color depicting predicted wind speed from dangerous orange to so-so yellow to benign light green, then darker cobalt, and finally, the neutral baby blue of a calm sea. A dark scarlet line showed Joaquin’s predicted path.

The storm would move a little farther southwest, BVS told Davidson, then cut north toward South Carolina. El Faro could easily skirt below the system, as long as she kept up her speed. The captain clicked the forward arrow and saw the future: tomorrow, the ship would be halfway to San Juan and Joaquin would be nearing the US coast. As he clicked forward in time, El Faro moved along its expected route, and Joaquin inched farther and farther north, away from the islands. They’d be fine.

What Davidson didn’t know was that due to a clerical error, the 5 a.m. BVS forecast he’d downloaded that morning was identical to the one sent six hours prior. Because BVS took several hours to process NHC data before issuing a report, that error meant the weather forecast Davidson was looking at was based on raw data nearly eighteen hours old. The report depicted Joaquin as a northbound tropical storm when, in fact, by dawn on September 30, most forecasters, including the NHC, recognized the system as a slow-moving, full-blown Category 3 hurricane that might not budge from its southwesterly track.

According to Davidson’s BVS report, they’d see some weather—winds and waves, maybe twelve to fifteen feet—the aftershocks of the storm. He sent the update to the computer terminal on the bridge for the other officers to see. “This doesn’t look too bad,” Shultz said, examining the projection when the captain joined him. “The ship can handle it.”

“We’ll see what the schedule looks like,” Davidson said, clicking through to Friday. He took the opportunity to lecture his new chief mate on the finer points of routing a ship. “Joaquin’s gone a little south,” he said. “This is why you watch the weather all the time. All the time.” He cleared his throat then added, “Absolutely.”

As dawn approached, El Faro was one hundred miles north of the Bahamas. If they maintained their current heading, they’d sail east of the island chain into the deepest Atlantic—a straight shot to Puerto Rico. But if Joaquin didn’t turn north as predicted, they could get into trouble.

A land map shows the Bahamas as a series of spindly islands and cays running from the Florida peninsula to Cuba’s eastern tip. A nautical chart or satellite photo tells a very different story: the Bahamas are in fact the highest ridges of two huge limestone masses built up over millennia by the creation and compression of coral reefs. Known as Little Bahama Bank and Great Bahama Bank, these plateaus were once dry land before sea levels rose following the last Ice Age, creating extremely shallow areas that block deep draft vessels from accessing the Gulf of Mexico from the Atlantic.

On a calm day, the banks’ waters are a hypnotic cerulean, easily distinguishable from the dark, deep waters around them. But on rough and windy days, when the water surface is shredded by winds, few landmarks will warn you that you’re about to hit a submerged wall, until you do.

A handful of underwater canyons provide deep but narrow shipping highways. The Northwest Providence Channel, for one, runs east to west, separating Little Bahama Bank to the north from Great Bahama Bank to the south.

The Old Bahama Channel is another natural canyon—a fifteen-mile wide chasm between the Great Bahama Bank and Cuba. It’s such a popular route that NOAA’s nautical chart number 11013 shows it as a divided highway, complete with purple arrows reminding mariners that traffic here follows the right-hand rule. Tolerances in the channel are tight, though, bound by hidden seventeen-hundred-foot-high cliffs that plunge down into the abyss.

For centuries, mariners have threaded their way through these channels, sounds, and astonishingly deep trenches, losing countless ships when storms forced them onto the unforgiving shoals, leaving an estimated $400 million worth of Spanish plunder between Cuba and Florida. In August 2015, just a month before El Faro’s ill-fated voyage, treasure hunters announced the discovery a Spanish galleon sunk by a hurricane in 1715 off Florida’s coast, a find that yielded more than $1 million worth of gold coins.

After countless casualties, prudent mariners started favoring the Straits of Florida, which provide wide and deep passage from the southern tip of the Sunshine Sate along Key West, clear all the way to the northwest coast of Cuba, and into the Gulf of Mexico.

On the Puerto Rico run that morning, playing it safe meant following that same line: adjusting El Faro’s course 50 degrees south, right now, and taking the Straits down along the lee side of the island chain to the Old Bahama Channel. That would add 160 miles to the voyage, and at least five hours to their arrival time.

One month earlier, Second Mate Charlie Baird had convinced Davidson to take this same route to avoid Tropical Storm Erika, a move that shifted their ETA six hours later and burned 504 more gallons of fuel. Erika turned out to be a dud of a storm. It never developed into a hurricane and rumor has it that TOTE wasn’t pleased with Davidson’s decision to take the long way around. In hindsight, it seemed like an overcautious move that cut into the run’s profit. Fuel costs $38,000 a day to keep El Faro running full speed ahead. Port labor is also pricey. Time and fuel—it was always a delicate balance.

There was pressure to save on both, and Davidson had blown it once. He wasn’t going to blow it twice in the same season.

