The overcast means little in itself. So you turn to the latest marine forecasts.
The previous SAT-C forecast, at 11:00 p.m., showed Joaquin altering course slightly to the south, to 240 degrees or west-southwest, with winds rising as high as sixty knots but no higher. It is still predicted to remain a tropical storm, and its projected path continues to run well above the ship’s planned route. It transpires later that this forecast places the storm 104 miles farther to the northeast than will be the case and underestimates its strength by thirty-five knots.
Davidson turns to the next forecast, the SAT-C transmission that comes in at 5:00 a.m. This one is the most misleading of all. It predicts that Joaquin will remain a tropical storm, moving slowly west-southwest, with winds just below hurricane force and declining. The mariners on the bridge mark the storm’s first symptoms (and from here on, the conversation on the bridge is reproduced verbatim).X
“First wall of water,” Shultz remarks, presumably watching the fuzzy line on his screen that indicates precipitation, “gonna get a whole line of rain squalls . . . got the swell.”XI
“Oh, yeah,” Davidson replies. “Probably gonna get worse. . . . Look.” They study the SAT-C bulletin together. “Remember how we saw this the other day. Festering. And we talked about these [slow-moving storms] are the worst.”
“I’m anxious to see the newest BVS,” Shultz says. “. . . Guessin’ we’re just skirtin’ the yellow [weather graphic] here. . . . We’ll see.”
“We’ll see how it goes,” the captain says. “. . . This is forecasted to go north . . . and that takes your option out to top it.”
“Even so, the worst weather’s up here.”
“Correct.”
“So we’ll just have to tough this one out,” Shultz continues, “come down south of the track line.”
And at this point the captain and his chief mate agree to alter course slightly westward, to 134 degrees, to steer the ship farther away from the storm’s anticipated position. However they will not take one of the “holes in the wall” to the Old Bahama Channel, or rather, they’ll put off any decision to divert till they are farther south.
“Either that or it’s merging,” Shultz says. “. . . Old Bahama Channel when we get there. I would wait. Get more information. . . . This doesn’t look bad. . . .”
Davidson comments that even on this new course the waves will be twelve to fifteen feet high.
“The ship can handle it,” the chief mate says.
At around 6:10 a.m. Davidson goes below, saying he will send up the BVS weather package, which is emailed exclusively to a workstation in the captain’s office and reaches the bridge workstation only if forwarded by the skipper via the ship’s intranet.
When he comes back, the two men examine the Bon Voyage graph.
“We’re south and west of it,” Davidson comments.
“Uh-huh,” the mate agrees.
“So let’s open that up.” The captain points with one finger. “. . . Come down here a little bit, you know what I’m sayin’? Yeah, you can steer a little bit more away . . . from the center.” The two men plug the new course and waypoints into the GPS set. “. . . What’s helpin’ us right now is our speed.”
“It’s twenty—twenty additional miles,” Shultz says.
“And then if the storm doesn’t come this deep to the southwest as anticipated,” the captain replies, “we can just come around it.”
“Yeah, and what we’ll do is,” Davidson continues shortly thereafter, “once we know what this storm is clearin’ up outta here, we’ll be more assertive toward getting back to the, uh, optimum track line. . . .”
“Yeah,” Shultz agrees.
“I think that’s a good little plan, Chief Mate. At least I think we got a little distance from the center.”
“And that’s more like fifty miles out.”
“Much better.”
A little later, the ship rolls more heavily than usual. “Startin’ to get the seas,” the captain comments, and for the first time pronounces, or rather mispronounces, the enemy’s name: “Joe, wa-kin.”
“That’s some name, huh?” Shultz says.
“They’re twins.”
Still entering names of waypoints into the GPS, Shultz laughs. “You know they couldn’t give us Jimmy—James or Erika. Equal-opportunity storm-naming.”
The sun comes up. Davidson yawns hugely. “Oh, look at that red sky over there. Red in the mornin’, sailors take warning. That is bright.” As if looking for reassurance, Davidson reiterates to Shultz, “It’s a good little diversion. Are you feelin’ comfortable with that, Chief Mate?”
