Run the Storm

by George Michelsen Foy

  While the lubrication cycle might seem secondary to the main event, its importance in the overall engine-room scheme is hard to exaggerate. If the cycle fails—if the oil pumps, for example, stop running—the soaring heat of the turbine will quickly cause it to seize up and stop, and the ship will lose propulsion. If this happens in high waves the ship will be helpless to evade them. If both the on-line and backup pumps fail, to prevent destruction of the turbine an automatic shutoff stops the turbine cold when oil pressure drops below redline level; this happened last July when an inexperienced oiler, mistaking an oil for a seawater valve, shut off supply to the oil pumps. The pumps went off-line, causing the engine to stop, and left El Faro drifting, helpless, in the middle of San Juan Harbor.

  The mishap was reported to the company and to the Coast Guard. Better training was recommended, and the lube-oil valves were tied off and painted in different colors. The incident became part of a “risk matrix” that Coast Guard inspectors maintain on every US-flag commercial ship, a file that includes injuries and breakdowns as well as other particularities of the vessel.

  No one on this ship, no one even at Tote, is aware that El Faro’s record, while by no means abysmal for a vessel of this age, has recently moved the ship into a new category in the matrix. On October 1, 2015, she is to be added to a “target list” of vessels that are deemed at particular risk of dysfunction, requiring additional oversight.

  3

  El Faro is an hour out from the Jacksonville sea buoy by 11:30 that night. The third mate, Jeremie Riehm, is on watch till midnight. He is forty-six, a quiet man with an easy grin, thick brush-cut hair. Riehm, the only navigation officer who did not graduate from a merchant marine academy, is by definition a “hawsepiper,” and his experience at all levels of deep-sea work is held in some respect: one of the ship’s bosuns claims Riehm is the best seaman aboard. He has been at sea since he was twenty-four.

  The deckhand on duty is Jack Jackson. At age sixty Jackson is in good shape—tall, reasonably fit, unlike a lot of the crew on this relaxed and regional schedule, who run to fat. Like Riehm, he is one of the most experienced hands on board. Jackson became curious about sailing as a teen in the seventies, watching freighters amble up and down the Mississippi from where he worked as a waiter at Café Du Monde, a restaurant on the levee in New Orleans. At that time, American shipowners were busy trading their US-made and -registered ships for “foreign-flag” vessels built in Korea, registered in Liberia, manned by poorly paid crews from Indonesia or the Philippines, and thus much cheaper to operate. But enough Yankee freighters remained that Jackson had no trouble finding work on runs that turned him on. He is attracted to excitement; his younger brother remembers riding pillion, both aghast and thrilled as, late at night, Jack tore at mad speed through the French Quarter on his Norton 850 Commando motorcycle; and exotic ports were exciting then. Unlike now, when ships are turned around within hours in supermechanized, isolated, massively protected container or bulk-cargo terminals—as in Rotterdam, Singapore, Blount Island—in those days ships going to Angola or Senegal or up the Congo River, or to various out-of-the-way harbors in Asia, allowed a sailor time to experience the country. It was the old “merch,” ancient mariners will tell you. In such ports the cargo was unloaded slowly, using the ship’s derrick, and sometimes on the backs of local stevedores, in a process Conrad would have recognized. The harbors were often hot, clogged with bumboats, native sailing craft, and smells of spice, woodsmoke, sewage; plagued with delay. This meant Jackson could take days off to explore.IV

  The former bosun on El Faro says Jackson is the only AB on the ship who is proficient at traditional sailor’s rope work, such as making a monkey’s fist, an intricate ball of Manila used to weight heaving lines so they can be thrown to shore. “Officers learn seamanship from the sailors,” the bosun says, and Jackson is one of the teachers. He learned navigation early and might have become a mate decades ago. Once, while he was working on a Navy-contracted ship charged with secretly testing Soviet submarines’ defenses off Kamchatka, in Russia’s Far East, the company offered him a free ride at maritime school to earn his third mate’s license. Jackson refused; he prefers a job without the hassles of paperwork or the drag responsibilities of leadership, work that allows time off during which he can read or draw—he is seldom seen without paper and a Rapidograph pen. Perhaps for similar reasons he has stayed single, though there have been women aplenty, in different parts of the world.

