Into the Raging Sea Read online

  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.

  Chapter 4

  Third Mate Jeremie Riehm

  28.42°N -78.47°W

  Third Mate Jeremie Riehm arrived on the bridge shortly before his 8:00 a.m. shift and watched the tropical sun rise into an unctuous sky. Another steamy Caribbean day ahead. The air-conditioning had been cranking all night and now it was chilly on the bridge in spite of the stickiness of the morning outside.

  The scorching sun would soon beat down on the metal roof of the wheelhouse, so Jeremie wore a T-shirt and shorts under a light jacket. His thick brown hair flopped into his eyes. He’d brusquely brush it up and back with his fingers giving it a permanent flip. Forty-six years old, he looked like a rugged, slightly stockier Brad Pitt.

  “You hear about the storm?” Chief Mate Shultz asked Jeremie.

  “Yes, I’m aware of it,” he answered. “Caught a little bit of it on the news. I heard it’s gonna be a hurricane tomorrow or later today according to the Weather Channel.”

  Shultz took Jeremie over to the chart table to show the new course he and the captain—who was downstairs getting breakfast—had prepared earlier that day. The chief mate pointed to Joaquin’s projected course, drawn in wax pencil on a clear plexiglass panel laid over the paper nautical chart. Tiny numbers scattered across the white sea indicated depths in fathoms; there was twelve thousand feet of ocean below them. The shallow Bahama banks blocking their escape route to the west appeared as a scorpion-shaped expanse of light blue. Sinuous purple lines represented the elaborate network of underwater communication cables that link the United States to the Caribbean islands, South America, and Europe—cords that could be cut by the keel of a ship if it dragged over them.

  Joaquin had moved farther west and south, which meant that if they’d continued on their original course, they’d run straight into it, Shultz said. “I mean, our timing was perfect to reach the eye. Now worse comes to worse, we can duck in behind the islands.”

  “We’re gonna get slammed tonight, though,” Jeremie said grimly, studying the chart in front of him. A slight heading change wouldn’t buy them much, he thought, and sixty miles from the eye was at least forty miles too close.

  Jeremie looked up to nod at Jack Jackson, his helmsman on the 8:00 to noon watch, who’d just come up from breakfast. Jack stood by while the chief mate and third mate discussed the new plan. “It’s been too quiet this season,” Jack observed.

  “Been that way last year and the year before,” agreed Jeremie. Very quiet hurricane seasons. Good weather could breed complacency.

  “Out in the Pacific, it’s been one typhoon after the other, a daisy chain of ’em,” Jack said. “One in Taiwan hit 180 miles per hour.” He shook his head thinking about that kind of wind. It was enough to give an old mariner like himself a good scare.

  Davidson came back up to the bridge to check in on his third mate. “So we got a little weather coming in,” he told him. “I’m sure you heard,” he continued. “Joaquin morphed its ugly head between the time we left and the morning when we woke up. Tough to plan when you don’t know but we made a little diversion here. We’re gonna be further south of the eye. We’ll be about sixty miles south of the eye. It should be fine. We are gonna be fine—not should be—we are gonna be fine.”

  The captain looked at his third mate intently, confirming that the officer understood the plan. Satisfied, he left the bridge to Jeremie and Jack who together watched the rising sun cook the already hot Caribbean waters into a soupy haze.

  Jeremie was known for speaking his mind. Unlike the other officers aboard El Faro, he’d come up through the hawsepipe, meaning he hadn’t graduated from one of the country’s seven maritime academies. Instead, he’d signed on to the merchant marine as general crew when he was eighteen years old and worked his way up. During his downtime aboard the vessel, he’d studied the ship’s books and manuals and often surprised his fellow officers with the depth of his knowledge. Most of them were older and had little interest in exploring all the bells and whistles offered by advancing technology. They could run a ship with or without it. But Jeremie liked figuring things out.

  Once he had enough proficiency and experience, Jeremie screwed up his courage and took the third mate’s test. The exam is a brutal, three-day trial of knowledge and nerves. It was especially hard for Jeremie, who got anxious at the thought of taking tests. After passing, he didn’t want to go through that again, so he remained working as a third mate for the next decade. Sailing as a second mate would have meant more money and more authority on the bridge, but for him, it wasn’t worth the stress. He lived modestly on shore, focused on family. He was married to an African American woman who ran a day-care center on the remote Florida island where they lived with their two teenage children. When he was off duty, he helped her with the business and kept to himself.

  A few years back, Jeremie joined his fellow ship’s officers Captain Pete Villacampa, Chief Mate Paul Haley, and Second Mate Charlie Baird at their union’s ultra-advanced simulation center in Miami. He was a generation younger than the other officers. For four days, they worked together on a computer-generated bridge, which rocked and rolled like a real ship, enough to make a person seasick, as the program generated complex maritime situati
ons for them to work their way out of. Jeremie’s understanding of the weather systems, radar, and loading software—things he’d taught himself—proved invaluable. The team earned one of the highest scores the instructor had ever recorded.

  Three months after that simulation test, Villacampa and Haley were fired by the shipping company, along with two other seasoned officers, Captain Jack Hearn and Chief Mate Jimmy Armstrong. The official line was that they’d lost their jobs because illegal drugs had been found on one of TOTE’s ships.

  In July 2012, US customs agents in Jacksonville saw a suspicious shipping container coming off El Faro’s sister ship, El Morro. The box looked like it had been tampered with, maybe pried open after it had been sealed. Sure enough, a couple of the unlicensed crew—an ever-changing cast of characters hired through the union by the shipping company’s crewing manager—had stashed forty-seven kilos of cocaine inside it, a $3.5 million haul bound for the US market. After the seamen were busted in Jacksonville, the ship’s steward—a Puerto Rican named Danny, and another family member—were gunned down by a member of the drug cartel in a San Juan restaurant while Danny’s vessel was docked nearby.

  That shipping containers had been used to transport contraband surprised absolutely no one. Roberto Saviano’s book on the Italian mafia, Gomorrah, offers a shocking example of the disturbing things people stuff in these nondescript steel boxes. In his book’s opening scene, a crate being loaded onto a ship in Naples accidentally opens midair and dozens of human corpses pour out of it and onto the ship’s deck. The dead immigrants had paid a lifetime’s worth of wages to the Mafia to have their remains repatriated to China; they were unceremoniously scooped back in and shipped according to plan.

  No port authority has the resources to monitor what’s inside the hundreds of thousands of shipping containers crossing the oceans at any one time. Worldwide, approximately 1 percent of the boxes are actually opened and inspected. Drug dealers and arms brokers count on this fact to move their illicit wares around the globe; they build rare losses into their business plan. Because occasionally, someone gets caught.