Davidson knew that early on Friday morning, two days from now, stevedores and hundreds of trucks would be lined up at San Juan Port waiting to unload El Faro’s cargo. By Friday afternoon, supermarket shelves across the island would be fully stocked with the goods she carried. By Monday, provisions would be low, and the trucks would line up again for El Yunque, El Faro’s sister ship, to bring another haul. TOTE’s ships were Puerto Rico’s lifeline. Any delay in arrival would set off a costly chain of events.

Davidson couldn’t afford to screw up with TOTE again. In the cutthroat world of shipping, prudence didn’t always pay. As a master, you had to be willing to push your luck. He’d lost a good job once before for playing it too safe when he ordered a tugboat assist after one of his ships developed steering problems.

Davidson decided to take his chances with Joaquin. Atlantic hurricanes always cut north eventually, and the ship was fast. They could easily outrun this one.

He and Shultz marked a point on their map east of the Bahamas and set a course nine degrees more southerly than the normal route, a slight change which they hoped would keep them out of trouble. “I think that’s a good little plan, Chief Mate,” Davidson said after spending an hour hashing it out. “At least I think we got a little distance from the center. We’re gonna be further south of the eye, about 60 miles south of it. It should be fine. We are gonna be fine. Not should be—we are gonna be fine.”

He knew they’d probably feel the aftereffects of the storm and wanted the ship secured for heavy weather. “Take a hard look at some of that cargo down there,” he advised his chief mate. “Delegate the men to look at the lashings as you deem necessary.”

Davidson’s warning about the lashings made the chief mate reconsider what he’d witnessed the day before when the stevedores were loading the trailers and containers onto the ship. He didn’t think they’d secured them properly but didn’t make a big deal out of it. “The longshoreman was doing the lashing wrong and I was trying to help,” Shultz told Davidson. He was the new guy on the ship and felt awkward criticizing their work.

“Go right to the foreman—cut out the middleman,” Davidson advised him. “I do it all the time.”

“They just don’t do the lashing the way it outta be done,” Shultz repeated in frustration. It was his job to make sure loading was done right, but it had all happened so fast, and he hadn’t yet established solid relationships with the workers he was overseeing.

Shifting cargo doesn’t only cause damage, it can break loose and kill a man. It can go right over the deck or wreak havoc in the holds. It can set off a domino effect during heavy seas, throwing the ship over, causing a perilous list. Globally, ships lose an average of about six hundred containers each year to storms, collisions, and groundings. Now that they were at sea, Shultz worried whether they had enough chains to double- or triple-lash if they needed to. If he’d looked at the cargo-securing inventory, he’d know that the vessel was short 170 lashing rods and missing more than a thousand required turnbuckles and twistlocks. Even if he had the equipment on hand, though, trying to lash at sea was miserable—it’s nearly impossible to maneuver around a loaded ship like that to chain things down. The cargo is packed tight, and if something did come loose while you were trying to secure it, you could be crushed. They were too far gone. Hopefully, the chains would hold.

Shultz spent the next several minutes logging alternative routes and waypoints into the ship’s GPS system. He wasn’t completely sure he trusted Joaquin, and he wanted to give the other officers various options if they ran into trouble. The storm had proven an unpredictable and erratic foe; Shultz wanted to work out as many escape routes as he could.

Logging in all those new waypoints (which made a high-pitched beep with each entry), irritated Davidson.

“It’s a good little diversion,” he scoffed at Shultz. “Are you feelin’ comfortable with that, Chief Mate?”

“Better. Yes, sir.”

“You can’t run every single weather pattern,” Davidson barked. His chief mate was already rubbing him the wrong way, and they’d only been up for an hour.

Shultz didn’t want to piss off Davidson. He was brand-new to the ship, new to the captain, and relatively new to the Atlantic. He’d come from shipping for years in the Pacific Northwest and was happy to be on the Puerto Rican run, at least temporarily, closer to Florida where his petite native Brazilian wife and two teens lived. He was a dedicated husband who vigorously embraced his wife’s Catholicism.

Nothing was more sacred aboard a ship than respecting the chain of command. Though he had as much experience as Davidson, Shultz knew to defer to his captain in all things to ingratiate himself to his superior. If he thought that sixty miles from the eye of a major storm didn’t sound right, he kept it to himself. A challenge like that could be viewed as insubordination. Shultz had kids approaching college age. Like everyone else, he had expenses. He needed this job.

Outside in the wild Atlantic, however, there were ominous signs.

At 6:40 a.m., Davidson watched the rising sun set the eastern horizon aflame, reminding him of an old adage. “Look at that red sky over there,” he said to Shultz. “Red in the morning, sailors take warning. That is bright.”

For thousands of years, sailors have viewed crimson skies at dawn as a bad omen. Science backs this up: Red has the longest wavelength in the color spectrum—powerful enough to penetrate the dust and moisture kicked up by an atmospheric event, such as a major storm. Other colors in the rainbow get scattered by thick storm clouds, leaving the sky a blazing scarlet.

Dawn on September 30, 2015, was distorted by a terrific atmospheric event brewing dead ahead of El Faro.

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