  But Jackson, like Danielle Randolph, had doubts about this trip. Probably it’s just a sleight of autumn, a coincidence of wavelengths in a thirtysomething and a sixty-year-old who are both, at different points in their lives’ cycles, verging on a new phase.

  “Usually he called when he was in Jacksonville, we talked for three, four minutes,” Jack’s brother, Glen Jackson, says. “This time [September 8, 2015] I was in Lowe’s, or Home Depot, and we talked for forty-five, fifty minutes. For the first time he said, ‘Man, I think I’m gonna get off [the ship].’ He never broke a contract before, but he was seriously concerned.” Jack thought El Faro was a rust bucket, but that wasn’t the problem; he had sailed on rust buckets before without worrying overmuch about it. Still, the last time Glen and his brother talked was the usual three-minute check-in, the day El Faro left on this trip, and Jack didn’t mention leaving then.

  Tonight, perhaps, he and Riehm talk gearhead: the mate owns a classic Ford, and Jack is still into motorbikes, a passion he also shares with the electrician, Champa. Jackson and Riehm both check the radars, which on longest range show only the thin orange line of Florida receding, thirty-odd miles to starboard.

  Other merchant ships should show up as orange wedges with their automatic identification system transponderV info flagged on-screen, but now there are zero, none at all; it turns out later they have either stayed in port or scooted back to shelter because of Joaquin. El Faro is going against the flow, against wisdom in a way, but she and her crew are old hands at this route. They know Tote’s profits depend on providing regular and uninterrupted service, as far as possible, to the island.

  Many sailors and especially islanders are conscious that Puerto Rico, which produces few household items besides some coffee, sugarcane, fruits, and rum, depends for life support on the goods El Faro and her sister ship El Yunque bring to the island: everything from cereal to TVs, lightbulbs to Popsicles, steaks to car parts to tampons. The dependency is decades old and has only grown starker over the last twenty years as the island’s economy has crumbled. Unemployment in Puerto Rico in 2015 stands at 12 percent, more than double the US average. Tourism still brings in cash, but other local businesses fail daily, in good part because the monsters of mainland retail, chiefly Walmart and Walgreens, drive hard their usual business model, using economies of scale in orders, advertising, and transport to offer products cheaper than elsewhere. This is a smart move in Puerto Rico, where nearly half the population lives at or below the poverty line, and where 10 or 20 percent off the weekly food budget is therefore a big deal; but it guts the bodegas and main streets.VI

  Walmart is known to include delay clauses in its transportation contracts, essentially penalizing shippers if goods aren’t delivered before a specified deadline,VII and this might exacerbate a natural tendency, at Tote headquarters, to insist everything must be done to get the ship to its destination on time, with due deference to safety concerns of course.

  Riehm, a cigar aficionado, tends to take breaks on the bridge wings, where he can light up and watch the horizon and feel the wind on his face, something a good navigator needs to do once in a while to sense in his gut what is going on. Just as a competent engineer will not sit exclusively by his dials but will walk around his machines, his servomechanisms, touching and tweaking and smelling them sometimes, a navigator needs to get a feel, unmediated by gauge and software, for the elements through which the ship is moving. This is more important than usual given the offline status of the ship’s anemometer, the instrument that measures
wind speed, which is crucial in heavy weather at night when the effects of high winds on waves are invisible. The anemometer has not worked properly for at least three months, and Davidson has filed an online request for repairs through the company’s AMOS spreadsheet (the acronym standing for Asset Management Operating System), but nothing has been done so far. Tote is known, among some of El Faro’s people at least, for being slow, if not downright reluctant, to replace gear, and both officers and crew have complained about it.

  Another good reason to get a gut feel for the night is to judge the “sail” effect of wind on the forty-foot-high container stacks, which can affect the vessel’s stability; this effect, for some reason, is not included in CargoMax stability numbers.