“Better, yes, sir. . . . The other optionXII is drastic.”
“Yeah, it doesn’t warrant it. . . . You can’t run . . . every single weather pattern.”
“Not for a forty-knot wind.”
Davidson (feigning panic in his voice): “Oh my God, oh my God! . . . We’ll just sit on the bank and fish for trout.”
Both captain and mate are living out a paradox here. While it’s a given for mariners that the Bahamas chain constitutes a near-impenetrable barrier of reefs and shallows, especially for a big, deep-draft freighter (heavily loaded as she is, El Faro’s keel reaches almost fifty feet below the waterline), and particularly in storm; while fifty years ago even skilled navigators would have blanched at the thought of trying to thread their way through one of the few deepwater channels between the islands in high winds and poor visibility; the near-pinpoint accuracy of modern, satellite-based navigation technology has rendered such fancy navigation much more feasible. Now even a moderately skilled skipper, knowing his position in real time to within a few meters, can take his ship safely through reefs and rocks, shoals and islands, in zero visibility, while his radars give him a visual to back up the GPS track.
The paradox, however, lies in the overconfidence such technology can instill in its users. Fifty years ago a captain would consider a dodge behind the Bahamas, through the one or two “holes in the wall” available in the chain, too dangerous given that he could only find his way by celestial navigation, in weather that might make it unfeasible, and by dead reckoning. So he would likely have avoided the area entirely—would have “given it a wider berth,” as maritime historian James Delgado says—either by staying in port or by taking a route such as the Florida Strait and Old Bahama Channel, well to the southwest of the storm. “Tickling the dragon’s tail” is what Delgado terms the habit of relying on the fantastic precision of GPS to evade maritime perils at the last minute. The confidence Davidson seems to feel in his slight westerly diversion certainly seems to fall within that definition. And this dragon is far more ticklish than most.
The wind is still on the ship’s port quarter. Clouds are moving in to hide the newly risen sun. The ship’s course is now almost due southeast. It is a little after 7:00 a.m. on Wednesday, September 30.
6
And so you wake up in your cabin on a Wednesday morning in the warm early-autumn of a tropical Atlantic, with the sky restless and the sea out your porthole like a living thing, not unfriendly but vast as the sky, vaster maybe, a complex fractal repetition of chevrons and crests, green-blue except where the ship’s passage throws light spray: it’s not rough but there’s a swell, you can feel it slowly roll the ship back and forth, enough so that your inner ear has slid back into the rhythm and habit of measuring roll and pitch and shifting your center of gravity, back and forth, back and forth, to compensate; every minute, every second, you counterbalance so thoroughly that when eventually you go ashore your body continues to adjust, trimming itself to a roll that isn’t there, a phantom swell, a sea that lasts in the deepest, darkest chambers of the brain, forcing you to think twice about where to put your feet though you’re walking down a solid concrete sidewalk all the while. A phantom sea that can last hours, days even, after you’ve left the ship . . .
And you roll out of your bunk, barely taking in your stateroom: the speckled tiles, white-painted steel wall
s, tiny metal dresser, the flat-screen TV you’re allowed to hang off the bulkhead, the porthole with its single channel of sea and clouds (or containers if you have the misfortune to be facing forward or aft),XIII the door to the diminutive bathroom; and you shower, dress, prepare for the duties and routines of shipboard; thinking, as Kurt Bruer, the former shipmate now crewing a bulk carrier on the Mississippi, does, as almost everyone does, of what the people most important to you are up to: the kids waking, rubbing sleep gum from the corners of their eyes, smell of charred Eggos in the toaster—or your wife, or sweetheart, boyfriend, still dreaming, warm and untensed beneath the sheet, the floor immobile under bedposts or feet, and nothing more exciting or risky than the drive to work, a fast-food enchilada for lunch, to look forward to—missing them hard, all of a sudden, though maybe you saw them as recently as yesterday or last week, so that you wonder sometimes why the hell you do what you do, spending days, months sometimes away from home (even if you can get back for a few hours every fortnight) in an occupation that, while not as physically dangerous as commercial fishing or lumberjack work, still pops up now and again on the list of the ten riskiest jobs in America.
