Into the Raging Sea
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Mariners live and die by weather. Naturally, they are obsessed with forecasts, signs, and augurs. Long after a seaman has turned his back on the ocean, he follows the weather. He might live in landlocked New Mexico, four hundred miles from the nearest boat, but he’ll still be able to tell you all about the system forming off the coast of the Bahamas.
At home in Portland, Maine, on September 29, 2015, El Faro’s off-duty Second Mate Charlie Baird couldn’t pull himself away from the Weather Channel. He’d just stepped off El Faro a week before, relieved by Second Mate Danielle Randolph. The pair had been tag-teaming the job for a couple of years, seventy days on, seventy days off. Now he was on his sofa, still in his robe at ten o’clock in the morning. He didn’t like what he was seeing, this storm developing in the Atlantic. He was off the clock, but he couldn’t help himself.
He picked up his phone and texted El Faro’s captain, Michael Davidson: “Storm forming north of the bahamas!!”
Growing up in Portland, Charlie loved the water, loved sailing, loved the sea. In high school, he was a state-champion swimmer, breaking record after record, and got recruited to swim at Niagara College. At sixty-six, he’s still remarkably fit, and still competing in triathlons. A handful of medals hang from the chandelier in his dining room.
Charlie joined the merchant marine in the early ’80s. He’s been shipping so long that, like many mariners, he’s missed a lot of life while at sea. Like someone who’s spent a few years in a coma, he’s kind of disconnected. A lot of casual conversation doesn’t make sense to him—movies, music, and events have simply passed him by. He would make a terrible Trivial Pursuit partner.
Charlie lets this all wash over him as he swigs another glass of red wine on ice.
He knew not to mess with hurricanes. First, there are the winds. At low speeds, the wind’s force on a large ship is minimal. That is, up to about 35 miles per hour. Wind speed and force have an exponential relationship, meaning that as the wind notches up, its force doubles, then triples, and then quadruples, and so on. It’s based on a simple formula: wind pressure per square foot = 0.00256 x (wind speed)2. Put another way, between 1 mile per hour and 35 miles per hour, the wind’s force against the boat runs roughly six to nine times its velocity. That’s the kind of incremental change that the human brain can handle. But over the next 35 miles per hour, its force rapidly grows to eighteen times its velocity. At 112 miles per hour, the wind’s force is thirty times its velocity—you can’t stand upright in that kind of wind no matter how far you lean; first you’ll slide across the ground, then you’ll get thrown backward into an uncontrollable somersault.
This power makes a big difference when you’ve got a crosswind across a large surface area, say, like the side of a container ship piled with boxes. At midspeeds, the wind’s force would be equivalent to twenty-one tons pushing up against that ship. You’ll heel a bit, and might want to shift your ballast to try to correct. Ratchet up the wind’s velocity to 110 miles per hour, and you’ve got about 375 tons trying to push the ship over. That’s the cumulative force of three of the world’s largest locomotives. If you’ve got vulnerabilities, like a low deck with lots of openings, that kind of force can be catastrophic.
And then there are the waves. At first, the cyclone’s high winds cause whitecaps to form on the water’s surface. As the hours pass, the waves grow. Start with a completely calm sea at noon on Monday; a 28-mile-per-hour wind starts to blow and by 11 p.m. on Tuesday, you’ll have thirteen-foot waves. A rough guide for wind to wave height is two to one—60-mile-per-hour winds (52 knots) stir up thirty-plus-foot waves, depending on fetch, or the length of open water over which the wind blows.
Of course, most mariners hope they’re never caught in seas like that, especially in a small boat.
How big can ocean waves get? For millennia, sailors spun stories about extreme waves a hundred feet high that came out of nowhere and smashed apart boats with just one hit. These were dismissed as salty tales, like mermaids and sea monsters. Even in the modern era, scientists considered freak waves a physical impossibility, in spite of compelling evidence to the contrary. During World War II, a rogue wave nearly sunk the Queen Mary ocean liner. The thousand-foot-long luxury passenger ship had been stripped down to carry American troops to Europe, and in December 1942, it was loaded with more than sixteen thousand American soldiers when a ninety-foot-high wave smacked her broadside, causing the ship to roll 52 degrees. There were plenty of witnesses to vouch for that one.
It wasn’t until modern equipment began recording rogue waves that scientists finally acknowledged their existence. On January 1, 1995, a laser aboard an oil rig in the North Sea recorded an eighty-four-foot-high wave. Since then sea buoys, satellites, mariners, and passengers have recorded these waves, confirming that indeed, they’re no myth.
Twenty-two minutes after Charlie texted him about Joaquin, Davidson texted back: “yup . . . thx for the heads up.”
Charlie sat on that sofa all day, watching the weather.
Monitoring the storm was the second mate’s job.
Danielle should’ve been obsessing about it just like him.
Charlie knew she wasn’t. He was fond of his fellow Mainer, a perky, freckled redhead half his age. He’d taken her under his wing like a little sister a decade ago when she joined the company while a cadet at Maine Maritime Academy. Back then, she was all energy, but ten years of shipping was wearing her down. Danielle recently found out she’d been passed over for a promotion to the new LNG ships. That killed what was left of her enthusiasm for her shipping career, and now he thought she was clocking in, clocking out.
Basic tasks seemed to elude her, like correctly plotting the ship’s location during her watch. She didn’t actively seek extra work to keep things running smoothly on the decrepit ship. Why bother? TOTE had kicked her to the curb after she’d sacrificed so much of her life to this career. Danielle started taking over-the-counter meds to fall asleep during her breaks and slamming caffeine to stay awake during her watch. These days, she went unusually quiet when her closest friends in Maine asked her about her life at sea.
And there was more. As Charlie was preparing to leave the ship to go home this last time, Danielle pulled him into her cabin and told him something about Captain Davidson he didn’t want to hear.
There was no way she was thinking about weather.
But 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.
Chapter 6
Second Mate Danielle Randolph
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 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 to care.
But like many mariners, Danielle had developed an addiction to shipping. You’re addicted 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.
Chapter 7
Collision Course
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.