  Jackson instinctively keeps an eye on “distance made good,” how far the ship has traveled on the chart. Basic navigation on modern ships is carried out on an ECDIS, or Electronic Chart Display and Information System, essentially a computer that graphically melds a digital chart with the ship’s GPS position; more recent versions will overlay radar images, including other traffic, plus tide and weather data, so that a navigator can read almost everything he or she needs to know by eyeballing one screen. But El Faro doesn’t have an ECDIS; its GPS workstation merely fixes the ship’s position, including distance, speed, and time from waypoint to waypoint. The person navigating has to keep visual track of where he or she is on a paper chart.

  Still, the GPS position is ridiculously accurate, to within a few yards. In any case both Riehm and Jackson have no problem navigating the old way, multiplying speed and time to see how far they’ve come, how much time remains till the next waypoint, a calculation known as dead reckoning; estimating how many degrees off a planned course wind or current will push them, and how to change course to compensate. There are no currents to speak of, this far off the Florida coast, no ships whose vectors they have to plot.

  The evening passes without incident. A few minutes before midnight Danielle Randolph and Larry Davis appear in the wheelhouse for their regular twelve-to-four shift. Given that both Jackson and Riehm will be on watch again in eight hours, and Riehm will probably get up earlier to check lifesaving equipment, including life rafts on deck and survival suits in individual cabins, it’s near-certain that the off-duty watch standers now retire to their cabins to sleep: Riehm to his stateroom in the navigating officers’ quarters on the next level below, and Jackson to the crew’s quarters three decks down, one deck up from mess deck.

  A little before 4:00 a.m. Chief Mate Shultz appears in the wheelhouse, along with Able Seaman Frank Hamm. The routine of watch change is like a rite in the church of navigation, a ritual of call and response. There is even a missal of sorts: it’s the overall voyage plan that the captain and second mate worked up before departure, Jacksonville to San Juan; plus the captain’s “night notes,” which describe his instructions for this particular period of darkness, including when and if the captain should be woken up.

  The officer on duty shows the relieving officer their current position—roughly seventy miles east of Cape Canaveral when Shultz comes on watch—and course and speed. He lists any planned course changes, and the relieving officer repeats the information. Traffic, if any, is described, along with any other relevant data, such as engine problems, cargo state, and weather.

  4

  Sometime before 6:00 a.m. on October 30, Captain Davidson leaves his stateroom and takes the companionway to the bridge. It is still dark out, still overcast. Chief Mate Shultz is probably at the usual watch-standing officer’s position on the forward port side, next to the two radar screens.

  If relations between Davidson and Chief Engineer Pusatere are sometimes strained, the captain and his first officer get along well. Both are social by nature and appreciate each other’s qualities. In a tight society like a ship’s, that also means knowing some of each other’s darkness, and the darkness, especially the captain’s, is relevant here.

  One former engineer on El Faro says Davidson is considered by some to be “weird,” idiosyncratic in his habits and tastes. Randolph has told a Coast Guard officer she’s friendly with that she is wary of what she considers to be Davidson’s mind games. The captain can be irritable—his flare-ups with the chief engineer are a case in point—though that is hardly a comment worth making on a ship that sometimes feels like a floating pressure cooker, thirty-three people locked together on the same run week after week, some of them you get on with and some you don’t, some are diligent and some, in your opinion, fuck off. Jeff Mathias has been described as an “undiplomatic New Englander”; Dany Randolph, too, has been known to erupt. The alternate third engineer, Mitch Kuflik, who at almost six and a half feet is imposing enough physically, is not exactly sunshine and daylilies when he sees someone slacking—can even be a tad scary when he spots a job he considers botched.

  Davidson is well liked in some respects, and people appreciate his easiness with unlicensed personnel, but this doesn’t necessarily facilitate command in the tight autocracy that is a ship, and it can prove a downright handicap in a corporate situation. Davidson’s openness, for example, might have worked against him last August, when a crewman showed up drunk after shore leave in San Juan. Davidson, once summoned by the duty officer, not only allowed the crewman back on board but did not immediately report him to Tote, which violated what corporate officers term their “zero tolerance” policy toward drinking alcohol.