Why do they do it? For Larry Davis, working on ships is a job that, compared to being in the Marine Corps, in which he served for a while, compared to commercial fishing, which he did for too long, is relatively safe and well paid. Mariette Wright, a fifty-one-year-old AB, finds in shipping out a mixture of stuff she likes: seeing different countries (she’s been to every continent but Africa and Antarctica), being part of a tight company of people with whom you always have something in common, even if they are almost always men . . . she went to sea at eighteen and has never looked back.
James Porter, a forty-year-old “goodie”—a job title derived from “general utility deck engine,” or basic deckhand and wiper—has, like Wright, always wanted to see different places, to get outta Dodge. Now that he has two young boys who have become the center of his life, the Puerto Rico run is a good compromise, it allows him to travel to the islands and still get home frequently enough.
Porter is first cousin to AB Jackie Jones, thirty-eight years old, another African-American from the rougher areas of North Jacksonville. Jones grew up in the same neighborhood as Lashawn Rivera and told him about the “merch,” which resulted in Rivera’s going to Piney Point, Maryland, to the training school run by their union, the Seafarers International Union (SIU), and then to sea. Both Jones and Rivera had got into trouble as younger men, Rivera for evading arrest, Jones with a check-kiting jacket, both of them in court frequently for the kind of minor roadside offenses known to African-Americans as DWB, or driving while black.XIV For Jones as well as for Rivera, shipping out has offered an escape, a chance at the good life as well as enough money to support a family. Jones, known as Pop to his pals, has six kids, most of them still at home, and he keeps them well fed; matter of fact, he likes good food so much he once set up a restaurant in North Jacksonville called Wing Palace and now brings his own bespoke barbecued chicken wings aboard and sometimes sets up a Crock-Pot to cook red beans in his cabin.
At breakfast these men and one woman show up in the “unlicensed” mess, to port of the galley, sitting together or apart, breaking away according to their watches and duties, except for Rivera and the two stewards who are always present, accessible through the wide hatch in the mess hall’s starboard side. Though the assistant steward, Lonnie Jordan, is in overall charge of breakfast, Rivera will be in the galley as well, getting lunch together. Quite possibly the cook, only partly in jest, vents agony at his crewmates shuffling by as they pick up eggs, bacon, pancakes, Rivera complaining of the record of the San Francisco 49ers, a team he has supported since he was a kid, when he hero-worshipped Joe Montana. San Francisco is letting Rivera down badly this season: in their last game against the Arizona Cardinals, just three days ago, they lost 47–7; a week before that, the Steelers beat them 43–18. Football is king in North Florida, and El Faro is a Southern ship, at least in her unlicensed roster. El Yunque, her sister ship, running the opposite schedule, in San Juan when El Faro is in Jacksonville and vice versa, is known to be an Islands ship, much of the talk in her mess being in Spanish, and most of her unlicensed personnel from Puerto Rico.
Speaking of football, the last thing Carey Hatch, a forty-nine-year-old able seaman on El Faro’s day schedule, said to his dad before leaving was “Make sure Florida State keeps winning.” Jackie Jones reads the Bible every morning before he reports to work, but he is also a hard-ass Gators fan and hugely proud of his football-playing son. A lot of the men spend their time off watching pigskin, live on TV if they are within range, which is usually for the first twenty-four hours southbound; or else on DVDs on the crew’s-lounge screen, or on the screen-plus-DVD-player nearly everyone has rigged up in his or her cabin. Jones has discs of his son playing on a championship football team in a statewide junior league. Randolph, too, gets into the football banter, but as a Mainer she’s naturally a New England fan, and her Patriots T-shirt draws good-natured abuse from the Southern faction.
Mostly, whether it be cable or films or TV series on tape, during the long hours of boredom or sleeplessness off-watch people hang out in their cabins watching screens, with the exception of Jack Jackson, who prefers to draw or paint. This is different from what mariners call the “old merch,” when video amenities were rarely available, with perhaps the exception of a screen and cassette player in the lounge, and there was more interaction between crew members; more brawls, too. Back in the day, older mariners will tell you, seamen were a wilder bunch, booze and drugs found their way aboard more commonly; crewmen had more time, as Jackson once did, to go ashore and party their asses off, and get into trouble often enough. But that was before an American-flag cargo ship, a dead-to-rights rust bucket called Marine Electric, went down in a storm off the Virginia coast in 1983 with thirty-four people aboard, and only three rescued; a disaster that caused the Coast Guard to crack down hard, though maybe not hard enough, on rules and regulations governing both equipment and personnel.
As a result they’re a different breed, this crew, from the pre-nineties merchant marine; less used to the variety of seagoing demands, since a fair number of them have known nothing but this placid run for years; older, on average, more staid, though former crewmates suspect there’s still some covert drinking aboard, and a little drugging, maybe some amateur smuggling, all of this seriously discreet because discovery will mean automatic loss of a cushy job, and the Coast Guard demands drug tests for all license renewals. Many of these people sail at a lower rating and salary than they’re entitled to just to get work on the Puerto Rico run. Yet all are recognizable still as mariners, by what they have in common with seamen everywhere, the art of holding fast away from land, knowing the grinding boredom and loneliness and occasional risk, and balancing that against shipboard camaraderie and the skills of basic seamanship and rope work; sometimes, a secret joy in the play of light on water, a deepwater sunrise, the dwindling of land. These qualities are as old as Odysseus, they set such men and women apart and hold them together.
Not that social time doesn’t exist aboard El Faro, some kind of seagoing society on this family-oriented ship, and that usually happens around meals. Beyond ship noises, one gets used to the rapid tap-tap of the black guys playing dominoes in the crew’s lounge, slapping their counters in hard, fast sequence on the metal tables; sometimes, muffled and largely unmeant insults around a game of cards; the occasional laugh, people teasing or joking as they score a cup from the coffee machine. Humor is the oil that cools this social engine, often enough. Bitching, too, often enough, about not getting sufficient overtime. Overtime from Tote often pads out the month’s-end budget, helps make a car payment. Chief Mate Shultz is liked because he is an enthusiastic teacher, willing to cheerfully explain details of ship- or cargo-handling to crew members; but he’s also the target of a fair amount of resentment on the part of the crew for not allowing them more hours. They know
it’s not really Shultz’s fault, since Corporate caps the amount of money that can be spent on OT. Still, on a ship at sea, there’s no one to blame but the messenger.
A Seafarers International Union meeting was held this morning on the unlicensed deck, before breakfast, run by the bosun and Mariette Wright; voices were raised as union members got worked up, most likely over the overtime issue. The ruckus pissed off ABs trying to get in their last hour of rest before watch.
Generally speaking the unlicensed crew, who are two-thirds black, two-thirds from the Jacksonville area, feel a low-level but chronic irritation at what they see as the caste system underpinning El Faro’s sociology. The all-white, largely Yankee, fairly Republican officer class, with a few exceptions such as Randolph and Davidson, are perceived as acting somewhat superior to the deckhands, oilers, engine-room wipers; the officers being treated and paid better than hoi polloi. “The Southern blacks are different from Northern, they’ve been through a lot, they have some prejudice [against whites],” one former El Faro deckhand says, but in truth the unlicensed crew members feel far more united against their officers than separated by their ethnicity. The crew are a family of sorts, linking arms against the arbitrary diktats of the brass.
Resentment against the officer class was honed last July when Marvin Hearman III, an able seaman and oiler, coming upon a chief mate asleep on watch, took a cell phone picture of the dozing officer and sent it anonymously to Tote’s safety manager, John Lawrence. The mate was demoted and reassigned, but the company spent a fair amount of energy trying to figure out who had sent the image. When Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers boarded the ship afterward and searched Hearman’s cabin with a drug dog, finding nothing, some of the men on board assumed this was a form of retribution instigated by a Tote official; they noted, as well, that the crewman targeted happened to be black.
Run the Storm Page 8