  More seriously perhaps, there have been comments from crew as well as from officers to the effect that Davidson’s style leans toward that of a “stateroom captain,” someone happy with the increasingly bureaucratic, job-delegating role of the modern ship’s master. Davidson is “doing bridge paperwork all the time,” an ex-bosun on El Faro says. Another ex-crewman notes that Davidson spends an inordinate amount of energy enforcing clear handwriting in the ship’s log. Certainly, having been brought up by a father who is a certified public accountant might imply an ease with desks and computers, spreadsheets and paperwork, and a concomitant acceptance of this more abstract nature of modern command. By way of contrast, such ease is not shared by another Tote captain, Bror Erik Axelsson, a former commercial fisherman and master on El Faro, who is known to be an old-style, even stubbornly old-fashioned, skipper; for roaming around the ship at all hours, checking lines and lashings, getting his hands dirty—a hard-nosed and intrusive routine not always appreciated by the crew.

  Tote’s staff have heard the reports about Davidson’s style. Corporate evaluations, while noting he has an excellent record and is “able to handle a diversified and unpredictable crew quite well,” also mention his reputation as a stateroom captain.

  Jim Fisker-Andersen, the director of ship management at Tote Services, has stated in internal communications that Davidson is “the least engaged in crew management” of all Tote skippers. Another captain, Earl Lawfield, will report that Tote sees Davidson as someone who’s “not going in the direction Tote is going in.”VIII

  Not all of the crew would agree with the owners’ assessment. Some of them have spotted Davidson checking containers, weather, and the Main Deck generally, in the early hours. Kurt Bruer notes that when on the bridge Davidson is not reluctant to take over watch standing for a while, to allow the mate or AB on duty break-time, enough at least to grab a cup of coffee or fix a sandwich of cold cuts from the “night lunch” buffet the cook has prepared, or to write an email home from a terminal in the ship’s office on the next deck down. Davidson is concerned with crew safety, known for telling crew members to wear hard hats, to “come back with all your fingers and toes.” And this captain is courteous: one bosun notes that Davidson is the only Tote captain he has worked with who routinely thanks him for “doing a good job.”

  Davidson, as well as being egalitarian, is respected as a good family man. This is no small compliment on a run that includes a lot of Florida or Puerto Rico people who waited weeks, even months, in the Jacksonville or Lauderdale union halls for a Tote job to light up on the
digital “job board” specifically so they could stay close to their families; for El Faro will be in Jacksonville, or San Juan, every other week, regular as clockwork, which affords those who live nearby time to go home and hug the kids, or have dinner with the wife or husband, get laid maybe. And when their tour of duty ends—typically they work sixty days on, thirty off—they won’t have to fly from Singapore or Rotterdam or Oakland to get home.

  Davidson’s usual rotation would have taken him off the ship for this trip, but that would have meant, during his next tour, he would have missed his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. As a result he requested an extension to his current tour so that he could be home later for the celebration. This is the main reason he is running El Faro tonight.

  None of this matters, though, when the ship is sailing; when all of a mariner’s training, all his experience, incessantly din his brain with protocols to run through, problems to foresee, data to check, because it’s only through unending observation—the Navy catchphrase is “situational awareness”—that one can ensure the myriad systems that make up a ship keep running and working safely. This morning, given the presence of that tropical storm somewhere off to port, the key routines to observe concern the weather.

  5

  Here is the weather as observed from a ship. First, there’s what you actually see with your own eyes; at night, under overcast skies, the stars are few or nonexistent, and not much is visible of the sea but the recurrent, kaleidoscopic shimmer of wake, sometimes backlit by phosphorescence, spreading blue-white from the sides and stern over a half-seen undulation of waves. On this night the actual wind is still from the north and remains light. If you knew this was a tropical system and could measure the wind accurately, with an anemometer for instance, you would know that if you stood facing the wind in the northern hemisphere, given that the system’s wind rotates counterclockwise, the zone of low pressure would lie to your right.IX Presumably, with a northerly breeze, as you face the wind blowing at the ship’s stern, this puts Tropical Storm Joaquin to your right-hand side (the ship’s port side), to the east. But you can’t consult the anemometer, and anyway the wind’s southward progression tonight is slower than the ship’s; therefore what breeze exists is relative, it comes from El Faro’s movement, from dead ahead.